QuestionsWhat is love?The natural loves are good but not self-sufficient: they are meant to be raised
What is love?An ascent to beauty

The natural loves are good but not self-sufficient: they are meant to be raised

The four loves: affection, friendship, eros, charity; Need-love and Gift-love

C. S. Lewis 1898 · 1963The moral law everyone feels, and reason itself, point towards God.
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What it claims

Love is an ascent: the natural loves, good but incomplete, reach their true form when raised into divine love.

Why

The natural loves are real goods, but they go bad when made absolute: they need to be raised by the love of God.

The same idea through history
Plato380 BCPlato, the Symposium: love climbs from beautiful bodies to Beauty itself. Lewis keeps the idea of an ascent, but what lifts is not contemplation: it is the love of God coming down to us.
C. S. Lewis1960The Four Loves (London, Geoffrey Bles, 1960), drawn from 1958 radio talks: Lewis distinguishes Need-love and Gift-love, then four loves (affection, friendship, eros, charity), and shows that the first three, natural, need the fourth.
In short

"The natural loves are good but not self-sufficient: they are meant to be raised" is an argument by C. S. Lewis (The Four Loves, 1960, 1960) on the question "What is love?" (answer: an ascent to beauty). Its claim: Love is an ascent: the natural loves, good but incomplete, reach their true form when raised into divine love. According to AskPhilosophy's logic check (Z3 solver), the argument is valid only if one grants a premise the author leaves unstated (P4). AskPhilosophy presents 3 objections, 0 of them with a documented reply, and the original text behind each premise, checked word for word.

The Four Loves, 1960
Valid with an implicit premise

Should we despise love that comes from our needs, or treat it as the end of everything? Lewis refuses both. The natural loves, family affection, friendship, love between a man and a woman, are real goods. But each, when made a god, can turn into excess, jealousy, tyranny. They are not self-sufficient. What keeps them good is charity, love as God has it for us. It does not destroy them: it puts them in their place and raises them. Love is therefore an ascent: from a natural need to a gift that goes beyond it.

P1The natural loves are real loves and real goods. Even Need-love, like a child running to his mother, deserves the name of love.
P2Left to itself, and above all when made an absolute, each of these loves can go bad. Eros, for instance, may urge to evil as well as good.
P3The natural loves are not self-sufficient: they stay good only under the love of God, charity.
P4 · implicit premiseWhat is good but not self-sufficient must be raised, not suppressed: the natural loves must be placed under charity and transformed by it.
Love is an ascent: the natural loves, good but incomplete, reach their true form when raised into divine love.

click a premise to reject it

If you accept every premise, logic forces you to accept the conclusion. So the debate is about the premises.
Checked by a logic solver: the premises cannot all be true while the conclusion is false.
Without the implicit premise: Without P4, the computer finds a world where natural loves are good and fragile, charity exists, but it remains foreign to them without raising them. The other premises are true, the conclusion is false.
Valid with P4. Without it, we know that natural loves are good but fragile and need charity to stay good; we do not know whether this help raises them or remains external to them. P4 is Lewis's central idea, which Christian tradition has discussed: does grace perfect nature, or oppose it?
Analogy. A garden is a good, but it goes back to wasteland if no one tends it. The gardener does not destroy the garden: he prunes it and makes it more beautiful. Lewis says charity is that gardener. His critics answer that a garden can very well stay beautiful without a divine gardener, and that this is the premise to be shown.

Objections

3

Each objection is a conversation: click to see who replies and where the debate stands.

A
Anders Nygren 1930 · attacks premise 4

For the theologian Nygren, Eros and Agape are opposed: eros is the human love that climbs towards what it desires, agape is the love that comes from God, without motive or merit. Making one climb up to the other mixes two loves that, for him, Christianity holds apart.

no reply
We have not yet found a direct reply by Lewis in the texts.
The debate goes on (our summary) Lewis holds with Nygren that charity comes from God and goes beyond human need, but he refuses to condemn Need-love and says this is the right word for it. A disciple of Nygren answers that this love then remains a means, not a road to agape. A disciple of Lewis answers that agape without natural loves would have nothing to transform.
Where the debate stands (our summary)Core disagreement between theologians: does grace transform human love (Lewis, like the Catholic tradition) or replace it (Nygren, Lutheran in inspiration)? The debate is not closed.
Sigmund Freud 1930 · attacks premise 3

For Freud, culture drives men to aim-inhibited love relationships and to the ideal of loving one's neighbour as oneself, which is justified by the fact that nothing runs so much against original human nature. This raised love is a demand of civilisation, not a gift of God.

no reply
We have not yet found a direct reply by Lewis in the texts.
The debate goes on (our summary) A reader of Lewis can answer that the fragility of natural loves described by Freud (aggressiveness, jealousy) is exactly what Lewis affirms in P2, and that the ideal of loving one's neighbour is not a late product of culture. A reader of Freud answers that an elevation explained by culture does not need God.
Where the debate stands (our summary)Both agree on the fragile character of natural love. They disagree on the origin of raised love: a grace (Lewis) or a construction of culture against nature (Freud).
E
Erich Fromm 1956 · attacks premise 3

For Fromm, in The Art of Loving, loving is an art learned through practice: it requires discipline, concentration and patience. Love is an activity, and primarily giving, not receiving. Mature love is therefore the fruit of the person's own work on herself, with no need of a love from above to raise it.

no reply
We have not yet found a direct reply by Lewis in the texts.
The debate goes on (our summary) A reader of Lewis answers that Fromm confirms P2 by describing love as never-finished work, and that this work needs a model one does not find in oneself. A reader of Fromm answers that maturity is this model, and that it is acquired without recourse to God.
Where the debate stands (our summary)Core point: can love perfect itself by its own strength? Both accept that natural love must grow; they differ on what makes it grow.