Love

views updated

LOVE

"Love" as a concept enters philosophy at one point through religion, particularly when the origin of the world is expressed as an act of procreation or the Creator is conceived of as loving his creation either as a whole or in part (i.e., the human race). But the concept of love is also a subject for philosophic meditation in regard to ethical problems. Love, as one of the most powerful of human impulses, was early seen to be much in need of control, especially if man as rational animal was to be able to use his rational capacities. Much of the ethical writing on love is designed to suggest some means whereby the pleasures and other values of loving may be preserved without entailing the supposed evils of intemperate sexuality. This type of speculation ran from Plato through the Neoplatonists—those of both the early Christian period and the Italian Renaissance. In the Platonic tradition love had a unique metaphysical status, for it existed in both the material and the ideal worlds. Love can take on many forms, from gross sexual passion to a devotion to learning, but, it was argued, the ultimate object of love is the beautiful. The goodness that God sees in his creation is its beauty and to feel the beauty of the world is to love it and its Creator.

Classical Mythology

The word eros as it is found in Homer is not the name of a god but simply a common noun meaning "love" or "desire." In Hesiod's Theogony Eros becomes one of the three primordial gods, the other two being Chaos and Earth. Although Eros has no offspring and seems to play no role in the genealogy of the gods, he has the greatest power over his fellow immortals. He unnerves the limbs and overcomes the reason of both gods and men. When Aphrodite is born from the sperm of Uranus (Heaven), Eros and Himeros (desire, longing, lust) accompany her into the council of the gods. Whether Hesiod was talking in terms of personalized abstractions or was actually thinking of anthropomorphic beings is not clear, for the Theogony is a curious mixture of both kinds of expression. For the history of philosophy, the importance of Hesiod's brief mention of Eros lies in the attribution to him of a power that is the enemy of reason. Something similar is to be found in Sophocles' Antigone in the chorus that is sung just after Creon has announced that Antigone must die for having buried her brother's body. Eros is addressed as the god who has brought about Antigone's tragedy. He is described as unconquerable, destructive, roaming over the sea and among the dwellers of the wilderness. Neither the gods nor ephemeral humankind can escape him; he drives his victims to madness and turns the just to evil. An even stronger denunciation of the god may be found in Euripides' Hippolytus, along with the additional warning that whether one surrenders to love or refuses to capitulate to it, one is doomed. And indeed, Phaedra, whose successors are obviously Vergil's Dido and Racine's Phèdre, became the prototype of a woman ruined by Eros.

Such poetic passages reflect certain observations about human nature and human behavior. They point to a struggle within man's psyche between a rational, controllable, prudent, and wise agent and an irrational, uncontrollable, mad, and foolish agent. When the former is in control, man will behave in praiseworthy fashion, but when the latter gains the upper hand, he will act like a beast. He will abandon reason that, according to most of the ancients, alone distinguishes him from the beasts. Although man also has an animal nature, to yield to its demands is to betray his essential nature. The notion that Eros might reinforce the human element in man does not appear in the pre-Platonic writers.

Early Philosophic Reflections

The Greeks admitted several forms of love, including heterosexual and homosexual passion; parental, filial, and conjugal affection; fraternal feeling; friendship; love of country; and the love of wisdom. All were associated with either Eros or Philia (fondness or friendship). Love was believed to be a power capable of uniting people in a common bond. And since not only people but also animals and the elements were thus united, it was appropriate to conceive of this power as lodged in a single agent that governed the whole cosmos. According to Parmenides, Love was created by the goddess Necessity, and in the writing of Empedocles, love emerges as one of the two universal forces (the other being strife) that explain the course of cosmic history. These two agents—the one of union, the other of decomposition—are not simply names for the fact that composition and decomposition occur; on the contrary, love and strife are not resident in things but are external to them and act upon them. According to Empedocles, the cosmos, so to speak, is held in tension between the forces of harmony and disunion. Were the two forces to be synchronously present, the world would clearly be in a state of disorder. Hence, Empedocles introduced the idea of cycles into his philosophy, as well as the concept of world history as an alternation of the reigns of Love and Strife. When Love is in control, the elements form compounds out of which arise more complex units and, eventually, animate beings. In the primitive period of the cycle, men worship Aphrodite, are innocent of slaughter and, presumably, of war, and are, moreover, vegetarians. "The altar did not reek of the unmixed blood of bulls, but this was the greatest abomination among men, to snatch out the life and eat the goodly limbs" (Fragment 128). But when Strife is dominant, disorganization, the ultimate disaggregation of the elements, and war and all its attendant evils, take the place of the blessings of love. As far as we can tell from the surviving fragments, Empedocles believed that the cyclical process was everlasting.

