FROM THE BACK COVER:

In this, one of his most popular books, C. S. Lewis sheds light on the eternally provocative subject of love.

With his characteristic insight, humor, and acute judgment, Lewis categorizes and describes all the natural loves. Affection binds parents and children, neighbors who have nothing in common, humans and their pets; it is love owed, rather than earned; it grows out of familiarity; it "is indeed the least discriminating of loves." Eros - not pure physicality but the more complex feeling of being "in love" - may inspire great sacrifice, but to potentially destructive ends. Friendship is "the least biological of our loves," the most spiritual in nature, but also the most inclined to snobbery. Each of these loves has its particular joys, and each its own proximity to hatred.

For Lewis, no natural love can prosper except in the presence of the Fourth Love, Charity, which is both the love of God and the selfless love of others. And though every kind of love carries its particular risks, Lewis exhorts us not to avoid them, for "hell is the only place outside of heaven where we can be safe from the dangers of love."

"The Four Loves [is] a modern mirror of souls ... of the virtues and failings of modern loving. Lewis combines a novelist's insight into motives with a profound religious understanding of our human nature." -Martin D'Arcy, The New York Times Book Review

C. S. Lewis was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, in 1898 and died in Oxford, England, in 1963. He held the Chair of Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Cambridge University and was the author of numerous books on Christianity, a science fiction trilogy, a novel, three volumes of poetry, and many works of literary criticism. He was also the author of the much-loved children's series The Chronicles of Narnia.