Philosophy of Love and Sex

The Bible and St. Thomas Aquinas on Love

0. Group assignment: For next Wednesday.  Choose a popular magazine and look at its attitude towards romantic relationships.  What does it see romantic relationships as being for?  What are their ingredients?  What do they lead to?  What leads to them?  What do love and sex have to do with romantic relationships?  Make some comparison with the relationship in Tristan and Iseult.  To make for groups, email me by tomorrow afternoon which magazine you’d like to work on (feel free to include a second choice).  I’ll then assign groups.  If you don’t email me a magazine name, I’ll assign you myself to something.  I may reassign people if some magazine has too many.

1. Christianity is often said to be a “religion of love”.  What does this mean?

• The New Testament makes a bold claim.  The sum total of morality is love of God and neighbor.  Just before Jesus tells the story of the good Samaritan, he is asked what is needed for entering heaven.  He turns the question on the questioner who responds by quoting two Old Testament texts, one of which says to love God with all one’s being and the other says to love your neighbor as yourself.  Jesus agrees that this is indeed sufficient.  (Luke 10.)  Saint Paul summarizes this as follows: “Love does no evil to a neighbor; therefore love is the fulfilling of the law.”  (Romans 13:10.)
• So one sense of Christianity being a religion of love is that it claims that the whole of morality is summarized by love.  All the specific moral rules that Christianity offers—Honor thy father and thy mother; thou shalt not murder; thou shalt not commit adultery; thou shalt not steal; thou shalt not bear false witness; etc.—are supposed follow from the commandment of love.  These other commandments are commentary.
• There is another sense of Christianity being a religion of love.  Christianity holds that God saw our failures to love, our sinfulness, and God loved us so much that He became a human being, Jesus Christ, who suffered and died for our failure to love, so that by being united to his suffering and death we might die to our failure to love, and be raised up to love, both in this life and the next.  Furthermore, God himself is Love, and eternal love between the Three Persons of the Trinity.  Thus, Christianity is a religion of love in two ways: It commands love to us, and it tells of God’s love for us.

2. Famously, the story is told that Rabbi Hillel—a pre-Christian figure crucially important for the development of Judaism—was asked to explain the Old Testament Law while standing on one foot.  He said: “Do not do to others what you would not have them do to you.  The rest is commentary.”  This is frequently quoted.  But this is not the end of the story.  Hillel next says: “Now go and study.”  The point is that the commentary is important.  Even if all the other commandments follow from this one, we need to study the other commandments.  Why?  Well, imagine someone who says: “It’s enough that I know the seven axioms of geometry.  Everything else can be proved from these axioms.  Why do I need to remember Pythagoras’s theorem?”  This would be ridiculous.  First, the consequences of the axioms—what can be proved—are important.  Second, we only really understand the axioms by understanding the consequences.

• John puts this as follows: “By this we know that we love the children of God, when we love God and obey his commandments.  For this is the love of God, that we keep his commandments.  And his commandments are not burdensome.” (1 John 5:2).  It’s not always obvious what actions are loving and what actions are not.  John proposes a test: Are the actions in accordance with God’s more specific commandments?  If they are, then they are loving.  If not, not.  So, the role of God’s more specific commandments for us, according to John, is to explain to us what love is and how to love.
• Some people complain that Christianity started out as a religion of love but has added a lot of rules.  But we know from the difficulties of pinning down what love is that you need an explanation of what love is, and various rules do help to explain what love is. 
• St. Augustine’s maxim, “Love and do what you will”, then has a catch.  True, if you love, whatever you do is right.  But according to Saint John, to know that you are indeed loving someone, you have to check that your actions are in accord with the specific commandments, which are the commentary on the commandments of love of God and neighbor.  In Graham Greene’s The Heart of the Matter, Major Scoby thinks he is loving both his wife and his mistress because he is trying to make both of them happy.  According to John, the Major is deceived or deceiving himself: His adultery, being a violation of God’s commandments, is a sign that there is someone he doesn’t love or love enough—presumably his wife and God, but perhaps also his mistress since if he loved her, he would not tie her down to a married man like himself.

3. But the Bible does not limit itself to explaining what love is by giving various moral commandments that follow from the commandments of love.