The attribution of peace and harmony to the goddess Aphrodite (Empedocles' name for love) is clearly a renunciation of the early poets' idea of love. Empedocles' conception of her resembles the alma Venus of Lucretius. Yet she remains the goddess of sexual love, for sexual love has become one example of the universal power of union: It provides the philosopher with empirical evidence of a metaphysical principle.

plato

For a complete expression of a philosophic concept of love, one must turn to Plato's Symposium. Probably no other document in European literature has had as much influence on the philosophy of love. The various speeches that are reported in this dialogue represent points of view with which Plato does not always agree but which he apparently thought important enough to be presented as typical. These speeches range from an encomium of love's effect on morality to a description of its effect on knowledge. Phaedrus likened the passionate attachment between Achilles and Patroclus to the conjugal affection between Alcestis and Admetus. In both cases it is the lover, not the beloved, who has gained virtue through his or her love. In the following speech, by Pausanias, two kinds of love are distinguished, that of the heavenly Aphrodite and that of the earthly Aphrodite, or the love of the soul and the love of the body. The former is more likely to be the love of a young man (not a boy) at the time when his reason begins to develop and his beard begins to grow. In this speech honorable love is clearly the attraction that a man has for a virtuous soul and is fused in the mind of the speaker with philosophy itself, which is the love of wisdom. It is this honorable love that Eryximachus then describes as the source of harmony and the preserver of the good.

The conclusion drawn from these encomiums is that love is in essence the love of beauty and that beauty is nothing material; it is an ideal. But no man desires the ideal until he has been educated through philosophic training. In the final speech, which supposedly reports the philosophy of the seeress Diotima, we find that there is a scale of beauty, progressing from that of bodies through that of forms, thoughts, minds, institutions and laws, the sciences, to absolute or ideal beauty.

Beauty, for Plato, was the one bridge between the two realms of the material and the ideal, particulars and universals. (This appears clearly enough in the Phaedrus ; what the Symposium adds is a discussion of the power that draws men to beauty in its many modes.) The two realms present not simply a duality of kind but also of value, for the ideal and the universal, which are perfect and eternal, are always to be preferred to the material and the particular. Sexual love itself, although lowest on the scale of love, is nevertheless the seed of ideal love, since what attracts a man to the beloved is beauty.

aristotle

Plato's account of love, insofar as it concerns friendship, was amplified by Aristotle in the eighth and ninth books of the Nicomachean Ethics. But Aristotle treated chiefly the ethical and psychological aspects of the matter. He also utilized the metaphor of the attractive power of love in explaining the motion of the planetary spheres, the Unmoved Mover being the beloved and the planetary system the lover. With important differences that will be mentioned below, the Unmoved Mover became a part of the Christian concept of God.

Transition to Christianity

In the Magna Moralia, which was probably composed at least in part by Aristotle, it is written that "It would be strange if one were to say that he loved Zeus.… It is not love towards God of which we are in search … but love towards things with life, that is, where there can be a return of affection." God then is thought to be incapable of returning our love for him, assuming that we can have love for him. In fact, although there are myths in which gods and mortals have been in love with each other, the gods always first disguise themselves as mortals, as Aphrodite did when she fell in love with Anchises, or take on various other forms, which was the habit of Zeus. These myths all deal with sexual intercourse, not with friendship or paternal affection. Omitting the culture heroes, there was no god or goddess in ancient mythology who had any love for humankind. Prometheus is an exception, but he was punished for his help to mortals, and in all probability the historic Greeks thought of him as simply a personification of forethought.

