Love: Reasonable and Religious
“God is Love,” say believers. The statement appears twice in the Gospel of John. Yet the facts of human existence are not consistent with this assertion unless God does not love humanity or is not omnipotent. And if the deity of the Torah-Tanakh/Bible/Koran is “love,” it is surprising that there is not much that these three “holy” writings have to say on the subject beyond platitudes. Divinely-commanded genocide and doctrines such as eternal torture in hell and jihad are certainly not expressions of love.
Christianity famously lays claim to the term agape (uh-GAH-pay), one of a number of forms of love that the ancient Greeks recognized. Agape was considered by the Greeks to be the highest form of love, a selfless and unconditional love. Christians appropriated this idea, which they now claim is uniquely their own, understanding it to be God’s unconditional love of humanity and the sort of love that believers should reciprocate towards “God.” It is also linked to the “Christian charity” that believers are supposed to feel towards others.
John 3:16 is often held to capsulize Christianity. But it is not consistent with an “unconditional” love inasmuch as divine salvation is conditioned on its recipients being “whosoever believeth in [Jesus].” Christian theology also fails to account for why an omnipotent deity needs a blood sacrifice to forgive or “redeem” humans who are only in need of forgiveness or “redemption” because of circumstances for which “God” is responsible. In 1 Corinthians 13 Paul, writing long before the author(s) of John, supplies frequently-quoted lines about agape, translated there as “love.” But it is questionable, to say the least, how well his description applies to the Bible deity, especially as that deity appears in the Old Testament.
This is not the only instance of Christianity (and civilization generally) borrowing important ideas from the ancient Greeks, whose ideas about love were much better developed than those of the peoples of the Middle East. The Greeks distinguished different forms of love depending on its felt and expressed character:
~ Eros, or sexually-oriented love, from which we get our word “erotic.”
~ Philia, love without sexual attraction, often (but not always) used today as a suffix that may be attached to whatever may be loved in this way: bibliophilia (a love of books), hemophilia (a “love” of bleeding, a term used to describe disorders in which the blood does not clot properly), oenophilia (a love of wine), technophilia (a love of technology) and so on.
~ Storge is the love of family members for one another, often considered a kind of instinctual attachment.
Ludus, or playful love, a more superficial affection similar to an interest in games and amusement that can motivate the pursuit of short-lived pleasures in, for example, flirting and promiscuity.
~ Mania, obsessive or jealous love, a kind of love-gone-wrong that can cause problems.
~ Pragma, from which we get our word “pragmatic,” is a practical-minded love that is mature and usually of long-standing as with couples or friends who have been together for many years.
~ Philautia is a healthy love of oneself which includes having compassion for and a sympathetic understanding of oneself without which it is difficult to love others.
~ Agape, the aforementioned selfless or unconditional love, ties into modern philosophers’ ideas about moral progress in which people begin with loving their own family or tribe and gradually expand this “circle of love” more and more widely to encompass all of humanity.
The subject of love has been studied, analyzed and dissected into many elements and characteristics since then. A variety of systems of classification and categorizations of love have been proposed. But not even the Greeks’ way of considering the matter has stood the test of time. For love is so personal and subjective, so tightly related to its particular and yet changing contexts that millennia of writers, singers, artists and others have failed to capture its essence. In addition, cultural variations through time and space and even changing terminology, to say nothing of the connotation of the many terms used to refer to this emotion (feeling, sentiment, passion, attachment, affection, and the like) have made it almost impossible to think of any conclusions as settled, let alone definitive. The development of the discipline of psychology and, more recently, neurobiology and neurochemistry have also changed the ways that love can be thought of. With these last, love has become a physical phenomenon in the brain. Yet it is still manifested in the whole body, including cardiac function, though it is often said that the heart is just a pump. Importantly, though the sciences can shed much light on what is happening physically when people express what they are feeling, science cannot tell us what it is really like to love or feel loved.
Love may seem confusing for these reasons. But, at bottom, it is an expression of human values at the most personal level. OS it it is not going too far to say that love, broadly understood, drives or is involved with driving every human thought and behavior. And sometimes this is a love-gone-wrong. Love, therefore, has a moral dimension as it can impel people to actions that are good or bad, not just as it affects others, either, but as it affects oneself, one’s happiness, and one’s capacity for insight, growth and effective living. Thought of in this way, love is arguably a religious matter and undoubtedly a subjectively religious experience. Indeed, even the feeling of agape seems similar to what is called ?being one with the universe? or a feeling of being, in some way, connected with the eternal. French writer Romain Rolland (1866–1944) said that it is:
… quite independently of all dogma, of all Credo, of every Church organization, of every Holy Book, of all hope in a personal survival, etc. — the simple and direct fact of the sensation of the eternal ( which can very well not be eternal but simply without perceptible limits, and in that way oceanic). The sensation is, as a matter of fact, subjective in character (I, myself, am familiar with this sensation).In this sense I can say that I am profoundly ‘religious’ without [it] in any way harming my critical faculties and my freedom to exercise them I carry on simultaneously, freely and smoothly, a ‘religious’ life (in the sense of this prolonged sensation) and a life of critical reason (which is without illusion).? [letter to Sigmund Freud December 5, 1927]
Freud (1856–1939), the famous Austrian founder of psychoanalysis, expressed doubt about the existence of the “oceanic” feeling and could not find it in his own experience. But the idea nevertheless struck a chord within him somewhere as he replied that Rolland’s letter “left me no peace.” Freud could only think to suggest that this “oceanic” feeling could be an atavistic retreat to the experience of an infant that has not yet learned to differentiate itself from its mother and the outside world. But even if this is so, it is no reason not to appreciate a pleasant and inspiring feeling and to incorporate it into one’s experience of life as Rolland evidently did and as Freud seems not to have grasped.
Love is an enormous, complex and multifaceted subject that lies at the core of the human condition. As such, it must be considered profoundly religious. But unlike supernaturalism, falsely considered by many to be the essence of religion, love is a subject that scientific methods are now poised to explore, even if the sciences cannot quite get to the subjectivity of it. Religion, properly understood, and critical reason, as Rolland said, can (indeed, they must) not only coexist but work in service to each other. For science is at once an object of love and a restraint on human passions including religious zeal. While human values anchored in religious feeling (religious in the sense that Rolland meant) must keep scientific methods and technologies directed towards advancing human well-being. And critical reason, in turn, is the best guide to discerning the nature of human well-being.
