Word
Gems
What is a
man but the sum of his thoughts?
- Mortimer Adler's
- Syntopicon
Essays
Love
HERE, as in the chapters on GOD and MAN, almost all the great books are
represented except those in mathematics and the physical sciences. Even those exceptions
do not limit the sphere of love. As the theologian understands it, love is not limited to
things divine and human, nor to those creatures less than man which have conscious
desires. Natural love, Aquinas writes, is not only "in all the soul's powers, but
also in all the parts of the body, and universally in all things: because, as Dionysius
says, Beauty and goodness are beloved by all things."
Love is everywhere in the universe--in all things which have their being from the bounty
and generosity of God's creative love and which in return obey the law of love in seeking
God or in whatever they do to magnify God's glory. Love sometimes even takes the place of
other gods in the government of nature. Though he thinks the motions of the world are
without direction from the gods, Lucretius opens his poem On the Nature of Things
with an invocation to Venus, "the life-giver"--without whom nothing "comes
forth into the bright coasts of life, nor waxes glad nor lovely."
Nor is it only the poet who speaks metaphorically of love as the creative force which
engenders things and renews them, or as the power which draws all things together into a
unity of peace, preserving nature itself against the disruptive forces of war and hate.
The imagery of love appears even in the language of science. The
description of magnetic attraction and repulsion borrows some of its fundamental terms
from the vocabulary of the passions; Gilbert, for example, refers to "the love of the
iron for the loadstone."
On the other hand, the impulsions of love are often compared with the pull of magnetism.
But such metaphors or comparisons are seldom intended to conceal the ambiguity of the word
"love" when it is used as a term of universal application. "Romeo wants
Juliet as the filings want the magnet," writes William James, "and if no
obstacles intervene he moves toward her by as straight a line as they. But Romeo and
Juliet, if a wall be built between them, do not remain idiotically pressing their faces
against its opposite sides"--like iron filings separated from the magnet by a card.
THE LOVE BETWEEN man and woman makes all the great poems contemporaneous with each other
and with ourselves. There is a sense in which each great love affair is unique--a world in
itself, incomparable, unconditioned by space and time. That, at least, is the way it feels
to the romantic lovers, but even to the dispassionate observer there seems to be a world
of difference between the relationship of Paris and Helen in the Iliad and that
of Prince Andrew and Natasha in War and Peace, or Troilus and Cressida, Tom Jones
and Sophia, Don Quixote and Dulcinea, Jason and Medea, Aeneas and Dido, Othello and
Desdemona, Dante and Beatrice, Hippolytus and Phaedra, Faust and Margaret, Henry V and
Catherine, Paola and Francesca, Samson and Delilah, Antony and Cleopatra, Admetus and
Alcestis, Orlando and Rosalind, Haemon and Antigone, Odysseus and Penelope, and Adam and
Eve.
The analyst can make distinctions here. He can classify these loves as the conjugal and
the illicit, the normal and the perverse, the sexual and the idyllic, the infantile and
the adult, the romantic and the Christian. He can, in addition, group all these loves
together despite their apparent variety and set them apart from still other categories of
love: the friendships between human beings without regard to gender; the familial
ties--parental, filial, fraternal; the love of a man for himself, for his fellow men, for
his country, for God. All these other loves are, no less than the love between man and
woman, the materials of great poetry even as they are omnipresent in every human life.
The friendship of Achilles and Patroclus dominates the action of the Iliad even
more, perhaps, than the passion of Paris for Helen. The love of Hamlet for his father and,
in another mood, for his mother overshadows his evanescent tenderness for Ophelia. Prince
Hal and Falstaff, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, Pantagruel and Panurge seem to be bound
more closely by companionship than any of them is ever tied by Cupid's knot. The love of
Cordelia for Lear surpasses, though it does not defeat, the lusts of Goneril and Regan.
The vision of Rome effaces the image of Dido from the heart of Aeneas. Brutus lays down
his life for Rome as readily as Antony gives up his life for Cleopatra.