There is no god in classical religion who could be called "our father in heaven." The attitude that Lucretius tried to foster in the minds of his fellow Romans was supposed to be an antidote to their fear of the gods. According to the legends, however, there was good reason to fear them. Ceres and Bacchus may have given men bread and wine, but most of the divinities did little more than take revenge on the human race for the injuries they had received from their fellow gods. In Judaism and Christianity, however, a new relationship to the divinity was established. As early as Deuteronomy 6:5 the commandment was laid down to love God "with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might," a commandment repeated by Jesus (Matthew 22:37) as the first and great commandment, followed by the second, "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself." It will be observed that now love is not seen as a power that destroys man's reason, but rather, as an emotional attitude that can be voluntarily produced. It is praised in the Psalms (for example, 91:14) and also in the First Epistle to the Corinthians and the First Epistle of John (I John 4:16–20). Both epistles cite the power of love to heal discord and fear, and love is represented as a bond between God and man. According to the Gospel of John (3:16), it is because of God's love for the world that redemption is brought to man.

That man could love God, even if he could not love Zeus, had been seen by Philo Judaeus in his Questions on Genesis (XVIII, 16) in which he says that once a man has received a clear impression of God and God's powers, his soul is filled with longing for union with God. Thus, in the First Epistle of John, God is identified with love, "and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God in him" (I John 4:16). This idea was also found in non-Christian theologians of Hellenistic times, for example, in the Hermetica (Asclepius II, Sec. 21), in which all things, including God, are said to be bisexual, a unity that is approximated by men and women in sexual love. This unity is admittedly incomprehensible and what "you might correctly call either Cupid or Venus." But in both Philo and the Hermetica, as in Plotinus and Cleanthes' "Hymn to Zeus," the original stimulus to the love of God is knowledge, not sexual love. In Asclepius (XIII, 9) the love of God is reduced to worship, sacrifice, prayer, and reverence, and these follow upon a knowledge of the divine nature. In Plotinus the union with God, although aided by ascetic practices, is nevertheless the climax of cognition. Since knowledge occurs only between similar beings, to know God is to be like him; since God is unique, one must become absorbed into his being in order to know him. This may seem to be suggested in the verses from the First Epistle of John cited above, but actually in John the love of God, although it unites man and God, is an act of will similar to the love for one's fellow man. It would presumably be made manifest by one's acts and one's faith; it is not the conclusion or fulfillment of a metaphysical system.

Although the Church Fathers came closest to an identification of God with Aristotle's Unmoved Mover and later Christian philosophers gave God the attributes of that ontological principle, there were differences that have too often been obscured. The Unmoved Mover was neither a person nor a creator; he was uniquely able to produce change without being altered himself, and he could thus suffer no emotions whatsoever. The biblical God was the very antithesis of this. But in order to give an analogy of the way in which the Unmoved Mover moves the world, Aristotle took recourse to the metaphor of the beloved who attracts the lover. This, of course, became in time Dante Alighieri's "love which moves that sun and the other stars." For Aristotle, however, the Unmoved Mover could not return the love of the beings who are below him. In Christianity, as in Judaism, it was essential that God love his creatures as they love him, and, as previously mentioned, love seems to have been thought of as subject to volition. According to Plato (to limit the discussion to him), love arose involuntarily at the sight of a beautiful body. A man's erotic education consisted in a denial, after an analysis of the nature of beauty, of the acts that usually follow such a sight. Once that denial became a part of a man's character, he could rise to allegedly nobler beauties until the final goal—the contemplation of absolute beauty completely detached from anything corporeal—was reached.

The early Christians had more confidence in man's will than had their pagan contemporaries. Both love of God and religious faith were thought to be subject to volition. The concept of believing in order to understand, as St. Augustine put it, was based on the assumption that belief was not the effect but the source of understanding. To what extent the early Christian writers were aware of the psychological effect of practicing certain rites, as Pascal later was, is difficult to say. But since great emphasis was put upon ceremonious expressions of devotion and upon the refusal to carry out pagan rites, we can assume that the practices were believed to induce the appropriate emotions. The most famous of such ceremonies was the Christian agape, in which the devout met to share a supper and to rejoice in their common beliefs. The word agape means both love and the object of love, although the pagan satires treated it as if it meant a sexual orgy. The participants in the agape probably thought of it as a ceremony of brotherly love commemorating the Last Supper, although according to the testimony of the Epistle of Jude (12), it was abused at a fairly early date. Whatever its origin and its primitive significance, it is clear that it was supposed to be a ceremony of affection, and it reinforced the friendliness that members of the same religion might be expected to have toward one another. Two emotional factors that seem to have been absent from paganism thus came into prominence in early Christianity—fraternal love as an essential of piety and filial love to a divine father, both of which were reciprocated. These forms of love were strengthened by the persecutions to which the early Christians were subjected—persecutions that bound them together in a special community and led to self-sacrifice in the various forms of martyrdom.

