Love

One and the same word says that we love a dish, a friend, a country, a child, and the one for whom we give our life. “Love” covers realities so diverse that one may doubt they have anything in common. They do, however, and to find it is to reach what loving is. The answer holds in few words: to love is to will a good. The forms of love, its difference from feeling, its source in God, all unfold from there.

A single word for several realities

English has only one word where other languages distinguish several, and the Greek of the New Testament knows four, which naming already clarifies what we seek. There is the attraction of desire, which wants to possess what draws it, erōs (ἔρως); friendship, that chosen bond between two persons who will each other’s good, philia (φιλία); the tenderness that unites those close, a mother’s for her child, storgē (στοργή); and the love of pure gift, agapē (ἀγάπη), which turns toward the other for his own sake, expecting nothing in return. This is the word the New Testament keeps for the love of God and for the love he asks, the highest of all, because it gives without seeking its own good. These loves go by degrees, from the desire that seeks to take to the gift that gives itself.

To love is to will a good

Beneath these forms runs a single movement: love is an impulse toward a good. We love what we hold to be good, and even the one who loves badly pursues a good, real or apparent. To love a thing is to will it for the good it brings us; to love a person is to will his good, for him. In both cases the will turns toward a good and holds to it. Love therefore always begins with an encounter: something good presents itself, and the heart turns toward it.

Two ways of loving

One distinction commands all the rest. One can love a thing for the good it procures: I love this fruit, this music, this place, because they do me good: I love them for myself. One can also love someone for his own sake, willing his good, for him: such is true friendship, a mother’s love, the love that gives while expecting nothing. This second love goes out of itself and stands in the other; it is this love that fully deserves the name. And because it wills the good of the other, it wills his true good, what makes him grow, rather than what pleases him at the moment.

More than a feeling

Love does have a sensible side, made of emotion, of the heart’s impulse, of the stir felt before the presence of the beloved; it is a real form of love. Feelings, however, come and go, they depend on mood, on fatigue, on the day; a love that held only to them would fade with them. Its root lies deeper: an act of the will, the choice to will the good of the other, which remains when the emotion weakens and proves itself in acts more than in impulses.

Love tends toward union

To love is to will to be with what one loves. Love draws near, seeks presence, suffers from absence, and tends toward union, to the point of willing to be one with the beloved: “Set me as a seal upon your heart; for love is strong as death, the great waters cannot quench it nor the rivers sweep it away.” Song of Songs 8:6-7 The higher the love, the deeper the union it seeks.

God is love

Every created love comes from a first love. The good things we love, we did not make good: they are good because another willed them so. At the beginning of every love, then, there is a love that did not begin, that of God, and Scripture names him by love itself: “He who does not love has not known God, for God is love.” 1 John 4:8 God does not possess love as one good among others: he is love, from all eternity, in the exchange of the three divine persons. And the love we bear is a share received from his, poured into us: “The love of God is poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.” Romans 5:5

The summit: giving oneself

To will someone’s good leads to giving oneself to him: “There is no greater love than to give one’s life for one’s friends.” John 15:13 Christ did not only say it, he did it, dying for those he loved; God had shown it first: “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son.” John 3:16 This love of pure gift surpasses the powers of man left to himself; God pours it into the heart. It is charity, the agapē the New Testament names: the very love of God shared with man, which makes him able to love God for himself and his neighbor as God loves him.