What is love? Is it possible to define love? Simply a vision of the world corresponds many times to love, not to love as such, although the term is disrupted as society progresses, until everything that corresponds to love is defined as “Love”.
It is certainly complicated to deal with a term that is interpreted or can be seen from different visions in a society that is increasingly dominated by an emotivism, which consumes it in simple feelings that do not establish a truth. If we ask any person about what he thinks is love, he will define what he feels for any being that brings him emotional stability, as an object, or he lowers it to the point of a sexual vision.
It is a mistake to define love with a term that is closed in an environment, limited by everyday use. For the simple fact that all that the human act defines love is often simply a desire, and if it manages to define love it becomes the term by which everything will be defined, but that definition of love, subject to human ambiguity will always be insufficient.
The contemporary problem: the reduction of love
Let's start, with a topic that resonates a lot and sometimes avoided, the fact of emotions, love can not be defined by a simple impulse, much less a reduction to something momentary, the idea that “Love ends” is certainly a bad idea, you can not end something divine, it does not end, there simply never was. This shows that we define love as something unstable, and not as something true, because if you know what you truly love, you will never stop loving.
One of the most striking problems we see today is the fact of defining everything as love: usefulness, attraction, sexual desire, attachment, habit. All wanting becomes “love” which empties the term, we do not see its transcendence, but it remains in simple ideas. When everything is “love” nothing really is, because we see it as a finite.
Love, in all its expression, is relational, to impose ideas as I want because of how I feel, because simply wanting is also exhausted, because feelings invade to the depths of a wanting, which is not transformed into love. Nor is it to discard options towards whom, and towards whom not, that would be an impulse that only leads to “choose the least worst”.
If the term falls in the latter sense, in what we will all manage to define, it is the reduction of the person who loves, because he has been loved first (cf. 1Jn 4:19) but if his impulses overcome his capacity to distinguish what is love, what remains? It does not engage the whole person, but is simply guided by its own psychology, leaving aside its transcendence of goodness, no longer understood as participation in the good, but as inner satisfaction. He is good and loves, because he was loved first. His life is no longer structured in something that leads him to Christ, but leaves him aside from different emotions. Love is self-giving, which engages the whole person.
The current crisis is not an excess of love, but the loss of its truth, because we do not love too little, we love badly. The problem is not the intensity of affection, but the disorientation, it has been reduced to what it is not (emotions, feelings, impulses) because it has lost its original reference. When it is not seen as a correspondence to the real good, it is when it begins to decay in subjectivity, it is no longer donation, nor commitment, but simple passing emotion, it is not found to correspond because it has been detached from the source, it is fragmented and only emotions are seen that do not involve the whole of life.
Love as gift and fidelity
“God is love” (1 Jn 4:8), the term that St. John defines for God does not simply establish an attribute of God, the term “is” defines the essence of God. Learning to love is done by loving.
We have said that God is love, but then he does not close, because the act of closing the divine action is not proper to God, otherwise we would not be here, we are created by an action that is born first of the will of something superior to our intellect. The sign of the relationship, of the gift of God is found in the continuous call to the covenant, where it is certainly up to man to maintain this covenant. This is important, since we find that love itself does not close, but is established as a continuous relationship.
“If you love me, you will keep my commands” (Jn 14:15). To obey the law of the Lord is simply to love the author of the law himself; this does not correspond to losing even a minute of freedom, but to gain the freedom to love completely the one who first loved us. In this we understand that we cannot love that which we do not know, and because we have known the Lord, we obey his law. The knowledge of the law is roughly a return to the origin.
“Behold, what manner of love the Father has had for us, that he has called us sons, for we are sons” (1 Jn. 3:1). Sons through the Son, the sacrifice of Christ is the sign of the greatest love, since he gives himself. It is certainly true that, if the term falls into vanities, the name of God also falls.
The human virtues must always tend to something that transcends man himself, they cannot remain stagnant in a single feeling, but in a correspondence. “(Jn 15:13) To give one's life, even if it is ultimately costly, corresponds to love, but the complexity at this point is that we get bogged down in the comfort of a single feeling, without a correspondence of imitating Christ, by giving one's life. This is related to the part of the gospel ”I no longer call you servants, I call you friends“ (Jn 15, 15) friends because he gives himself, therefore this defines that the greatest love can only come from the side of Christ.
In biblical theology we find that love is defined not as something fleeting, but as a gift, a fidelity and a struggle for the truth, that he who raised himself on the Cross, attracted all men thirsty for something more, something that leads them to correspond as brothers, that is why baptism that makes us brothers, and sons by Him Son springs like love, from the same side of Christ. Because his disposition is that all come to the knowledge of the truth, but with the help of the brother, that is why “He sent them two by two” (Lk 10, 1).