augustine

Of the Church Fathers, it is St. Augustine who gives us the most detailed analysis of love, ranging from his youthful sexual escapades to his final love of God. The famous opening of Book II of the Confessions described his condition as one of utter subservience to the flesh. Just as he was capable of enjoying sin (in his case, petty theft), not for the loot it brought him but for the joy of sinning, so he enjoyed love not for the sake of his beloved, but for the sake of his own self-centered pleasure. He described in vivid terms the loathing that invaded him while satisfying his passion. The death of a dear friend aroused in him a realization of the egocentricity of his passion, and in planning to organize a small group of fellow Christians who would live in charity and share their belongings (a plan that came to nothing), he first approached unselfish love. Through self-knowledge he learned to look upon the eternal light and ultimately came to the complete love of God, which he described in the tenth book of the Confessions. The fruit of this love was knowledge of the divine. Whereas for Plato and Philo cognition led to love, for Augustine it was love that led to cognition. This theme was developed in the twelfth century by such writers as William of Saint Thierry and St. Bernard of Clairvaux.

Middle Ages

The ecstatic loss of self that accompanies sexual love was also assumed to be one of the features of the beatific vision. It is apparent in mystical literature that erotic language is especially effective in communicating mystical experience, and the similarities between religious and sexual ecstasy are manifest in, for example, the Song of Solomon. One should not conclude, however, that the medieval mystics were actually aware of the similarity between the beatific vision and sexual union, for those who are supposed to have made "mystic marriages," like the two St. Catherines, had presumably never had a corporeal marriage. Nonetheless, in mysticism the climax of the love of God was self-annihilation, much as in the Indian mithuna, and although the church never encouraged mystic practices, it had to admit their importance when they led to the immediate knowledge of God.

Thus, love in itself became an object of study, and the casuistry of love was elaborated in textbooks and poems as early as the twelfth century. Most of these writings seem to have taken as their source the De Amore of André le Chapelain which, whether intended to be serious or not, was taken seriously by most of its readers. It would appear to be a manual on seduction and to have only the most remote relevance to love. The time of its publication, however, coincided with the appearance of many commentaries on the Song of Solomon, and its influence on the rituals of the courts of love has been admitted by most medievalists. As the etiquette of the courts of love developed, love became an end in itself and was not necessarily to be gratified by sexual experience. The lover was supposed to serve his lady with no recompense other than the consciousness of his having served her.

One can only guess at how faithfully the precepts of courtly love were carried out, but as a set of ideas they form an important part of European moral philosophy. By elevating women to a position of irrefragable sovereignty over men, the ideals of courtly love became interwoven with the religious ideal of unquestioned loyalty to church and to God. The sovereign woman became identified with the Blessed Virgin to whom were applied many of the epithets of the bride in the Song of Solomon—rose of Sharon, the closed garden, the tower of ivory—phrases whose symbolical meaning had already been elaborated by St. Bernard. In the thirteenth century the question of the relative primacy of God's reason and will was disputed. For those who believed in the primacy of God's will, it followed that obedience rather than understanding was to be given the higher value. This was also true of courtly love and of chivalry as a doctrine.

dante

The culmination of the medieval writing on love is, for modern readers, Dante's Vita nuova. However else this book may be interpreted, it is the story of how love that begins with the sight of a girl's beauty ends with a vision which Dante intimated was to be that of the Divine Comedy. For Dante the Johannine phrase "God is love" was of essential importance in religion. In ending the Divine Comedy with the love that moves the sun and the other stars, he identified his own love and all love with the love that the cosmos has for its Creator. His "new life" was not to be fulfilled in a union with the woman whom he loved but in her guiding him through paradise. Few words occur more frequently in the poems of Dante than "amore." Sometimes he seems to be writing in the vein of courtly love, sometimes in the mystical vein of St. Bernard, but in both cases love is represented as a force that attracts man to a nobler life. Dante does not overlook the sufferings of a man in love; indeed, he emphasizes them. But to suffer because of love appears to be analogous to the sufferings of the martyrs—an abnegation of the self for a value that transcends egoism.

