The Four Streams of Love

What is love?

Dictionary definitions see it as a feeling, emotion, attachment, attraction or affection. These are clearly reductionist as emotivist. Yes, love is a feeling; but is much more than that.

More philosophical, moral minds insist it is an act of the will, a concern for the other, a disposition of generosity and even self-sacrifice. This is an improvement, but remains reductive as moralistic. Yes, love is a decision, of will-guided-by-intellect; but is much more than that. 

Love cannot be defined in light of other realities since it is the absolute, primal, foundational, original principle of reality. It is coextensive with Being itself. How do you define being? existence? reality? They are immediately, intuitively obvious, as self-manifesting. The attempt to define in other terms is immediately futile.

Human loves...in all their complexity, nuance, depth, ambiguity, promise...remain vulnerable to futility, frustration and tragedy...unless they realize their true nature. They all flow from, reflect, and flow to, the Absolute, Eternal, Tri-Personal Drama/Event of love within the Holy Trinity. Human loves only become coherent, purposeful, integral, and sustainable when seen as reflections, icons, sacramentals...finite, tentative, provisional...of the great, abiding, infinite Love of the Trinity.

Let us again ponder the varieties of human love. C.S. Lewis, in his classic The Four Loves, revived the classic Greek typology:  Storge as affection, body-based; Philia as friendship of equals joined in a common engagement;  Eros as desire;  Agape as selfless, sacrificial concern for the other. Here we again prefer an alternate four-part typology around the loves of the family: filial, of the son/daughter for father/mother; paternal/maternal as delight and tenderness; fraternal/sororal of brother and sister and friend; and spousal, the mutual desire of bride and groom. This paradigm is less abstract and more concrete, grounded in the realities that structure every human family.

Filial love incorporates storge love of affection into a deeper spiritual reality. It is the primal love of the human person as creature: receptive. The embryo/infant/child is receptive of parental love, broadly understood. This is physical, emotional, and eventually intellectual, social, spiritual. It is the primal pleasure and joy of comfort received that nourishes trust as the foundational attitude towards life. This develops further into gratitude, appreciation, reverence and eventually adoration of the Creator. This is the fountain from which every human love will flow. This is the core love of every creature.

Paternal and Maternal loves are best not abstracted into "parental love" so that they retain their grounding in nature, biology, and the ontology of gender. But their inner form is identical in its twofold focus: delight in the little Beloved, and tenderness of care for the little one in her fragility, vulnerability and suffering. Delight here is distinct from pleasure or satisfaction; it is not merely a feeling; it is the intellectual-contemplative-emotional-spiritual engagement with the little one as true, good and beautiful. This is accompanied by the passion to nurture and protect her against any threat. This passion of protection, even in the animal kingdom, is the strongest natural instinct, even exceeding the desire and delight of lovers. (In my opinion.) Arguably this is the love that most resembles the divine. It is groBunded in the physicality of storge as it consumes itself sacrificially in the love of agape.

Fraternal/Sororal or Friendship love is identical with philia.  It is the mutuality of equals as engaged in a common enterprise: family, sport, politics, religion, art, etc. It is free of the neediness of filial love, of the heavy duty of parental concern, of the flaming passion of spousal desire. There is mutuality in delight, respect, care and desire...but all in a lighter manner. What binds is not that mutuality so much as a third, shared reality that engages, a faith, mission, interest, hobby or goal. So it is a tripod: two friends and their shared concern.

Spousal Desire is equivalent to eros  understood in the broadest, deepest sense. We of course know the "erotic" as physical desire or attraction. This is  included in eros or spousal longing but is far from being everything. A deeper aspect is romantic, emotional or psychological attraction. This is stronger as it draws from deeper psychic needs. Both of these, however, are basically need-based attractions and not really love in the truer sense of valuation of the other, beyond one's own needs or desires. Such desire can be selfish, passing infatuation and, frustrated, be easily transformed into hatred and resentment. Such attraction is itself wholesome and good, but only within the context of  and infused by deeper, stronger forms including charity (agape), reverence, tenderness, selfless delight, and shared openness to transcendent values.   

Christian, especially Protestant, thought (Nygren) has sharply contrasted agape  and eros as opposites which exclude and deny each other: the first generous, selfless, Godly; the second selfish, lustful, sinful. It is true that eros on its own is vulnerable to perversion into domination, violence, control. But even the lowest forms of need-based desire (of the infant, of the animal, of the injured person) are in themselves good. In addition, there are higher forms of eros  which are more deeply, intensively wholesome: the desire for genuine beauty, truth and goodness. Here we have the artist, the scholar, the journalist, the activist in passionate pursuit of justice. These too are forms of desire. More profoundly still: our inner desire for God's very self. We are created to desire God: this is Eros. This is good. 

Even deeper still: the love of God for us, properly understood, is not pure agape, oblation and sacrifice, bereft of desire. God does desire us. He created us out of generosity but also out of desire for us, a yearning to share with us his eternal joy, a yearning for us as delightful to him. This was not need based. It was generosity-based desire. 

And so, we see in every love the operation of desire along with generosity. The infant desires the attention of mother and father; and this is very good. Friends and siblings enjoy each other and their shared interests. The mother and father desire their little one, in an entirely wholesome, generous manner. Lastly, of course, spousal desire includes but transcends the physical and emotional into the generative, altruistic, personal, aesthetic, moral, and spiritual. 

Spousal love  uniquely flows from mutuality in desire but is even more profoundly grounded in fraternal/sororal or philia love, the more stable reverence for each other and united engagement with transcendent realities, including family and God. In lesser degree, spouses or lovers engage with each other ... creatively, fluidly, organically ... in filial/parental love. In the dance of matrimony one responds to the others need and vice versa. But that is, of course, not the focus of the relationship.

Love and Time

Living in the fragility and tentativeness of time, we are always pilgrims, journeyers moving and changing, drawn by grace to the Kingdom of Heaven. And so our human loves are tentative, finite, and vulnerable. We move from infant love to maturity, from one friendship to another, from romantic love to seasoned love. No earthly love can satisfy the profound erotic longing of our God-desiring hearts. 

At the same time, every genuine human live is a sharing in the infinite love of the Trinity and so it endures, as memory, in the enduring life of God and thus triumphs over death intrinsic to time. Every kind act, every friendship and romance, every heroic act...abides forever in the eternal heart and intellect of of God.

Pope Benedict

With incomparable clarity and depth, Pope Benedict, in his classic Deus Caritas Est, illuminated the interior harmony of eros and agape. In human (sinful) life they often contrast. But in God they infuse and illuminate each other. God gives to us in oblation, sacrifice and generosity; but out of a desire for us and for union with us. He imagines the ladder of Jacob, with angels ascending and descending, as showing the love of God, descending generously as it ascends from the abyss of human desire and need. The two are in perfect accord. 

The Love of Christ

We leave the best to last. In our Lord Jesus Christ we see every human love as reflective of the love of the Trinity. 

Filial: Christ, loyal son of Mary and Joseph,  is the Son of God: perfectly, absolutely receptive of and reflective of all the love and being of the Father. 

Paternal: Christ comes to us from the heart of the Father to die for us, to pardon, to save, to give eternal life.

Fraternal: Christ is our friend, brother, captain and king.

Spousal: Christ is Bridegroom of the Church his Spouse: he burns with desire to give himself and set fire to the earth.

Every specific human love is a unique combination of these four loves. Every one of our personal, human loves, however humble, is a share in this magnificent Drama of Love.

You have made us for yourself, Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in You.  St. Augustine