A Short History of Love
The concept of love from ancient times to today
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What is love?
A timeline of the concept of love, from Plato and Aristotle, through early Christianity, courtly love and Christian mysticism, to romantic love and love towards robots.
From the ancient times to today, one question has plagued philosophers: What is love?
This question comes in many forms and guises: How can we properly define love? Is love the same as liking? If not, what is the difference between the two? Is love the same as friendship? Can love exist without friendship between the lovers? Can we love without being sexually attracted? Is Christian charity (often also called love) related to erotic love, and how? Can I truly love an animal, a country, a job or my car, or am I just misusing the word when I say these things? We talked about some of these issues in a previous post about the definition of love and another about the different kinds of love.
In this post, let’s have a look at the history of the concept of love – from the ancient times to today. Naturally, this will have to be very short, otherwise we’ll end up with something like Irving Singer’s three-volume textbook on the philosophy of love:
Singer’s book “The Nature of Love” is the standard work on the philosophy of love. A fascinating three-volume study across twenty-five centuries, it can provide years of study to a motivated reader. A rare book that is, at the same time, serious scholarship and a captivating read.
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Platonic love
“Platonic” love, as we use the word today, has little to do with Plato. Plato (428-348 BC) was the student of ancient Greek philosopher Socrates (470-399 BC) and teacher of Aristotle (384-322 BC), whose life we discussed here and whose philosophy we’ve also talked about earlier.
Before we talk more about Plato, it’s important to be aware that ancient Athenian love was, to a large extent, homosexual love. The Greeks, never too egalitarian (their democracy extended only to male citizens and ignored women, foreigners and a sizeable population of slaves) thought that love with women was mostly there to make children, while the purest and highest form of love is that which involves two men. Of course, opinions varied, and Alcibiades, for example, Socrates’ dashing general-lover-playboy, was also known for his many affairs with women.
Plato gives us a theory of love in his “Symposion,” a recollection of a party, at which a group of friends discuss the nature of love.
Present at the Symposion, probably the most famous drinking party in human history, are a doctor, a poet, a lawyer, the philosopher Socrates, the general Alcibiades (who is also Socrates’ boyfriend) – and the wisest of all is said to be the one who is absent: the woman Diotima, teacher of Socrates in matters of love, and, scandalously for the time and place, a woman!
Diotima’s theory, as told by Socrates, as told by Plato, is this: we begin by loving beautiful bodies. After a while, we notice that bodies are all more or less the same, and that the truly lovable characteristics of others are in their personalities: so we begin loving their minds, the way they think and behave. But after a while, even these features begin to seem repetitive and dull. We begin to recognise that beauty is not limited to human beings. A landscape can be beautiful. The order of nature is beautiful. The way the stars and planets go about their orbits in celestial harmony is beautiful. Even states and governments are beautiful, with their complex economies and legislations, thousands of parts working together to produce a living, moving thing, a state. So the lover expands their horizon to include all these lovable things – until, finally, they realise that behind all these visible things is something greater: the pure beauty of mathematics, of the laws of nature. And behind that is what Plato calls “forms” or “ideas,” and what we could better translate as “the mind of God”: a realm of eternal ideal objects, of which our physical world is just a degraded shadow.
In Plato’s Symposium, Plato defines love as the desire for the eternal possession of the good.
And there’s another reason to prefer the love to eternal things. For Plato, love is “the desire for the perpetual possession of the good.” The good, in this case, is exemplified by the beloved, but love to a real person can never be forever. People age, die, or leave us. Loving thoughts and ideas is as close as a mortal human being can come to eternity. And when we today talk of Plato and his Symposion, this is the proof that his approach worked. Thousands of years after his death, here we are, still talking about Plato’s ideas, about Socrates and Diotima, and about that mild evening in a living-room in ancient Athens, where a group of friends met to discuss the nature of love.
Aristotle: Love as friendship
Aristotle, Plato’s student, was of a more practical mind. He asks, what is the purpose of human existence? He looks at all the other things in the world and he sees that everything strives to be the most perfect realisation of the kind of thing that it is: all lions try to be the strongest, healthiest, fiercest lion. Every flute is created in the hope that it will be the best, most melodious flute. And so also with human occupations: every shoemaker tries to be the best shoemaker. Every general wants to be the best general. But what is a good shoemaker? It is one who makes good shoes. What, then, is a good human in general? For Aristotle, it is the human being who exemplifies best what it means to be human. And this means: one who combines a virtuous behaviour with human reason. Or, the other way round: one whose reason is controlled by virtue.
So if humans want to become better humans, they’ll have to learn to be more virtuous, and this they can learn only by engaging with other human beings.
Aristotle’s theory of happiness rests on three concepts: (1) the virtues; (2) phronesis or practical wisdom; and (3) eudaimonia or flourishing.
The function of friends and lovers is, accordingly, to help us on our way to human excellence – and ours, to help them. Love and friendship are, for Aristotle, not so different: both are means by which we become better persons, by practising and training our virtues with the help of the other person.