Renaissance Neoplatonism

In Plotinus a distinction was made between three forms of love—love as a god, as a daemon, and as a passion. The first of these was again divided into the celestial and terrestrial Aphrodite. The celestial Aphrodite inspires the love of ideas and is the soul of the intelligible world. The terrestrial Aphrodite presides over marriage and is the soul of the sensible world. Love as a demon is identified with the souls of individual human beings. As a passion it is the love of beauty in temperate men and the love of sexual pleasure in those who dwell exclusively in the material world of ugliness. All love, however, is the love of some degree of beauty. Plotinus adopted the scale of beauties that had been outlined in the Symposium and read into it a hierarchy of being. At the apex stood the One; the "way up" to the One led from the beauty of material objects to that of ideas. In this instance one sees again the fusion of the erotic passion with the ecstasy of the mystic vision. Paradoxically, an experience that is intimately associated with our bodily life was thought of as the one escape from it.

This complex of confused ideas permeated Renaissance Neoplatonism. Philosophers such as Marsilio Ficino and Count Giovanni Pico della Mirandola constantly emphasized the power of love to free the soul from its bodily prison. They took over the theme of the two Venuses, and they assigned separate human faculties to each. They gave different names to the kinds of love—namely, divine, human, and animal.

leone ebreo

The philosophy of love expounded by Ficino and Mirandola was most fully developed by Leone Ebreo (Judah Abrabanel) in his Dialoghi d'amore (1501–1502), a work that circulated extensively not only in Italy but (in translation) through all Europe. Leone tied together the religious, philosophic, and literary traditions into a single network of ideas.

In the Dialogues the two interlocutors are Philo and Sophia, obviously elements of the word philosophia. Philo is the lover, and Sophia is the beloved. The first dialogue distinguishes between love and desire and describes the various forms of love; the second discusses the presence of love in all natural operations, from the synthesis of the four elements to the movements of the planetary spheres; and the third deals with the love of God as the force that holds the universe together. Thus, it is asserted that love is a single principle permeating all things, from the material through the spiritual, and that this principle is the dynamic factor in cosmic change. There is no difference in essence between the attraction the elements have for one another and the forms of love that exist in human beings. The appraisal of the kinds of love is based on the objects of love, and Leone, like most of his contemporaries, thought that wisdom was inherently more valuable than pleasure.

It should be noted that the concept of a single dynamic power, whether it was called love or force or attraction, became more and more widely used as time went on. Its most extreme form was the Sehnsucht ("longing") of some German romantic philosophers, the Streben ("striving") of Johann Gottlieb Fichte, and Novalis's endless and unfulfilled search for the blue flower. One of the characteristics of love, at least in the mind of Leone, is its inability ever to be satisfied. Though Philo in the Dialogues pleads with Sophia to tell him that she responds to his love, she will not do so.

Modern Period

During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the interest in love was largely psychological and was expressed mainly in novels, poems, and maxims. While love of neighbor and God was approved, sexual love was morally more problematic. The ideal of female chastity was still upheld; in English novels, such as those of Samuel Richardson, a man was allowed to love a woman as long as he did not infringe upon her virginity. Whereas André le Chapelain graded sexual relations according to the social ranks of the maiden and her seducer, Richardson put all men and women on the same level in this respect. Thus, love was democratized. Sexual love was not to be condoned unless sanctified by the sacrament of marriage.

In such French novels as Le grand Cyrus by Madeleine de Scudéry, Les liaisons dangereuses by Choderlos de Laclos, and La nouvelle Héloïse by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, one finds more subtle distinctions and analyses. These authors continue the Renaissance casuistry about the different kinds of love and their respective values, but it must be remembered that their psychology of love was developed against the background of Christian moral principles. There is a constant conflict between the fervent religious and moral desire not to satisfy one's longings (described in La nouvelle Héloïse ) and an awareness of the almost unlimited force of the individual's erotic desires (treated in Les liaisons dangereuses ).

