Toward an Understanding of Love
Love has become a slippery and cheap term in modern culture. People speak of love to describe their feelings toward kittens, romantic partners, tacos, God, sports, or the weather. The word is rendered almost useless unless a speaker couches the term in a specific way to clarify the intent. There are legitimate linguistic reasons for this, but I call us to plumb the depths of this word’s potential—to go beyond its shallow, popular use and recognize the potency it can carry. Love is actionable, communicates meaning, gives without insisting on reception, invites without requiring. “Love,” says Nikolaos Ludovikos, “is the dialogical…wisdom of reciprocity—as proposal, learning, attendance, and burning desire.” (7) Love is both the cause, the process, and the effect of facilitating wholeness in those whose lives we touch, deferring rather to the needs of others than to our own inclinations.
The way we define love matters. Words shape how we interact with ideas and entities, and when our words lose the capacity to communicate deep truths and experiences, our capacity for communicable vitality diminishes to a similar degree. A shallow perception of love will inhibit our ability to experience and share it as fully. Furthermore, we learn about our Creator and Originator when we learn about love, since love is eternally existent in his essence.
The fullest embodiment of love is seen in God’s free giving of himself to the world by becoming incarnated in the God-man, Jesus Christ. Jesus indicated that the greatest love a man can have is to give his life for another. We find it difficult to give up even small bits of our lives to others because we prefer the self and let the value of self eclipse the value of others. Jesus, however, proceeded to give his own life—the very highest embodiment of perfection—for the ruins of his most highly esteemed creation: a ruination of which they were the cause. In this saga, the best of us (for Christ is man) was betrayed by and for the worst of us, yet it all occurred by his own allowance and consent—by his love. Thus we see a higher pinnacle of our previously affirmed supreme—the highest of the highest, if you will. In this cardinal example, we see that love was the actuating force, the medium, and the telos of God’s cosmic sacrifice. (A potentially valid objection may be stated to this claim, preferring instead to designate the glory of God as the principle aim. However, I maintain that the love and glory of God are co-essentially present and original in his substance, and thus find the differentiation all but moot.)
Love is much more than a feeling or even an action: it is a cause that gives rise to substance. We are created not merely to love, but by, in, and for love. We discover and more fully embody our core substance as we participate in communion and relationship with creatures and the Creator. When we reject dialogical, self-giving love for God and his crowning creation, we also reject the root of ontological wholeness. Loudovikos cites Maximus the Confessor when he asserts that a “lack of communion between entities is identified with their separation from God and return to nothingness.” (142) In other words, our relationship and communion with God and with others is a core contingency of how thoroughly we can be in the world. Stated otherwise, the human constitution is inherently relational and a decline in relationship diminishes being. Considered this way, love is more than the path to find meaning, it is meaning. Love finds its way into our hearts and lives as we actively share it with those in our contact, but it then keeps going and becomes actually embodied in us and them.
Love is visible, fruiting, embodied. It defers to others in matters of preference, but stands firm where firmness is needed. It values personhood above individuality. Love cleanses the mind. It lifts us up and enables us to behold more perfectly the truths of both the natural and the supernatural. Milton put it well:
“love refines
The thoughts, and heart enlarges, hath his seat
In Reason, and is judicious, is the scale
By which to heav’nly Love thou may’st ascend.” (192; bk. VIII, 589-592)
Love is not merely a good virtue, it is a purging and elevating mechanism that becomes embodied as it is implemented in the hearts of those who practice and receive it.
Thus we also see that love is not so much a state of being as a mode of becoming. We do not yet fully see what we will be, but in holding communion with the revealed person of God and those who bear his image, we can increasingly become what we are not yet and participate in that which has not yet been fully revealed. As our communion increases, our capacity to love increases, and so our very substance—our core of being—gains fullness and maturity, ever becoming more of what it is meant to be. And in this continued becoming of our being, love is the actuating force, the medium, and the telos of our sacrifice—our ultimate aim.
Works Cited
Loudovikos, Nikolaos. A Eucharistic Ontology: Maximus the Confessor’s Eschatological Ontology of Being as Dialogical Reciprocity. Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 2010
Milton, John. Paradise Lost. Signet Classics. 2010
