Five Movements of Love

Every particular love is a distinctive, unique combination of the five movements of love which mutually enrich each other: delight (eros), admiration (another dimension of eros), tender care (close to the classical agape and storge or affection), companionship in the good (philia) and desire (again eros). While the first, delight, characteizes all loves, the following four are more pronounced as filial (admiration), paternal/maternal (tender), fraternal (companionship) and spousal (desire) loves. Delight takes precedence of place: exultation, celebration, enjoyment of the Beloved. Delight is responsive to the Beauty of the Other. This Joy infuses and defines every genuine love. Secondly, admiration or reverence is closely related: responsive to the good of the Beloved, this is a deeper, more intellectual recognition of dignity, nobility, virtue and goodness. This is especially characteristic of filial love, for mother, father, God and all authorities who radiate Goodness. This love is primarily receptive, trusting and reverent. Thirdly, tender care, paternal and maternal, is the complement of filial love in that it cherishes the preciousness and fragility of the Beloved and passionately desires to protect, provide and bring the Other to full happiness and fulfillment. If the filial is love of the small for the large, tender care is love of the strong for the little. Fourthly, companionship in the good replaces asymetry with equality and particularly characterizes friendship in all its forms, including brother-sister love and spousal love. This indicates that the lovers mutually move each other beyond the duality into a Good that is greater than the two of them. This could be a friendship in some hobby or interest or more deeply the partnership of husband in wife in regard to children and family or a companionship in prayer and mission. Lastly, Desire for union with the Beloved is the most complex, paradoxical and challenging love. This would include the lowest forms of love: the craving for affection, affirmation, security and comfort of the infant or infantile (which remains with us into the grave) and sexual yearning with all its tension, frustration and vulnerability to violence and betrayal. However we also know the divine eros, the holy, generous, eternal desire by which God longs to be with us forever in heaven. And so, every human love is a mysterious mixture of earthly and heavenly eros  and we who are immersed in it are unable to divide out the one from the other. And yet the Holy Spirit is active among and with us, through the Church, to strengthen and purify our loves; to recognize and renounce anything "diabolic" that would separate us from God and each other in love; and to increase and magnify all that is generous, pure, holy and magnanimous in our loves. In this account, eros or desire has a certain preeminence. Creation itself is the fruit of God's own desire to share with us out of His boundless, effervescent and exuberant Goodness. We ourselves are created with infinite desire for the Good the Beautiful and the True, as well as our desires, in our finitude, for security, attention, comfort, purpose and communion. And so, Desire becomes neither an illusion to be discarded nor a passion to be denied or repressed, but is our deepest nature. Even agape and tender care is desire for the well-being, the happiness, the salvation of the ones we love. The five distinct but interwoven movements of Love can be summarized by an acronym: TREAT. Love is all its splendor is indeed a neat treat as it is: Tender in it care, Reverent and admiring, Elated and even ecstatic in its delight, Attentive towards the good in companionship with the Beloved, Tending in desire for union with the one loved. May our Desire and our desires be inflamed, purified and ordered, intelligently, each in its proper place, always flowing into and out of our Desire for God and the salvation of those we love.