Metaphysics of Love

Introduction   

Love is an overused theme in many forms: poetry, novels, essays, short stories, treatises… not forgetting the visual arts (visual arts, photography), the sound arts (noise, music) or the “mixed” arts (film, theater, dance). In the written word, there is no field of science where love is absent: sexology, psychology, sociology, philosophy, metaphysics, theology… This is because love unfolds according to the human tripartition: body, psyche, spirit.

Of course, it can be reduced to the body (the physiological act, as in pornography), reduced to feelings (platonic love, the impossible loves of novels, pathological passions) or mystically transcended in divine eros (monks, nuns), but it can also unite the human body-soul-spirit tripartition, in which the spouses, in a single common movement, combine the act of love, the feeling of love given and received, as well as that prayer which places all love in God. There is no hierarchy between this summit of two and the individual summit of Christ’s mystical spouse: both, from the innermost depths of the person, rise to God through the grace of the Spirit.

Alongside these examples, which, while not experienced by everyone, are widespread and implicitly serve as a reference for all, we have to agree that love, even beyond fashions (such as courtly love or the fin’amor of the Middle Ages), seems universally – everywhere and at all times – to be considered the supreme value, the “Grail”, an absolute which, as such, is necessarily in God.

Love in God

In Christianity.

Love is metaphysically deduced in God, as the necessary principle and original source of the simple possibility of love in existence. With Plato, the Good “still exceeds being in dignity and power”, it is “beyond essence” (Republic, VI, 509 Β) and Christian theology will very specifically identify God and Love (“God is love”, will say S. Jean in 1 Jn IV, 8), which sums up the essence of Christianity¹. To clarify this Love, we might say, following the Platonic, Dionysian, Thomasian traditions… that “the Good is diffusive of Itself” (Bonum est diffusivum sui): it is in the nature of Love to give itself.

• “God is not only pure Good, or pure Will, but pure Love;
• “It doesn’t presuppose goodness, but gives it, creates it in things;
• “The divine will that brings creatures into being is always absolutely gratuitous; nothing is presupposed for it”; It’s a “free love”. “God, who is the cause of everything, loves everything because of the superabundance of his Goodness”;
• “It is out of love for his Goodness, in fact, that he wished to diffuse it and communicate it to others as far as possible, that is, by giving (creatures) to resemble him; this is why his Goodness did not remain in him alone, but spread throughout the world”.²

In other religions.

It would seem that Christianity has here “turned the tables” on Judaism, in which it is not so much God who loves (“He loved us first”, says the New Testament: 1 Jn IV, 19), as the essential law is to love the Lord “with all one’s heart, with all one’s soul and with all one’s strength” (Dt VI, 5)³, as well as one’s neighbor. It is even the practice of Tsedaka, a duty of charity, that will cause and manifest his love for God and his neighbor.

In Islam, God is “the most merciful of the merciful”; “merciful in essence” (ar-Rahmān, “the radiant of love”, 55^e sura) and “merciful in deed” (ar-Rahīm). The RHM root refers to the maternal womb: “God is the womb of the universe, and loves His creatures with a matrix love”⁴ and rah mah can be translated as charity, love, clemency, benevolence, generosity… However, it would seem here that “God loves those who do good” and not “the transgressors, the infidels, the insolent and the full of glory, the traitor and the sinner, the scandal-mongers, the unbelieving sinners, the unjust, those who profess evil, the boastful and the proud”… so that “with the exception of one verse, God’s love is always the reward for a virtuous attitude or faith”. God doesn’t take the risk of loving without being loved in return, al-Ġazzālī (1058-1111) will say⁵.

In Hinduism, we find, among five mārga (paths), bhakti yoga, the path of love of God, devotion, worship⁶ and “when a man attains it, he loves all beings”⁷. However, it seems that love of God is only one response to this devotion. Nevertheless, this path echoes, in a striking way, a saying of Christ:

• He who sees Me everywhere, and sees all things in Me, that one I never abandon, and he never abandons Me. He who, having fixed himself in unity, worships Me, Who dwells in all beings, that yogin dwells in Me (Bhagavad-Gītā VI, 30-31) ;
• May they all be one, just as you, Father, are in me and I am in you, so that they too may be one in us (Jn XVII, 21).

In the Buddhism (mahāyāna and vajrayāna) of the first centuries of the first millennium, Love is one of the four qualities of being, one of the “Four Infinites” or “Four Incommensurables” (love, compassion, joy and equanimity), and compassion or love takes precedence over asceticism. Ancient Buddhism (hīnayāna), on the other hand, favored asceticism and detachment.