spinoza

The Ethics of Benedict de Spinoza was published in Holland in 1677. In this posthumous work, as in earlier publications, Spinoza emphasized man's need of perfection—that is, the fulfillment of both his intellectual and his emotional powers, which indeed were not existentially separate. He maintained that the more adequate an idea, the more it is pleasing, liberating, and intrinsically human. The culmination of the ethical life—that is, the life devoted to freedom of the intellect—is found in the "intellectual love of God." This phrase may have come from Leone Ebreo, but the idea goes back to St. Augustine. Both the Confessions and the Ethics are built on premises that are discovered by the intuitive process. The God of Spinoza is far from being the God of St. Augustine, but the method of finding him in the inner life and becoming aware of his presence is curiously similar. Both philosophers present a similar paradox: One must lose oneself in order to find oneself, but in so doing, one finds that what one has really discovered is God.

other writers

The analysis of love now passes into the hands of psychologists. Comte Destutt de Tracy and the novelist Stendhal both wrote books on love in which they attempted to probe its motivation and its effects upon conduct, but neither attempted to do more than to discuss love as a sexual experience. Destutt de Tracy's De l'amour was not published until 1926, although it may have been known in manuscript form; Stendhal's On Love, however, was published in 1822, and although it had no popular success at the time, it was later widely read. In Germany, on the other hand, such books as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther, Elective Affinities, and, of course, Faust gave a quasi-religious tone to the sexual experience. The impossibility of attaining complete satisfaction led men of this tendency to idealize Don Juan as a perfectionist who seeks a goal that he can never reach, for the ideal is precisely that which ought to be and never is. K. W. F. Schlegel's Lucinde is a perfect example of this interpretation of love as the ever-sought and unrealizable ideal.

schopenhauer

Arthur Schopenhauer was unique in condemning all forms of love on the grounds that they tie one to the will-to-live. But he found this will even in the subanimate world of nature; thus, he was reverting to the ancient tradition of an omnipresent principle and was more interested in the metaphysical status of this principle than in the details of human psychology. Although Schopenhauer's condemnation of love follows from his general metaphysical position, he supplemented this condemnation with an essay, "Metaphysics of the Love of the Sexes," in which he tried to show that poets and novelists had recognized the evil of loving, although they had not formulated the abstract principles that would justify this point of view. Love drives men and women to suicide, madness, and extremes of sacrifice. Pointing out that he has no philosophic precedents to guide him, Schopenhauer flatly declares that all forms of love are rooted in sexuality and that, obviously, the existence of future generations depends upon its gratification. But the sexual instinct can disguise itself in various ways, especially as "objective admiration," although in reality the will-to-live is aiming at the production of a new individual. Because sexual union exists for the benefit of the species, not for the individuals involved in it, marriages should not be made for love but for convenience. Thus, he says, there is guilt in loving, for its culmination is simply the perpetuation of the will-to-live, with all its attendant miseries.

freud

Historically, Schopenhauer's influence on Sigmund Freud is more important than his theory of the will-to-live in itself. Freud renamed the will-to-live the libido and at one time even saw its goal as death. The concept of the death wish paralleled Schopenhauer's emphasis on art and pity as the two ways of escape from life, and it had no great success in psychological circles. The libido as a term for generalized desire, on the other hand, has become part and parcel of the terminology of psychodynamics. Like most philosophic concepts, it has been distorted by both its supporters and its adversaries, but by reintegrating humanity and its strivings into the natural world, it has revived in a new form the kernel of Diotima's speech in the Symposium. Freud, along with most Platonists, would deny this. However, since love in the Symposium is found not only in sexual attraction but also in scientific research and philosophic meditation, there is only a verbal difference between the two philosophies. Freud, to be sure, does not preach the denial of bodily love, but at the same time he never denied the need for self-restraint and self-discipline. Although he may have said that the scientist is dominated by an anal-erotic urge, he did not deprecate science in these terms; rather, he explained what he thought was its general etiology. He also opened the door to a franker discussion of human motivations, and his contribution to ethics can hardly be overestimated. He attempted to show men how to realize the ideal of self-knowledge that philosophers had advocated for centuries without indicating how one might attain it. By pointing out the universality of love in its various forms and suggesting how it becomes deformed and alienated from its natural goals, Freud laid the foundation for an ethics that would be freed from ecclesiastical dogmatism. Although his followers have modified some of his ideas, as was inevitable, they have not denied either the preeminence of the libido as a driving power in human affairs or its ability to mask itself. One cannot overlook Freud's contribution toward giving men the ability to understand both one another and themselves—a type of understanding that had been preached over the centuries but always on the assumption that human nature could be observed in conscious behavior.