Richard III, aware that he "wants love's majesty," implies that he cannot love
anyone because he is unable to love himself. Why should "I love myself," he
asks, "for any good that I myself have done unto myself"? This element of
self-love which, in varying degrees, prompts the actions of Achilles, Odysseus, Oedipus,
Macbeth, Faust, and Captain Ahab, finds its prototype in the almost infinite amour-propre
of Lucifer in Paradise Lost. This self-love, which in its extreme form the psychoanalyst
calls "narcissism," competes with every other love in human life. Sometimes it
qualifies these other loves; when, for example, it enters into Pierre Bezukhov's
meditations about freeing his serfs and turns his sentiment of brotherly love into a piece
of sentimentality which is never confirmed by action.
Yet self-love, like sexual love, can be overcome by the love which is charity toward or
compassion for others. True self-love, according to Locke, necessarily leads to love of
neighbor; and, in Dante's view of the hierarchy of love, men ascend from loving their
neighbors as themselves to loving God. Through the love he bears Virgil and Beatrice for
the goodness they represent, Dante mounts to the highest heaven where he is given the Good
itself to love.
The panorama of human love is not confined to the great works of poetry or fiction. The
same drama, with the same types of plot and character, the same lines of action, the same
complications and catastrophes, appears in the great works of history and biography. The
stories of love told by Herodotus, Thucydides, Plutarch, Tacitus, and Gibbon run the same
gamut of the passions, the affections, the tender feeling and the sacrificial devotion, in
the attachments of the great figures of history.
Here the loves of a few men move the lives of many. History itself seems to turn in one
direction rather than another with the turning of an emperor's heart. Historic
institutions seem to draw their strength from the ardor of a single patriot's zeal; and
the invincible sacrifices of the martyrs, whether to the cause of church or state, seem to
perpetuate with love what neither might of arms nor skill of mind could long sustain.
History's blackest as well as brightest pages tell of the lengths to which men have gone
for their love's sake, and as often as not the story of the inner turbulence lies half
untold between the lines which relate the consequences in acts of violence or heroism.
STILL OTHER OF THE great books deal with love's exhibition of its power. A few of the
early dialogues of Plato discuss love and friendship, but more of them dramatically set
forth the love his disciples bear Socrates, and Socrates' love of wisdom and the truth.
Montaigne can be skeptical and detached in all matters. He can suspend judgment about
everything and moderate every feeling by the balance of its opposite, except in the one
case of his friendship with Etienne de la Boetie where love asserts its claims above
dispute and doubt. The princely examples with which Machiavelli documents his manual of
worldly success are lovers of riches, fame, and power--that triad of seducers which
alienates the affections of men for truth, beauty, and goodness.
The whole of Pascal's meditations, insofar as they are addressed to himself, seems to
express one thought, itself a feeling. "The heart has its reasons, which the reason
does not know. We feel it in a thousand things. I say that the heart naturally loves the
Universal Being, and also itself, according as it gives itself to them; and it hardens
itself against one or the other at its will. You have rejected the one, and kept the
other. Is it by reason that you love yourself?"
In the Confessions of Augustine, a man who finally resolved the conflict
of his loves lets his memory dwell on the torment of their disorder, in order to repent
each particular sin against the love of God. "What was it that I delighted in,"
he writes, "but to love, and be beloved? but I kept not the measure of love, of mind
to mind, friendship's bright boundary; but out of the muddy concupiscence of the flesh,
and the bubblings of youth, mists fumed up which beclouded and overcast my heart, that I
could not discern the clear brightness of love, from the fog of lustfulness."
Augustine shows us the myriad forms of concupiscence and avarice in the lusting of the
flesh and of the eyes, and in the self-love which is pride of person. In no other book
except perhaps the Bible are so many loves arrayed against one another. Here, in the life
of one man, as tempestuous in passion as he was strong of will, their war and peace
produce his bondage and his freedom, his anguish and his serenity.