Christian love
Already around the time of Christ, St Paul becomes the first preacher of what would become the classic motto of Christian love:
In his letter to the Galatians, St Paul introduces the idea that “flesh” and “spirit” are opposed to each other, one sinful and one virtuous, one worldly and one god-like, and this dichotomy would colour the church’s perception of love right down to our own time, two thousand years later:
13 You, my brothers and sisters, were called to be free. But do not use your freedom to indulge the flesh; rather, serve one another humbly in love [agape]. 14 For the entire law is fulfilled in keeping this one command: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” … 16 So I say, walk by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh. 17 For the flesh desires what is contrary to the Spirit, and the Spirit what is contrary to the flesh. They are in conflict with each other, so that you are not to do whatever you want.
19 The acts of the flesh are obvious: sexual immorality, impurity and debauchery; 20 idolatry and witchcraft; hatred, discord, jealousy, fits of rage, selfish ambition, dissensions, factions 21 and envy; drunkenness, orgies, and the like. I warn you, as I did before, that those who live like this will not inherit the kingdom of God. (Galatians 5)
Clearly, St Paul here has some idea like Plato’s in mind, where Eros should, ideally, be removed from the bodily desires and directed towards some eternal version of the good.
Aristotle on living a life well through exercising one’s virtues.
St. Augustine of Hippo (354-430 AD) tried to reconcile the spirit with the flesh by pointing out that every action has a good (its purpose) and a pleasure that is associated with it and that is distinct from the good. So, for example, when I eat, then the good of eating is in the sustenance that the food provides; while, if I eat tasty and nice food, I might also get pleasure. But the two things are really different and sometimes opposed to each other: I can eat food that I like, but that is not good for me (chocolate cookies, for instance).
And we can transfer that thought also to sexual activities: in its natural context, sex is part of a reproductive process that is necessary for the survival of the species: the good and the pleasurable coincide in this case. But when we remove the good (the procreation) and indulge in sexual activity only for the sake of pleasure, then we are committing a sin: we are removing the pleasurable from the good – and mere pleasure is against the order of nature and nothing good can come of it.
Read more about Augustine’s idea here:
For St Augustine, the pleasure inherent in any activity is good as long as the activity is performed because of its intended function.
You see how St Augustine tries to avoid denouncing all sex as bad, which would then pose the question why God made it so that we need to have sex in order to procreate, only to then declare sex to be sinful. In Augustine’s view, sex, performed in the right context and with the intention to procreate, is not sin but the fulfilment of the divine order of things.
The Desert Fathers
While St. Augustine could be said to be still an ancient Greek or Roman man in his way of thinking, the monks and hermits collectively known today as the “Desert Fathers” catapulted the Christian concept of love into an entirely new direction that no Greek philosopher would have understood or approved of.
Where Greek philosophy generally valued balance, logical thinking and distancing oneself from one’s passions, the Desert Fathers go into the entirely opposite direction: they abandon every emotional distancing and attempt to fuse with the grace of God though spiritual exercises, fasting, meditation, isolation and suffering. In the process, they develop their very own brand of Christian love, agape, which is wild, unrestrained, selfless, self-sacrificing, unconditional. It is, essentially, what we still see as the ideal of Christian love and charity today, an ideal so severe and demanding that almost no one has a chance of ever living up to it. Thomas Merton (1960) collected a few of the most famous stories in his classic book “The Wisdom of the Desert”.
Merton’s classic little book has been an inspiration for millions of Christians over the past half-century since its publication. The stories of the Desert Fathers in one easy to read collection.
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Here are two well-known stories from Meron’s collection.
There was once a hermit who was attacked by robbers. His cries alerted the other hermits, and together they all managed to capture the robbers. The robbers were put in jail, but the hermits were ashamed and sad, because, on their account, the robbers had been put to jail. They had acted selfishly, and not with sufficient love for the robbers. So in the night they went into the city, broke into the jail, and freed the robbers, thus returning to God’s grace themselves.
Abbot Anastasius, another hermit, had a very expensive Bible, his only possession. One day, a visitor stole his book, but Anastasius did not pursue him, because he didn’t want to make the other man lie about having stolen the book. A few days later, a used-books seller from the city came to Anastasius and said: a man wanted to sell me this book, but because it looks quite expensive, I wanted to hear your opinion. Is this really a valuable book? Anastasius said yes, and told the book-seller the real value of the book, without mentioning that it was his own. When the thief heard that, he took the book back to Anastasius and begged him to take it back. But Anastasius didn’t want the book, and he gave it to the thief as a present. The thief was so impressed by the whole episode that he became Anastasius’ student and lived with him in the desert for the rest of his life.
In these two stories, you can see the extreme and uncompromising version of Christian love for one’s neighbour, practised with a determination and purity that can still surprise and astonish us today.
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Thanks for reading! This is the first post in a short series that follows the concept of love through the centuries. In the next post, we’ll talk about love in the Middle Ages and beyond.
Here is the accompanying timeline for this post:
A timeline of the concept of love, from Plato and Aristotle, through early Christianity, courtly love and Christian mysticism, to romantic love and love towards robots.
