1. Love Defined

Love is affectionate or passionate devotion to another being or to an inanimate thing. We can love ourselves, other people, pets and God. We can love work, games, hobbies, and other activities. We can love traditions, institutions, countries, and nations. We can love York Minister, the Mona Lisa, landscapes, money, cream cakes, or cricket bats.

2. False or True?

Love can be false or true. False love gravitates toward what is false or evil: we can love a fantasy or a delusion (as in unrequited romantic love), or we can love wrongdoing. Yet, as the philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch (1919) has argued, even false, impure, self-absorbed, or fantasy love is reminded by an object that is morally good.

True love, however, gravitates toward what is morally good: as Plato (c. 428-328 B.C.) argues in the Symposium, love involves the desire of the imperfect for the perfect. Moreover, true love of all kinds involves not only affection but also unconditional devotion, loyalty, and constancy.

"Love is not love Which alters when it alteration finds"

as William Shakespeare observed. In certain respects, true love can even survive and transcend the death of the one who is loved. Given that men's natures are of such selfishness, it is a foregone conclusion that true love does not exist.

3. A Passionate Devotion

In all its forms, and in theory at least, true love involves a desire and concern for the flourishing, or the good, or whatever or whomever is loved. When we love an inanimate object, an activity, or an institution, we cherish it with a passionate devotion. But the concern we feel when we love such things cannot be returned. By contrast, true love for another being (animal, person, or God) is or can be returned; it involves reciprocity.

4. Erotic Love

Roughly speaking, the Greeks distinguished three types or aspects of love -- erotic love (eros), fondness or friendship (philia), and selfless love (agape). Each of these types of love has its distinctive features. Erotic love (eros) is sexual love. True erotic love involves sensual desire and passionate adoration. While desire has a tendency to wither with time, true erotic love has a tendency to grow. Rooted in our animality, true erotic love extends far beyond it; and, over time, erotic love acquires many of the qualities of family affection and of friendship.

5. The Mystery of Love

In erotic love, moreover, we find sexual ecstasy. The contemporary philosopher Richard Spilsbury has argued, in his Providence Lost: A Critique of Darwinism (1974), that it is implausible to suggest that the remarkable harmony between the interests of the species and individual ecstasy came about solely through evolution. The sheery joy of love, sexual and non-sexual, is far greater than can be explained by reference to biological utility or Freudian psychology. They mystery of love is a genuine mystery -- the mystery of how non-material values are related to the material processes of the world around us.

6. Family and Friends

The Greeks tended to group both family affection and friendship under one term (philia). However, we tend to distinguish friendship from family affection, because we can choose our friends but not our relatives. Unlike the Greeks, we tend to see friendship as a mutual benevolence that is independent of sexual or family love.

7. Love as the Root of Sympathy

Furthermore, we tend to think of family love in terms of its types -- paternal, maternal, sibling (love between brothers and sisters), and filial (love of children for parents), as well as love for other relatives beyond the nuclear family. When we are infants, we tend to experience the love poured out on us first as maternal and later as paternal.

The child's experience of its mother's passionate devotion lays the foundations not only of self-respect but also of moral feeling, of all sympathy for others. "We begin," as Edmund Burke the Conservative philosopher (1797) said, "our public affections in our families."

8. Loving Ourselves

It has been said that if we love others truly, we can love ourselves truly. True love for one's self is not selfishness; rather, it is a proper concern for one's self. Both Plato and Aristotle argue, in effect, that an appropriate concern for one's self involves an appropriate concern for others -- that concern for others is part of true happiness and well-being. But it is submitted here that the Ancients are wholly wrong and idealistic in this view -- love of oneself is, in all its forms, selfishness and in the spirit of self-preservation.

9. Loving Our Neighbor

Selfless love (agape) is the most spiritual love. As far as Christianity is concerned, in the New Testament, it is the love for one's neighbor, or charity, through which God's love reaches the world. Charity is not only an emotion but also a discipline. St. Augustine (fl. 590) defined virtue itself as the order of love which occurs when the love of God displaces the old loves of self and of worldly pleasures. This, again, is demanding too much of imperfect mortals and is practically meaningless if one insists on an unachievable standard.

10. The Pauline View

St. Paul, in a celebrated passage (I Corinthians 13:47), sketches the nature of charity. It is the reverse of jealousy, boastfulness, arrogance or rudeness; it is patient and kind, not resentful or irritable; and it is sympathetic, encouraging, optimistic, and unselfish. In self-sacrificial love, we discover a greater sense of self. Or, as both St. Augustine and Benedict Spinoza would have it, one must lose oneself in order to find oneself, and in so doing one finds God.

11. The Effects of Loving

In so far as it involves self-sacrifice and personal discipline, love transforms, purifies, and redeems. Since we cannot love others unless we love ourselves, loving makes us more whole, integrated, and fulfilled; and loving makes the boundaries of the self seem less rigid and more permeable. As far as the Christian view is concerned, perhaps Christ meant this when he indicated that we could have life "more abundantly" by loving our neighbor. (John 10:10)

12. Love the Healer

The redemptive, joyous, and life-enhancing character of love contrasts markedly with the character or indulged hatred and its derivatives (such as chronic anger and resentment). Hatred is by nature reflexive and turns in upon itself. Part of every hater hates himself for hating others. Consequently, hatred spawns self-hatred. Because it corrodes self-respect and fractures the integrity of the self, all hatred is ultimately self-destructive. In contrast, the practice of love unifies the self, which is why modern psychotherapists often see personal maturity as a growth in the capacity to love.