In the Bible, the history of mankind itself is told in terms of love, or rather the
multiplicity of loves. Every love is here--of God and Mammon, perverse and pure, the
idolatry and vanity of love misplaced, every unnatural lust, every ecstasy of the spirit,
every tie of friendship and fraternity, and all the hates which love engenders.
THESE BOOKS of poetry and history, of meditation, confession, and revelation, teach us the
facts of love even when they do not go beyond that to definition and doctrine. Before we
turn to the theory of love as it is expounded by the philosophers and theologians, or to
the psychological analysis of love, we may find it useful to summarize the facts of which
any theory must take account. And on the level of the facts we also meet the inescapable
problems which underlie the theoretical issues formed by conflicting analyses.
First and foremost seems to be the fact of the plurality of loves. There are many
different kinds of love--different in object, different in tendency and expression--and as
they occur in the individual life, they raise the problem of unity and order. Does one
love swallow up or subordinate all the others? Can more than one love rule the heart? Is
there a hierarchy of loves which can harmonize all their diversity? These are the
questions with which the most comprehensive theories of love find it necessary to begin.
Plato's ladder of love in the Symposium has different loves for its rungs.
Diotima, whom Socrates describes as his "instructress in the art of love," tells
him that if a youth begins by loving a visibly beautiful form, "he will soon of
himself perceive that the beauty of one form is akin to the beauty of another," and,
therefore, "how foolish would he be not to recognize that the beauty in every form is
one and the same." He will then "abate his violent love of the one," and
will pass from being "a lover of beautiful forms" to the realization that
"the beauty of the mind is more honorable than the beauty of the outward form."
Thence he will be led to love "the beauty of laws and institutions . . . and after
laws and institutions, he will go on to the sciences, that he may see their beauty."
As Diotima summarizes it, the true order of love "begins with the beauties of earth
and mounts upwards . . . from fair forms to fair practices, and from fair practices to
fair notions, until from fair notions [we] arrive at the notion of absolute beauty."
Aristotle classifies different kinds of love in his analysis of the types of friendship.
Since the lovable consists of "the good, pleasant, or useful," he writes,
"there are three kinds of friendship, equal in number to the things that are lovable;
for with respect to each there is a mutual and recognized love, and those who love each
other wish well to each other in that respect in which they love one another." Later
in the Ethics he also considers the relation of self-love to all love of others,
and asks "whether a man should love himself most, or someone else."
Aquinas distinguishes between love in the sphere of the passions and love as an act of
will. The former he assigns to what he calls the "concupiscible faculty" of the
sensitive appetite; the latter, to the "rational or intellectual appetite." The
other basic distinction which Aquinas makes is that between love as a natural tendency and
as a supernatural habit. Natural love is that "whereby things seek what is suitable
to them according to their nature." When love exceeds the inclinations of nature, it
does so by "some habitual form superadded to the natural power," and this habit
of love is the virtue of charity.
Freud's theory places the origin of love in the sexual instincts, and so for him the many
varieties of love are simply the forms which love takes as the libido fixes upon various
objects. "The nucleus of what we mean by love," he writes, "naturally
consists . . . in sexual love with sexual union as its aim. We do not separate from
this," he goes on to say, "on the one hand, self-love, and on the other, love
for parents and children, friendship and love for humanity in general, and also devotion
to concrete objects and to abstract ideas . . . All these tendencies are an expression of
the same instinctive activities." They differ from sexual love only because
"they are diverted from its aim or are prevented from reaching it, though they always
preserve enough of their original nature to keep their identity recognizable." Sexual
love undergoes these transformations according as it is repressed or sublimated, infantile
or adult in its pattern, degraded to the level of brutal sexuality or humanized by
inhibitions and mixed with tenderness.
All of these classifications and distinctions belong to the theory of human love. But the
fact of love's diversity extends the theory of love to other creatures and to God. In the
tradition of biology from Aristotle to Darwin, the mating of animals and the care of their
young is thought to exhibit an emotion of love which is either sharply contrasted with or
regarded as the root of human love. Darwin, for example, maintains, "it is certain
that associated animals have a feeling of love for each other, which is not felt by
non-social adult animals."
