Do we believe in true love and what can our experience tell us about love. Let me provide some talking points.
My first question is: Is love a feeling or a conscious decision we make every day? Love is still one of the more commonly used words in our language, although used less than the 19th century when romanticism figured more strongly in literature. Love’s use can extend in many different usages. The ancient Greeks defined love as either storge, phileo, eros and agape. Storge was for your family and relations, Phileo was the affectionate love you feel for your friends and Eros was driven by desires and exemplifies passionate love, whilst agape was the pure and ideal love which was unconditional.
Hence we can have all of these expressions of love from mushy affection to unconditional love. Probably the one we identify the most is the love of a parent for a child.
The use of love can mean a personal affection in intimacy, to devotion, to a cause as in love for one’s country which can turn to war, to love as in sacrifice or in the desire or admiration for beautiful objects or art forms or when we simply say with sincerity “I love you.” Yet we are not clear on how love arises; the inclination is to link love as emanating from the heart to revert to feelings of love whilst others think love is a matter of daily decisions to consciously act in a loving manner. Another assumption is to say love is a kind of noble intuitive force which contributes to the greater good, but as we have so much evidence of countless crimes committed under the allure of love, this seems implausible. Biblically this leads those authors to distinguish passionate love as in intimacy -versus Agape, to mean "unconditional love", but who’s rather grand application, given our limitations as human beings, also seems to me to be somewhat of a contentious issue. Rather I think that the power of love gives one the capacity for loving unions to blossom over time, but that in turn is usually dependent upon a continuing encouragement or willingness to compromise, sufficient to withstand the mounting pressures of life’s experiences. The idea to me then that love leads to a more willing desire to make compromises or sacrifices seems more realistic than “unconditional love” which I prefer to leave to the province of divine love, as is included in the notion of grace. You can't really define it by saying what true love is but just discuss what our experiences have been in our life, which will then define it for us.
2 comments:
I think that the word 'love' is used too freely, perhaps, to indicate a variety of emotions etc.. Can one define this, 'whatever,' that we call love? May I quote what Cynthia Bourgeault says when talking about the author of 'The Cloud of Unknowing?'
"Typically we think of love as having something to do with emotions - with our feelings of affection. But if we assume that this is what our author (of the 'Cloud', my brackets) has in mind, we quickly tumble into the sand trap of that old "head versus heart" dichotomy......But already our author has warned us that God cannot be known by either of these routes: "You can neither see Him clearly with your reason in the light of understanding, nor can you feel Him with your affection in the sweetness of love." Whatever the author means by love, it is something of an entirely different order from our usual sense of devotion and affection. It is not a property of our cataphatic faculties (memory, reason, emotion, will) but of something that emerges from far deeper in the soul."
Does this not also apply to those whom we say we love? Is it not that, because love emerges from somewhere far deeper in the soul, love is indefinable?
Hi Tom,
I only just noticed your insightful comment. Indeed that love is not definable and likewise a lifelong devotion to another. A beautiful summary.
How are you coping with the current restrictions?
Best wishes
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