Love encompasses a range of strong and positive emotional and mental states, from the most sublime virtue or good habit [to] the deepest interpersonal affection and … the simplest pleasure.
Wikipedia
What a broad swath. We’re all familiar with love, whether we help our neighbors in our daily lives, hear kind words pass between people we don’t know, or even just get the interpretation of the media, we have some kind of exposure to love. But what is it, really?
What Is a Theological Virtue?
Let’s take the noun first. What is virtue?
Virtue is moral excellence.
Wikipedia
Thanks, Wikipedia! With that baseline, we can now look at its descriptor. What does the adjective “theological” mean in this context?
Theological – known only through Divine Revelation, Divinely infused, and God is the immediate and proper object.
New Advent
Putting these together, a theological virtue is moral excellence from, with, and for God:
- God makes the moral excellence available to us: it is from God.
- God Himself is in the moral excellence: to know it is to be with God.
- God is the proper target for the moral excellence: it is rightly for God.
When all three of these are true, we have a theological virtue.
Theological virtues are supernatural powers which enable mankind to attain our final destiny.
New Advent
Spoiler alert:
Our final destiny is with God.
Why is Love the Greatest of the Virtues?
Love is the only virtue that exists regardless of everything else: if the world were perfect, we would know love; our world is far from perfect, yet we still know love. Every other virtue requires an obstacle to be overcome whereas love exists independently.
Here’s an example which we’ll go further into later: for hope and faith to exist, there needs to be uncertainty. Hope and faith are meaningless if we know and can see the outcome; that’d be like showing up at the end of a ballgame, seeing the final score, and “hoping” for one of the teams to win. The game’s already over; we already know the score – so we can’t hope for a particular outcome because the outcome is already set in stone.
Contrast this with love. Whether you show up for the pre-game, make it just in time for the first pitch, or can only catch the teams as they walk off the field, you still love your team. Nothing changes from start to finish: if you love your team, you love your team.
Regardless of everything else, whether times are great or the world is literally ending or all of life on Earth is extinguished and all of God’s children are praising Him in Heaven, love endures.
Secular Love
Look up love in the dictionary: there are many definitions – none of which really fit what we mean when we’re thinking of telling a significant other I-L-Y for the first time. I, for one, would not be terrified of telling someone, “I have an intense feeling of deep affection for you,” or even, “I have a deep romantic attachment to you” – but dropping I-L-Y feels like I’m hitting the nuclear launch codes with myself at the targeted coordinates.
(As a side note, I really want to use one of those lines in real conversation. They make me smile, and I wouldn’t mind feeling like Data for a moment.)
Love is a difficult concept to take into the secular world because it is inherently and intimately divine. We humans try to control everything and form it to our will, to “perfect” it just the way we like it. There’s a problem with that: love is perfect the way God originally gave (and continues to give) it to us. When we alter perfection, it’s no longer perfect.
If you ever had the thought that love is fickle, you’re right: the version of “love” mankind peddles is imperfect and weak. When we look at the harm people who “love” each other do to each other, it can be difficult to believe in love at all. This “love” is not real love – the strong webbing God catches us in to cradle and nurture us when we allow ourselves to turn to Him.
Natural Love, Human Love
C. S. Lewis (best known for The Chronicles of Narnia) wrote about the four distinct types of love in The Four Loves. He differentiates genres of love in and understandable, relatable way; let’s check them out.
Storge: Affection
Affection is the most basic and most natural form of love; it is the result of fondness through familiarity, such as between mother and child. Such familiarity needn’t be from a familial tie; it can be by chance, such as a shared experience with a stranger you meet on the top of a mountain. C.S. Lewis describes it as a “warm comfortableness” with simple satisfaction in simply being together.
Philia: Friendship
Ah, friendship. The rarest and most insightful of all loves, philia is a strong bond between people sharing commonalities. Think about your closest friends: what do you have in common? Do you play the same sports? Do you believe the same things? Are you excited about the same topics? These commonalities are the basis of friendship.
Describing it as “the least biological, organic, instinctive, … necessary, [and] natural” of the loves, C.S. Lewis expresses a connection to the way some ancient cultures considered it “the happiest and most fully human of all loves; the crown of life and the school of virtue.” Because it is a love selected, by decision rather than by obligation or mere chance, it is on a higher plane than the other loves.
Eros: Romantic
You know you’re in love when you can’t fall asleep because reality is finally better than your dreams.
Dr. Seuss
Gag me with a spoon.
This love is actually interesting once we get past the rah-rah we face in secular society. (That stuff should really only distract teenyboppers, but it seems people are so fascinated with youth that even that which is as lame as this is romanticized … literally and figuratively.)
Far from being erotic (and fickle) love, eros is the pre-occupation with a person as a whole. This is wanting to know everything about someone, being enraptured by a personality, being enthralled beyond the who to the why and the how.
The fact that she is a woman is far less important than the fact that she is herself.
C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves
Eros is romantic and passionate, but not in the way we tend to think about it. It vigorously proclaims an interest in knowing everything about its interest, to know that person as a whole person as thoroughly as one can know another. It’s sitting down to have a conversation with someone because you want to hear what they have to say, because you want to know how they think, why they think that way, and what makes them who they are.
The natural loves are not self-sufficient. … The human loves can be glorious images of Divine love. No less than that: but also no more.
C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves
Divine Love: Charity – Agape
Agape – unconditional “God” love … exists regardless of changing circumstances.
Wikipedia
Agape love is the love of God. It is also known as charity. This kind of love is totally selfless and undoubtedly the greatest of the four loves. It is perfect love: timeless and unconditional. It is the love we are called to have for each other yet can not hope to offer without God’s help.
No true virtue is possible without charity.
Saint Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae
Charity enables the other virtues. Through God’s grace, we have access to agape if we will accept His guidance. Agape love glorifies God by reflecting His nature, and He infused it into our souls so that we may be happy. Accepting the gift of God’s love, we are called to love God back but also to love ourselves and our neighbors just as God loves us.
Further Reading
- New Advent: Love (Theological Virtue)
- New Advent: Saint Thomas Aquinas
- C.S. Lewis: The Four Loves
Thoughts?
What’s your experience with love? Which types are you familiar with? Let me know in the comments!
And, of course, we’re finishing out today’s post with everybody’s favorite scripture passage about love.
Love is patient and kind; love is not jealous or boastful; it is not arrogant or rude. Love does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrong, but rejoices in the right. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
1 Corinthians 13:4-7
You can certainly see your skills in the work you write. The world hopes for more passionate writers like you who aren’t afraid to say how they believe. Always follow your heart.
I intuit that you might be trying to stay neutral with your subject, but please know that the more controversial musings can lead to good debate when approached with respect..and it IS your site not a democracy- allow your content set the tone here!