Movement of being toward another. If intelligence is the sense of being, love is the sense of otherness, just as hearing is the sense of sound or sight the sense of the visible. This movement is a renunciation of oneself for the sake of the other. The movement toward a “horizontal” other (the neighbor, including the enemy) proceeds from the movement toward the “Vertical” Other (God).
Love is not merely an emotion or a feeling, but the most essential dynamic of being-in-relation: it reveals that existence is not closure but openness. Through it, the creature tears itself away from self-centering in order to give itself to another, thus participating in the very structure of reality, which is communion. This impulse requires an exodus from oneself, a kenosis — an emptied space where the presence of the other may appear.
Pure love does not seek to possess, but to let the other be. It does not confuse union with fusion, nor benevolence with weakness: it is the power of relation, the light of giving, the energy of mutual recognition. Thus, human love — whether friendly, conjugal, or universal — is fully true only when rooted in the Absolute Love from which it proceeds and which it mirrors: the love of the Divine for the world and of the created being for its Source.
One may say that love is the operative form of knowledge: it knows by uniting and unites by illuminating. Love is intelligence made alive — intelligence consenting to transcend itself in participation.
For further reading: Plato, Symposium; Dionysius the Areopagite, On the Divine Names, IV; Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 26–28; Jean Borella, The Profaned Charity; Maximus the Confessor, Ambigua; Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace; Bruno Bérard, Metaphysics for Everyone (Angelico Press) — English edition of Métaphysique pour tous (Paris, L’Harmattan, 2021; also translated into Italian, Spanish and German).