As is always the case in intellectual history, ancient beliefs survive and take on new forms. This is as true of the history of the idea of love as it is of other ideas. It is obvious that although no one believes any longer in the myth of the two Aphrodites as anthropomorphic deities each of whom is accompanied by a special Eros, the distinction between the two still persists as the contrast between carnal and spiritual love. The First Epistle of John and the Gospel of John have been by no means discarded in the Occident, nor has the commandment to love God and one's neighbor been forgotten. Caritas as both brotherly love and charity is still preached, if not practiced, and the Neoplatonic notion that through love we shall have harmony and through harmony, peace, is as potent a force in social education as it has ever been. Philosophy sometimes takes as its goal the rationalization of common sense, or at least of widely held beliefs, and according to the available evidence, no one has ever maintained that the whole duty of man consists in hating, provoking disorder, and disobeying what are at various times called the laws of God or of nature. Philosophers writing on love have attempted in numerous ways, first, to describe the unique part it plays in human life; second, to seek its similarity to other impulses; third, to appraise the ends that it wishes to achieve; and finally, to work out a systematic account of all these distinctions and put them into a logical network of ideas.

Bibliography

primary sources

Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics. Translated by W. D. Ross. Oxford, 1925. Books 7–8.

Augustine. Confessions. Translated by E. B. Pusey. London, 1907. Book 1, Ch. 12; Book II, Chs. 1 and 6; Book III, Ch. 1; Book IV, Ch. 6; Book VI, Ch. 14; Book VII, Ch. 10; Book VIII, Ch. 2; Book X, Ch. 7.

Bernard. De Diligendo Deo ; Sermon, In Cantica Canticorum. In Patrologia Latina, edited by J. P. Migne. Paris, 1844–1864. Vols. 182–183, respectively.

Chapelain, André le. De Amore. Edited by E. Trojel. Havniae, 1892.

Cleanthes. Hymn to Zeus. Translated by George Boas in Rationalism in Greek Philosophy. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1961. P. 251.

Dante. Divine Comedy. Translated by H. F. Carey, 2nd ed. London, 1819.

Dante. Il convivio. Translated by P. H. Wicksteed as The Convivio of Dante Alighieri. London: Dent, 1903.

Dante. Vita nuova. Translated by Dante Gabriel Rossetti as The New Life of Dante Alighieri. London, 1901.

Empedocles. Fragments 115, 128, 130. In Early Greek Philosophy, by J. Burnet, 3rd ed. London, 1920; New York, 1957.

Euripides. Hippolytus.

Freud, Sigmund. A General Introduction to Psycho-Analysis. Translated by Joan Riviere. Garden City, NY, 1943.

Freud, Sigmund. Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex and Totem and Taboo. In The Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud. New York: Random House, 1938.

Hermetica (Asclepius II, 21). Edited by A. D. Nock and A. J. Festugière. Paris, 1960. Vol. II.

Laclos, Choderlos de. Les liaisons dangereuses. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1961.

Leone Ebreo. The Philosophy of Love. Translated by F. Friedberg-Seelye and Jean H. Barnes. London: Soncino Press, 1937.

Lucretius. De Rerum Natura, Book I, 1–49. In The Stoic and Epicurean Philosophers, by W. J. Oates. New York: Modern Library, 1957.

Plato. Symposium. In Plato: Dialogues, edited by B. Jowett, 4th rev. ed. Oxford, 1953.

Pseudo-Aristotle. Magna Moralia. Translated by St. George Stock. Oxford, 1915. 1208 b, 31.

Schopenhauer, Arthur. The World as Will and Idea. Translated by R. B. Haldane and J. Kemp, 6th ed. London, 1907. See especially Vol. III, Ch. 44, "Supplements to the Fourth Book." London, 1909.

Spinoza, Benedict de. Ethics, Part 5. In The Chief Works of Spinoza, translated by R. H. M. Elwes, 2 vols. New York, 1955.