Homo Amans
St. Augustine develops an anthropology of man, where always its ultimate end or its principle is “to love”, the bishop of Hippo, you always love something, you can not live without loving something, because how can you live without that which you do participate, even if the direction of “what you love”, that you must love the good. Man can only be known by what he loves, not by himself. This we find a relationship in GS 22 “the mystery of man is only clarified in the mystery of the incarnate Word”. To love Christ, to love as Christ and to love in Christ, is in the end to know what man is.
The inner movement of man (his soul) is what we move towards, towards what we love, it is like an inner gravity that transforms, therefore we are continually loving. Disorder is synonymous with sin, order is synonymous with a harmony that transcends everything, because it orders everything towards an end, disorder leads to nothing, it also leads to an inner confusion. Now, the order of my life towards what I love for the good of others.
St. Augustine in “On Christian Doctrine, book I) uses two interesting terms “uti” (to use) and “frui” (to enjoy), two terms that refer directly to the direction to which man gives himself. The Frui, the love by which he loves for himself, in which he rests, which here is God, for being the ultimate end, only God can we love him completely for what he is. The Uti is the means, by which one arrives at something else, not as the ultimate end, knowing, moreover, that they are not the ultimate end, it is basically to know the place that corresponds to God, to think of people with a dependence on others is to put the place of God, we are only dependent on the providence of God, is to see the means to love all things in God, because they are good, evil comes from misuse.
Love belongs to the will, to be born of my love, it is not to forget freedom, but to live it fully, because to love the good, drives away evil, therefore gives happiness. A current problem is to turn the hierarchy towards the one who is loved, hence the instability is born, not to put God as the ultimate goal of love for which everything is born, it is not only based on the intensity, but in the direction.
The direction of love, it will always want the good of someone, it does not depend on enclosing in me, but to want all the best for the other, this is mentioned by St. Thomas (Summa Theologica I-II, q. 26, a. 4) where also unlike the feelings, which are changeable, where we do not control them, we can not control the world, but we can direct what we do, and there enters the will, where it chooses and remains.
But what does the good of the other mean? It is to lead him to the best, what really perfects him and configures him so that he himself wants the good of the other, it is not wanting to take away his freedom, or not trying to possess him, it is simply guiding, accompanying and often renouncing. The interest, for example, for the salvation of the other, is simply to love him, to know and to correct, to seek at all times that the other finds the perfect way, and thus love is contagious, because just as he has been loved, he will love another.
What is the difference with the feeling? The feeling passes, it can be a preamble to love, it is true, but it passes, it does not define love, it is an equally current confusion. The “dictatorship of relativism” (Card. Joseph Ratzinger Mass Pro Electing Supreme Pontiff, April 18, 2005). This dictatorship is now accompanied by the dictatorship of emotivism, where we lose our way, where what makes us feel good is hierarchized as love, while we leave aside what truly guarantees eternity. I must know what is good, it is good even if it costs, it is not about maintaining an eternal feeling of happiness, Christ on the cross loves, even with pain, he loves. The truth of love must be based on something that does not pass, we are conscious of living and of a duty to live everything with a view to eternity.
Pope Benedict XVI, in his encyclical Deus Caritas Est ( God is Love, 2005) brings a vision of eros and agape, from the Greek world, where he mentions that eros has been reduced to the possessive and transient, to the consumable, when it becomes all eros, it is absolutized, but what is eros? It is desire, which is not bad, it is human and necessary, you can only love what you want to love, the problem comes when you do it in a disorderly way, without a hint of freedom. Now agape: it is the love of donation, which brings an exit of oneself, it is a gratuitous surrender, which leads to elevate the desire, we all want to see God, even if we want to hide it, we do not define our life by something external but by something internal that is born from something superior. Full love is agape and eros, since it is a donation to the other, but at the same time the desire to have that perfect love.
To enter into the love of God, to love one another is a divine command, and Christ is the first and most beautiful example, which we see on the cross. The many types of love we see, or the differences about what love should be defined as, fall short when we look at the Cross. Jesus accepts all pain, for a greater surrender that guarantees us salvation. But, what I mean is that he does not flee from pain because he loves, he accepts it because he loves more, to interpret that love does not contract pain is an error that leads us to think of it as a simple passing desire.
The transcendent in the heart of man
“The person is not closure, it is openness” (Leonardo Polo, Person and Freedom). Every person is open to something he/she does not know, every day he/she knows something new even if it does not seem so, the person is a being that does not close himself/herself, he/she is totally open to experience new things, this includes love and self-giving, it is technically freedom, it is the freest act, that of self-giving.
In conclusion, love cannot be reduced to a simple feeling, but must be the preamble that leads me to look at the relationship with another, not with myself. The purest love is relationship, as God is love and relates, at the same time He calls us to a relationship with Him and with our brothers and sisters. To go down to a term that does not commit oneself to the totality of the person to the point of giving oneself, this is not love, it is simply a matter of desire, or of wanting. The same love that I give is the same love that I receive, Christ, the perfect image of the Father. He loves, but he also commands to love, that is to take the image of God to every corner of the earth, it is that we love one another as the Father has loved us, and thus we show that we have known God (cf. 1 Jn 4:7-11).
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