What the History of Love Reveals About Love Itself

Many of us expect love to do far more than make us happy. We expect it to make us whole, to tell us who we are, and even to give our lives meaning. This understanding of love is surprisingly recent.

Love is a word with a meaning that has changed over the centuries. Today, we tend to think about love primarily in terms of romantic love. But, if you consider it, the concept of romantic love barely features among the 66 books of the Bible. The two greatest “love” stories in the Bible are not of husband and wife, nor even of man and woman, but of man and man, and woman and woman: David and Jonathan, and Ruth and Naomi.

When Love Belonged to God

Instead, all love in the Bible is directed at God, and the love for the spouse, and more generally for the other, is subsumed under the love of God, of which it is an expression. Thus, in the Sacrifice of Isaac, Abraham’s love for God trumps his love for his own longed-for son Isaac, whom he is willing to sacrifice for no other reason than that God commanded it.

In ancient times, people did sometimes fall in love, but they did not believe that their love might in some sense save them, as we tend to today.

When, in the Iliad, Helen eloped with Paris, sparking the Trojan War, neither she nor he (nor anyone else) conceived of their attraction as pure or ennobling or exalting. When, in the Aeneid, Dido fell in love with Aeneas, Virgil portrays her love as a kind of divine affliction that distracts both lovers from their duties and ends in ruin and death. One might also think of Phaedra and Hippolytus, Medea and Jason, and Antony and Cleopatra.

The Rise of Romantic Love

But over the centuries, the sacred seeped out of God and into romantic love, which came to take the place of the retreating religion in lending purpose, weight, and meaning to our lives. People had once loved God, but now they loved love: more than with their beloved, they fell in love with love itself.

\Abraham had surrendered himself and Isaac out of love for God. But in the Romantic era, around the time of the French Revolution, love grew into quite the opposite: a means of finding and validating oneself, of lending texture, substance, and solidity to one’s life—as encapsulated by Sylvester’s 1978 hit, You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real), the final kissing scene in Cinema Paradiso, the “You complete me” scene in Jerry Maguire, and countless other popular songs and films.

In the time of God, “finding oneself”—or, more accurately, losing oneself in God—had demanded years of patient spiritual practice. But after the French Revolution, romantic love could come to the rescue of anyone, with very little effort or sacrifice on their part. Being saved became a simple matter of luck.

If love is a word with a meaning that has changed over time, it is also a word with multiple meanings, one that points at a diversity of distinct concepts with only a family resemblance between them.

What All Love Has in Common

Unlike us, the Greeks had several words for love, enabling them to distinguish more clearly between the different types. For example, eros referred to sexual or passionate love; philia to friendship; storge to familial love; and agape to universal love, such as the love for strangers, nature, or God.

Having many more words for “love” enables us to think and talk about love in new and different ways. For example, we might say that people in the early stages of a romantic relationship often expect unconditional storge, but find only the hunger and dependency of eros, and, if they are lucky, the maturity and fertility of philia. Or, like Plato, we might say that the best kind of philia is one that is born of eros, and that in turn feeds back into eros to strengthen and develop it, transforming it from a lust for possession into an impulse for philosophy.

But if we are to understand the deep meaning of the word “love,” then we need to uncover what all these different types of love have in common. In other words, what is it that unites eros, philia, storge, and agape? What is the common element that makes them all types of love?

What all these instances of love have in common, I think, is a reaching out beyond our own being to things that are able to lend purpose, weight, and meaning to our lives, even to the point of ingesting or incorporating those things into our inner being—whence the hug, the love bite, and the sacramental bread and wine of the Eucharist.

Love is the force of nature that enables us to cross the boundary between ourselves and the world, like the lobster, to shed our shell and grow beyond it—which is why people with little love are so small.