• Jesus is asked who counts as the “neighbor” in the commandment to love one’s neighbor as oneself.  Here we get the famous story of the good Samaritan and learn that we should be a neighbor to any person in need that we come in contact with.  Our love must be universal.  But we also get an illustration of what love consists in.  The Samaritan gives significant time and energy to a stranger without any hope of repayment.  “Which of these three, do you think, proved neighbor to the man who fell among the robbers?” – “The one who did the act of mercy for him.”
• Other illustrations: “Greater love than this has no man, to give up his life for his friend.”
• Love in the New Testament is closely tied to specific actions rather than to states of mind or heart.  Recall Kierkegaard’s remark that the love of Jesus is not some particularly fervent feeling.  Rather, love is a product of the will, something one does rather than something that happens to one.  The New Testament does not talk about falling in love, but about loving in the context of specific actions.  Love is not a state but a deed—even the grammar sometimes indicates this (e.g., at John 3:16—“For God so loved the world that he sent his only-begotten Son”—the word translated “loved” indicates a specific isolated act through the use of the aorist tense).  Love, thus, is always closely connected to doing good things to people.
• The Bible does not make distinctions between different forms of love.  It uses the same terminology, agape and philia, interchangeably for love.  Thus, basically, the same thing is supposed to be behind every relationship, whether between husband and wife, parents and children, God and human beings, or people and their enemies: love.   In fact, the Greek translation of the Song of Songs uses agape to indicate what is clearly an erotic love.

4. There are also claims made that you love your neighbor if and only if you love God.  How are we to take this?  Is it that an atheist cannot love anybody?

• There are two ways of taking this.  One can take this as saying that you just can’t have the right kind of unconditional self-sacrificing love for God’s creatures unless you love God.  Or one can take it as saying that if you do have the right kind of love for God’s creatures, then you do count as loving God, even if you do not actually know about God.  You count as loving God because you are grateful for what he has made, even if you do not know that it is to him that you are grateful.  You also count as loving God because you are obeying his commandment to love—even if you do not know you are obeying it.

5. Thomas Aquinas.  13th century philosopher and theologian, who took himself to be a follower of Aristotle, but in fact created an original Christian philosophy. 

• Thomas distinguishes love of concupiscence or of desire from love of friendship.  Suppose I want Bob to get some good thing, e.g., ice cream.  I then have a love of friendship for Bob and a love of desire or concupiscence for the ice cream.  Thomas thus distinguishes two ways of loving something: loving it simply through wanting good things to happen to it, and loving good things relatively, i.e., through wanting them to happen to someone (often, but not always, oneself).  Take the lustful man that C. S. Lewis talked about, the one who just wants sexual pleasure.  This man has a love of concupiscence for sexual pleasure. 
• Whom does he have a love of friendship for?  It is not the woman on Thomas’s account.  For he does not will any good to that woman—he only wants something from her.  The lustful man, rather, has a love of friendship for himself alone.  He has a love of desire for the sexual pleasure. 
• This raises a puzzle.  What kind of love can we have for God?  If love requires doing good to someone, how can we do good to God?  Doesn’t God already have everything?  So is our love for God a love of concupiscence only, a Need-Love, as C. S. Lewis would put it?

• But Thomas can say that while we cannot directly benefit God, we can glorify him and work so that his plans, his way of arranging the universe, are promoted.  There is a sense in which if Bob loves Jennifer, and I do good things for Jennifer, I also do good things for Bob.  Since God loves everything he has created, by doing good for other people, one is in a sense benefiting God.  This may be one reason why according to the Bible if one loves one’s neighbor one loves God.

6. What is love?  Thomas writes in a very dry and technical style.  But what may be surprising is how he uses this dry and technical style to analyze such emotionally charged things as the union between the lover and the beloved, the mutual indwelling, the zeal of the lover on behalf of the beloved, and even the ecstasy of love.

• Aquinas sometimes talks as if to love something is just to will good to it, but he argues that this is not exactly right.  Goodwill is a large part of love, but there is more to love, or at least to charity.  Goodwill can come by all of a sudden—as when watching a boxing match one has a sudden wish to have one side win—while love comes “of an earnest consideration of the object loved.”  Love recognizes the good of the object loved, and to recognize this good, one has to take time, to observe the object to be loved.  We see here that love requires knowledge: love is not blind. 
• How to reconcile this with the fact that Thomas no doubt thinks we should always love our neighbor?  Well, we have already considered all human beings to some extent, and know they are all created by God.  We love other human beings in general, being ready to put this love into particular action in the case of particular people who might come our way.
• The difference between love and goodwill is that if I love something, I yearn for union with it.  In love, (1) I appreciate the value of something, (2) respond to this value by wishing well to the beloved, and (3) become united with the valued beloved. 