At the opposite pole, the theologians identify God with love and see in God's love for
Himself and for His creatures the principle not only of creation, and of providence and
salvation, but also the measure of all other loves by which created things, and men
especially, turn toward or away from God. "Beloved, let us love one another,"
St. John writes, "for love is of God; and everyone that loveth is born of God, and
knoweth God. He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love. In this was manifested
the love of God toward us, because that God sent his only begotten Son into the world,
that we might live through him. Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved
us . . . And we have known and believed the love that God hath to us. God is love; and he
that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God in him."
In the moral universe of the Divine Comedy, heaven is the realm of love,
"pure light," Beatrice says, "light intellectual full of love love of true
good full of joy, joy which transcends every sweetness." There courtesy prevails
among the blessed, and charity alone of the theological virtues remains. The beatitude of
those who see God dispenses with faith and hope, but the vision of God is inseparable from
the fruition of love. "The Good which is the object of the will," Dante writes,
"is all collected in it; and outside of it, that is defective which is perfect
there." Desire and will are "revolved, like a wheel which is moved evenly, by
the Love which moves the sun and the other stars." Hell is made by the absence of
God's love--the punishment of those who on earth loved other things more than God.
THERE IS A second fact about love to which poetry and history bear testimony. Love
frequently turns into its opposite, hate. Sometimes there is love and hate of the same
object; sometimes love inspires hate, as it occasions jealousy, of the things which
threaten it. Anger and fear, too, follow in the wake of love. Love seems to be the primal
passion, generating all the others according to the oppositions of pleasure and pain and
by relations of cause and effect. Yet not all the analysts of love as a passion seem to
agree upon this point, or at least they do not give the fact the same weight in their
theories.
Hobbes, for example, gives primacy to fear, and Spinoza to desire, joy, and sorrow.
Spinoza defines love as "joy with the accompanying idea of an external cause,"
and he defines hatred similarly in terms of sorrow. Nevertheless, Spinoza, like Aquinas
and Freud, deals more extensively with love and hate than with any of the other passions.
He, like them, observes how their fundamental opposition runs through the whole emotional
life of man. But he does not, like Aquinas, regard love as the root of all the other
passions. Treating the combination of love and hate toward the same object as a mere
"vacillation of the mind," he does not, like Freud, develop an elaborate theory
of emotional ambivalence which tries to explain why the deepest affections of men are
usually mixtures of love and hate.
A THIRD FACT which appears in almost every one of the great love stories points to another
aspect of love's contrariness.
- There seems to be no happiness more perfect than that which
love confirms. But there is also no misery more profound, no depth of despair greater,
than that into which lovers are plunged when they are bereft, disappointed, unrequited.
Can the pleasures of love be had without its pains? Is it better to have loved and
suffered than never to have loved at all? Is it wiser not to love than to love not wisely
but too well? Is the world well lost for love?
These questions paraphrase the soliloquies of lovers in the great tragedies and comedies
of love. For every praise of love there is, in Shakespearian speech or sonnet, an
answering complaint. "All creatures in the world through love exist, and lacking
love, lack all that may persist." But "thou blind fool, love, what does thou to
mine eyes, that they behold and see not what they see?" "The greater castle of
the world is lost," says Antony to Cleopatra; "we have kissed away kingdoms and
provinces." But in Romeo's words to Juliet, "My bounty is as boundless as the
sea, my love as deep; the more I give to thee, the more I have, for both are
infinite."
Love is all opposites--the only reality, the great illusion; the giver of life and its
consumer; the benign goddess whose benefactions men beseech, and-to such as Hippolytus or
Didothe dread Cyprian who wreaks havoc and devastation. She is a divinity to be feared
when not propitiated, her potions are poison, her darts are shafts of destruction. Love is
itself an object of love and hate. Men fall in love with love and fight against it. Omnia
vincit amor, Virgil writes -- "love conquers all."
