Valentine's Day: Discovering the Meaning of Love

               We are a people who are infatuated with love. We love everything about love…whatever those things might be. We write and sing love songs. We devour romantic comedies and stories. We even have a national holiday, which is in essence, a celebration of love. It is safe to say, we are in love with the idea of being in love. It is much less safe to say that we have any idea what we mean when we use, over-use, and abuse this all important four letter word.

               Some 2,500 years ago (It would be so symmetrical if it had been on February 14^th) in ancient Greece, the world witnessed what would be the epic precursor to all Lifetime movie marathons. In one of the greatest pieces of historic literature ever penned, Plato tells the story of a great dinner party. This was more than just an average party; it was a grandiose celebration of love! It was a festival, a feast, a Symposium that gave the great minds of the day a chance to individually honor what mankind loves so much: namely, Love.

The keynote speaker was Socrates of Athens, and the raucous room fell silent as he stood to give his address. It may do us good, especially at this time of year, to follow suit and quiet ourselves so as to hear afresh the words of a man who truly sought to understand what it means to LOVE.

Socrates begins in a way which was almost unimaginable given his place in time. He asserts that the entirety of what he knows of love he has learned from a woman, Diotima. As most men can attest, Socrates was surely on the mark in realizing that the fairer sex is much to be thanked for helping us to understand what love truly is. In this regard a debt of gratitude must be paid to my beautiful wife J.

Socrates goes on to prove that Love must always be the lover of something rather than of nothing. Just as a father must always be the father of someone. If a father was the father of no one, he would not be a father at all. This may seem innocuous enough, but the ramifications of such a truth are far-reaching.

Socrates then asks if Love longs for what it is in love with. The answer to which is clearly yes. But we only long for things that we do not already have. So is it true that once we have the thing or the one we love that we no longer love it or them? Certainly not. Once we have the thing we love, love consists in desiring, in scrapping and crawling, in battling to secure that thing to ourselves forever! This is why marriage is one of the only true expressions of love. It is an open commitment and acceptance of what love is: a securing of something to ourselves forever. This securing to ourselves of something can only be considered love depending on the thing that is secured, but more on that latter.

So we have two points so far:

1.)    Love must always be the love of something

2.)    That thing is something that we lack

 

            The other dinner guests had previously asserted that the actions of the gods were governed by a love of beauty. But if love must be the love of something that it lacks, then love CAN NOT be beautiful! But we would not call love ugly, would we?

Goodness however, is certainly beautiful, but that means that love CAN NOT be good!

             So love is neither beautiful nor good. Would we dare call it ugly and bad?

             God is certainly both beautiful and good. So love CAN NOT be divine!

          So if love is not divine, can we say that it is human? Socrates would, and did, say, certainly not! Love is something that intercedes between the finite and the infinite. Love connects man with the divine. Love is a longing for the beautiful and the good which are eternal and divine.

          But this begs the question: Why do we long for the beautiful and the good? We do so because what is ACTUALLY GOOD and ACTUALLY BEAUTIFUL (see my essay “Fatherly Love”) will make us happy!

           Love then, in essence, is a longing for happiness. Love is a longing for every kind of happiness. The type happiness signified by teddy bears, chocolates, roses and hearts is just one small aspect of TRUE LOVE. When one makes you dinner, cleans your clothes, watches what you want on TV, reads with you, joins you in your favorite activities, THIS IS LOVE, as it is a desire to make you happy! Once again I am indebted to my wife for her unceasing display of daily love.

           As much as Hallmark may have skewed our sensibilities, love IS NOT a searching for our “other half.” Love is a perpetual searching and longing for the Good. Love is wanting the Good and wanting to secure it forever!

         Since goodness is divine, love is our ticket to the divine. It is our gateway. Once again we see the power of love as expressed in marriage. Love’s longing to secure the good forever, is always thwarted by death, yet through procreation, the ultimate expression of human love, death is put at bay (at least temporarily). The birth of a child symbolically defeats death as love has expelled death and momentarily brought a glimpse of immortality to the beloved.

        Death must always be central to a rigorous conception of love. That is why the ultimate demonstration of love was God laying down his life for man. But why? So that man, through this love, can have the good secured to himself FOREVER!

       Because this is the culmination of love, all acts of earthly love are miniature crucifixions. Every act of love is a sign to the world of the fact that God, in Christ, has reconciled the world to himself in absolute, unadulterated love! Any supposed act of “love” is no such thing if it fails to recognize this central truth (“And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, but have not love, it profits me nothing.”- 1 Corinthians 13:3).

       The one that you love, the one that loves you, in their love, is a daily reminder of the cross, and that is something worth celebrating.

I love you Julia.