7. What is union between the lover and the beloved?

• Thomas distinguishes two forms of union.  One he calls real union and the other he calls formal union. 
• Real union is an actual union that love impels one to, for instance union through spending time in each other’s physical presence.  Love can exist without real union—one might love someone who is in a foreign country and with whom one will have no contact. 
• Formal union is not just caused by love: rather, “love itself is this union or bond”.  Formal union involves union of affections: one’s will and emotions treat the other person as oneself, through doing good things to the other person as to an “other self”, as Thomas says quoting Aristotle, at least in the case of love of friendship.  (In love of concupiscence things are a little bit more complicated.)
• Thomas sees the union of affection as coming from a union of apprehension or understanding.  So in love of friendship I first intellectually recognize the value of, say, a person.  This is a union of apprehension: the beloved enters my mind, as it were, and so we are united in my intellect.  My will then gets going—understanding this person, I will good things to the beloved, treating the beloved as myself, since I see what benefits her as a genuine good.  In this, I treat the beloved as if she were in me—if she were a part of me, I certainly would do good to her.  Thus, the beloved is in a sense in me.  But at the same time I am in the beloved.  Because I love the beloved, and treat her as another self, when good or bad things happen to the beloved, it is as if they happened to me—it is as if I were in the beloved and received these good or bad things myself.  Hence, there is a union and a mutual indwelling of lover and beloved.
• And this is particularly true if the love is reciprocated.
• Finally, love produces ecstasy.  Ek-stasis just means: standing-outside (oneself).  There is a two-fold ecstasy, related to intellect (“apprehensive power”) and will (“appetitive power”), Thomas says.  We are placed outside our normal knowledge through love—we think about the beloved to the exclusion of other things.  This is the intellectual ecstasy.  And we are placed outside our normal affections: instead of just treating ourselves as ourselves, we treat someone else as ourselves.

8. Now one special kind of love is charity.  This is a supernatural love for God.  While there is some love for God that we can manage on our own, the fullest love for God requires “infusion”—i.e., it requires God to put it, infuse it, in us.  Even though God is perfectly lovable, it is hard to love him, because our affections incline “towards visible goods”.  To love God above all things we need his aid.

· Charity does not stick to loving God.  Because God created and loves various creatures, charity extends to all of them—if we love God, we will love everything he has made and loved.

· In particular, we will love our enemies and do good to all.  That does not mean that we can’t protect society from them.  (Here’s a thought: Suppose I stop a murderer from committing a crime by bashing him on the head.  I have actually done something good for the murderer.  For it is better for a person to be bashed on the head than to become a murderer.  Think about it: What would you prefer, to have someone’s life on your conscience for your whole life, or to be bashed on the head?  Of course, the murderer does not know what is good for him!)

· Nonetheless, we are supposed to love more the people closer to us.  That is how things are set up by nature: things in nature are designed to have greater effects on things close to them.  God doesn’t destroy nature when he gives people the grace of charity: he builds on nature.  Thus, the natural preference for friends and family remains.

· Sometimes, Thomas notes, we do need to neglect our family to help strangers.  (The Samaritan may have been heading home to his family.)  This will be if the stranger’s need is more urgent.  Where to draw the line?  Thomas says that this is something for which we cannot give any general rule.  The “prudent man”, i.e., the virtuous person, needs to make the judgment on a case-by-case basis.  So, yes, in some cases there are no rules.  Love and do what you will.

· Charity is above all love of God, a desire for real union with him for eternity.  Thomas thinks we cannot be completely happy apart from God.  How do we achieve this?  Thomas thinks there are three stages in charity:

o Beginners cast off their sins.  Avoiding sin is the first stage.

o Only after one has cast off one’s sins (or, perhaps, one’s most blatant sins?), can one make real progress.  (Can someone who torments rabbits in her spare time get to be a charitable person by doing good deeds, without first getting rid of her sin?)  This involves doing good.

o Finally, one desires union with God and acts all the time for the sake of that union.  Here, Thomas is thinking, no doubt, of mystical prayer.