Article Title

Through the Lens of The Four Loves: The Idea of Love in The Screwtape Letters

Authors

Paulette Sauders, Grace CollegeFollow

Abstract

It is my contention that when C.S. Lewis wrote his non-fiction book The Four Loves and published it in 1960, he had not been thinking about love in all of its manifestations for just a short time before it was written. All of the fictional works he wrote over the years, beginning in at least 1938, reflect his definitions and descriptions of the various kinds of love and their perversions that he systematically desctibes so well in The Four Loves. He does this in his fiction through his various characters and their actions.

In Out of the Silent Planet (1938), Perelandra (1943), That Hideous Strength (1945), The Screwtape Letters (1942), The Great Divorce (1945), and Till We Have Faces (1956), Lewis demonstrates each kind of love he discusses in The Four Loves.

For the 2014 Colloquium, I would like to focus on The Screwtape Letters in order to reveal the ways C.S. Lewis shows the reader the four kinds of love and their perversions instead of just refining and discussing the kinds of love as he does in The Four Loves.

Recommended Citation

Sauders, Paulette (2014) "Through the Lens of The Four Loves: The Idea of Love in The Screwtape Letters," Inklings Forever: Published Colloquium Proceedings 1997-2016: Vol. 9, Article 15.
Available at: https://pillars.taylor.edu/inklings_forever/vol9/iss1/15