In the dispassionate language of the moralist, the question is simply whether love is good
or bad, a component of happiness or an obstacle thereto. How the question is answered
depends upon the kind of love in question. The love which consists in the best type of
friendship seems indispensable to the happy life and, more than that, to the fabric of any
society, domestic or political.
Such love, Aristotle writes, "is a virtue or implies virtue, and is besides most
necessary with a view to living. For without friends no one would choose to live though he
had all other goods .... Friendship seems too to hold states together, and lawgivers care
more for it than for justice." When it is founded on virtue, it goes further than
justice, for it binds men together through benevolence and generosity. "When men are
friends," Aristotle says, "they have no need of justice."
But Aristotle does not forget that there are other types of friendship, based on utility
or pleasure-seeking rather than upon the mutual admiration of virtuous men. Here, as in
the case of other passions, the love may be good or bad. It is virtuous only when it is
moderated by reason and restrained from violating the true order of goods, in conformity
to which man's various loves should themselves be ordered.
When the love in question is the passion of the sexual instinct, some moralists think that
temperance is an inadequate restraint. Neither reason nor law is adequate to the task of
subduing -- or, as Freud would say, of domesticating -- the beast. To the question
Socrates asks, whether life is harder towards the end, the old man Cephalus replies in the
words of Sophocles, when he was asked how love suits with age, "I feel as if I had
escaped from a mad and furious master."
In the most passionate diatribe against love's passion, Lucretius condemns the sensual
pleasures which are so embittered with pain. Venus should be entirely shunned, for once
her darts have wounded men,"the sore gains strength and festers by feeding, and day
by day the madness grows, and the misery becomes heavier .... This is the one thing,
whereof the more and more we have, the more does our heart burn with the cursed desire
.... When the gathering desire is sated, the old frenzy is back upon them . . .nor can
they discover what device may conquer their disease; in such deep doubt they waste beneath
their secret wound . . .These ills are found in love that is true and fully prosperous;
but when love is crossed and hopeless, there are ills which you might detect with closed
eyes, ills without number; so that it is better to be on the watch beforehand, even as I
have taught you, and to beware that you are not entrapped. For to avoid being drawn into
the meshes of love, is not so hard a task as when caught amid the toils to issue out and
break through the strong bonds of Venus."
In the doctrines of most moralists, however, the sexual passion calls for no special
treatment different from other appetites and passions. Because it is more complex in its
manifestations, perhaps, and more imperious in its urges, more effort on the part of
reason maybe required to regulate it, to direct or restrain it. Yet no special principles
of virtue or duty apply to sexual love. Even the religious vow of chastity is matched by
the vow of poverty. The love of money is as serious a deflection from loving God as the
lust of the flesh.
WHAT IS COMMON to all these matters is discussed in the chapters on DUTY, EMOTION, VIRTUE,
and SIN. But here one more fact remains to be considered--the last fact about love which
the poets and the historians seem to lay before the moralists and theologians.
When greed violates the precepts of justice, or gluttony those of temperance, the vice or
sin appears to have no redeeming features. These are weaknesses of character incompatible
with heroic stature. But many of the great heroes of literature are otherwise noble men or
women who have, for love's sake, deserted their duty or transgressed the rules of God and
man, acknowledging their claims and yet choosing to risk the condemnation of society even
to the point of banishment, or to put their immortal souls in peril. The fact seems to be
that only love retains some honor when it defies morality; not that moralists excuse the
illicit act, but that in the opinion of mankind, as evidenced by its poetry at least, love
has some privileged status. Its waywardness and even its madness are extenuated.
The poets suggest the reason for this. Unlike the other passions which man shares with the
animals, characteristically human love is a thing of the spirit as well as the body. A man
is piggish when he is a glutton, a jackal when he is craven, but when his emotional excess
in the sphere of love lifts him to acts of devotion and sacrifice, he is incomparably
human. That is why the great lovers, as the poets depict them, seem admirable in spite of
their transgressions. They almost seem to be justified poetically, at least, if not
morally - in acting as if love exempted them from ordinary laws; as if their love could be
a law unto itself. "Who shall give a lover any law?" Arcite asks in Chaucer's Knight's
Tale. "Love is a greater law," he says, "than man has ever given to
earthly man."
To a psychologist like Freud, the conflict between the erotic impulses and morality is the
central conflict in the psychic life of the individual and between the individual and
society. There seems to be no happy resolution unless each is somehow accommodated to the
other. At one extreme of repression, "the claims of our civilization," according
to Freud, "make life too hard for the greater part of humanity, and so further the
aversion to reality and the origin of neuroses"; the individual suffers neurotic
disorders which result from the failure of the repressed energies to find outlets
acceptable to the moral censor. At the other extreme of expression, the erotic instinct
"would break all bounds and the laboriously erected structure of civilization would
be swept away." Integration would seem to be achieved in the individual personality
and society would seem to prosper only when sexuality is transformed into those types of
love which reinforce laws and ii duties with emotional loyalty to moral ideals and invest
ideal objects with their energies, creating the highest goods of civilization.
To the theologian, the conflict between love and morality remains insoluble--not in
principle, but in practice--until love itself supplants all other rules of conduct. The
"good man," according to Augustine, is not he "who knows what is good, but
who loves it. Is it not then obvious," he goes on to say, "that we love in
ourselves the very love wherewith we love whatever we love? For there is also a love
wherewith we love that which we ought not to love; and this love is hated by him who loves
that wherewith he loves what ought to be loved, For it is quite possible for both to exist
in one man. And this co-existence is good for a man, to the end that this love which
conduces to our living well may grow, and the other, which leads us to evil may decrease,
until our whole life be perfectly healed and transmuted into good." Only a better
love, a love that is wholly virtuous and right, has the power requisite to overcome love's
errors. With this perfect love goes only one rule, Augustine says: Dilige, et quod vis
fac -- love, and do what you will.
This perfect love, which alone deserves to be a law unto itself, is more than fallen human
nature can come by without God's grace. It is, according to Christian theology, the
supernatural virtue of charity whereby men participate in God's love of Himself and His
creatures--loving God with their whole heart and soul and mind, and their neighbors as
themselves. On these two precepts of charity, according to the teaching of Christ,
"depends the whole law and the prophets."
The questions which Aquinas considers in his treatise on charity indicate that the
theological resolution of the conflict between love and morality is, in essence, the
resolution of a conflict between diverse loves, a resolution accomplished by the
perfection of love itself. Concerning the objects and order of charity, he asks, for
example, "whether we should love charity out of charity," "whether
irrational creatures also ought to be loved out of charity," "whether a man
ought to love his body out of charity," "whether we ought to love sinners out of
charity," "whether charity requires that we should love our enemies,"
"whether God ought to be loved more than our neighbors," "whether, out of
charity, man is bound to love God more than himself," "whether, out of charity,
man ought to love himself more than his neighbor," "whether a man ought to love
his neighbor more than his own body," "whether we ought to love one neighbor
more than another," "whether we ought to love those who are better more than
those who are more closely united to us," "whether a man ought, out of charity,
to love his children more than his father," "whether a man ought to love his
wife more than his father and mother," "whether a man ought to love his
benefactor more than one he has benefited."
THE DIVERSITY of love seems to be both the basic fact and the basic problem for the
psychologist, the moralist, the theologian. The ancient languages have three distinct
words for the main types of love: eros, philia, agape in Greek;
amor, amicitia (or dilectio), and caritas in Latin.
Because English has no such distinct words, it seems necessary to use such phrases as
"sexual love," "love of friendship," and "love of charity"
in order to indicate plainly that love is common to all three, and to distinguish the
three meanings. Yet we must observe what Augustine points out, namely, that the Scriptures
"make no distinction between amor, dilectio, and caritas,"
and that in the Bible "amor is used in a good connection."
The problem of the kinds of love seems further to be complicated by the need to
differentiate and relate love and desire. Some writers use the words "love" and
"desire" interchangeably, as does Lucretius who, in speaking of the pleasures of
Venus, says that "Cupid [i.e., desire] is the Latin name of love." Some, like
Spinoza, use the word "desire" as the more general word and "love" to
name a special mode of desire. Still others use "love" as the more general word
and "desire" to signify an aspect of love. "Love," Aquinas writes,
"is naturally the first act of the will and appetite; for which reason all the other
appetitive movements presuppose love, as their root and origin. For nobody desires
anything nor rejoices in anything, except as a good that is loved."
One thing seems to be clear, namely, that both love and desire belong to the appetitive
faculty--to the sphere of the emotions and the will rather than to the sphere of
perception and knowledge. When a distinction is made between desire and love as two states
of appetite, it seems to be based on their difference in tendency. As indicated in the
chapter of DESIRE, the tendency of desire is acquisitive. The object of desire is a good
to be possessed, and the drive of desire continues until, with possession, it is
satisfied. Love equated with desire does not differ from any other hunger.
But there seems to be another tendency which impels one not to possess the object loved,
but to benefit it. The lover wishes the well-being of the beloved, and reflexively wishes
himself well through being united with the object of his love. Where desire devoid of love
is selfish in the sense of one's seeking goods or pleasures for oneself without any regard
for the good of the other, be it thing or person, love seeks to give rather than to get,
or to get only as the result of giving. Whereas nothing short of physical possession
satisfies desire, love can be satisfied in the contemplation of its object's beauty or
goodness. It has more affinity with knowledge than with action, though it goes beyond
knowledge in its wish to act for the good of the beloved, as well as in its wish to be
loved in return.
Those who distinguish love and desire in such terms usually repeat the distinction in
differentiating kinds of love. The difference between sexual love and the love which is
pure friendship, for example, is said to rest on the predominance of selfish desires in
the one and the predominance of altruistic motives in the other. Sexual love is sometimes
called the "love of desire" to signify that it is a love born of desire; whereas
in friendship love is thought to precede desire and to determine its wishes.
In contrast to the love of desire, the love of friendship makes few demands. "In true
friendship, wherein I am perfect," Montaigne declares, "I more give myself to my
friend, than I endeavor to attract him to me. I am not only better pleased in doing him
service than if he conferred a benefit upon me, but, moreover, had rather he should do
himself good than me, and he most obliges me when he does so; and if absence be either
more pleasant or convenient for him, 'tis also more acceptable to me than his
presence."
These two loves appear in most of the great analyses of love, though under different
names: concupiscent love and fraternal love; the friendship base on pleasure or utility
and the friendship based on virtue; animal and human love; sexuality and tenderness.
Sometimes they are assigned to different faculties: the love of desire to the sensitive
appetite or the sphere of instinct and emotion; the love of friendship to the will or
faculty of intellectual desire, capable of what Spinoza calls the amor intellectualis
Dei -- "the intellectual love of God." Sometimes the two kinds of love are
thought able to exist in complete separation from one another as well as in varying
degrees of mixture, as in romantic and conjugal love; and sometimes the erotic or sexual
component is thought to be present to some degree in all love. Though he asserts this,
Freud does not hold the converse, that sexuality is always accompanied by the tenderness
which characterizes human love. The opposite positions here seem to be correlated with
opposed views of the relation of man to other animals, or with opposed theories of human
nature, especially in regard to the relation of instinct and reason, the senses and the
intellect, the emotions and the will.
As suggested above, romantic love is usually conceived as involving both possessive and
altruistic motives, the latter magnified by what its critics regard as an exaggerated
idealization of the beloved. The theological virtue of charity, on the other hand, is
purely a love of friendship, its purity made perfect by its supernatural foundation. One
of the great issues here is whether the romantic is compatible with the Christian
conception of love, whether the adoration accorded a beloved human being does not amount
to deification--as much a violation of the precepts of charity as the pride of unbounded
self-love. Which view is taken affects the conception of conjugal love and the relation of
love in courtship to love in marriage. These matters and, in general, the forms of love in
the domestic community are discussed in the chapter on FAMILY.
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