In Taoism, with a dào (the Way; dàojiào = “teaching of the way”) about which nothing can be said, we find nothing about God or love (apart from the sexual Tao). In the words of Marcel Granet (1884-1940), we’re dealing with a kind of “naturalist quietism”. There are priests, but no Church; a real metaphysics, but a religion with no real transcendence; a prospect of immortality (or even longevity), but no resurrection, no meta-cosmological life.

We can only conclude that the original, positive and universal contribution of Christianity lies in the identity of Love and God. God is, by nature and in essence, Love.

In the Trinity.

As we know, the three divine Persons are pure Relations, otherwise we would no longer have “one God” (Credo). Indeed, to say that the Father is father is not to attribute a particular essence to him, but to recognize the pure relationship of paternity. Likewise, the Son is purely a relationship of filiation, and the Spirit purely a relationship of Love. Here, the Trinity teaches us that relationships (paternity, filiation) are Persons (Father, Son) and, conversely, that a relationship (Love) is a Person (the Holy Spirit). Relatio et Persona convertuntur: in God, relationships and persons are converted. We’ll call these relationships subsistent, since they exist in an autonomous way, otherwise there’d be no one!

What we understand about these relationships is that they are total gifts, of which Love is the essence:

Nothing counts in the eyes of the Father but the Son, who is equal to him in everything; without him, the Father is nothing, he exists as Father, and as God, only because he begets the Son to whom he gives all that he is, divine Nature and divine Essence. Thus, the divine Essence consists in this total gift; the Father exists only because he gives himself in totality.

Conversely, the Word knows himself in the Father and exists, as Son and as God, only insofar as he is begotten by the Father. He is the divine Essence only because he receives it from the Father; it is the same Essence given by the one and received by the other. But, in turn, the Son only constitutes himself by giving back all that he has received; he can only receive the divine Essence if he gives it to the Father.

The mutual exchange of divine Essence between Father and Son, this total and perfect gift of free will, constitutes the reciprocal Love of Father and Son. But this mutual Love, which proceeds from the will of total self-giving, must itself, in order to exist, be totally self-given. The gift of the common Love between Father and Son is then expressed in the necessary third Person, the Holy Spirit, as Love and Essence, as the substantial and essential bond that unites Father and Son in the unity of the same Love.⁸

Love in divinis is the relationship par excellence, the absolute Relationship, in which we give ourselves entirely to the other. In its Trinitarian summit, identity and otherness are transcended, so that only this pure relationship, this pure love, exists.

Love in the Creation

Love, diffusive and oblative, naturally presides over Creation. Love is creator; it freely gives itself into things by creating them, in the “superabundance of its Goodness”. This goes so far as to make creatures resemble Him (“Whatever proceeds from God resembles God, just as the effects of the first cause can resemble Him”⁹).

And if the Father creates the world through the Son, where does He create it? In the Holy Spirit: “in Spiritu Sancto“! These are “the two hands of God”, as Saint Irenaeus would say (Contra Haereses IV, praefatio, P.G., t.VII, col. 975 B).

God casts His divine Charity before Himself and creates the exteriority in which He projects creatures. But because this exteriority is God’s charity and love, it brings everything back to Him, being nothing other than the mode by which God comes to Himself from His own Beyond.¹⁰

The mystery of creation is better understood in this light of the mystery of the Trinity¹¹ and anticipates yet another mystery, when the Son, the Word of creation, is also Christ in the mystery of the Incarnation-Redemption, a mystery itself linked to that of the virginal Conception and the Immaculate Conception¹². – all the mysteries of Christianity refer to one another.

It is Love that gives being to things, that gives being to beings. Being is thus never strictly entitative, it is first and foremost relational. Man is first and foremost in relation to God, and it is in this that he enters into a relationship of solidarity with all other beings (his human brothers and, indeed, all other beings, be they sister the moon or brother the wolf, to follow St. Francis of Assisi), God being immanent in every being. “The Spirit is the Spirit of the Father and of the Son, and ours”, as St. Augustine put it (De Trinitate V, 14).

Thus, the creature is a receiver; everything is always received: being, freedom, love (“What do you have that you have not received?”; 1 Co IV, 7; Jn III, 27). Freedom and love form an inseparable couple, both in God’s gift and in the human response. On the other hand, we know the perverse and pathological forms of unfree love.

Love in the Incarnation-Redemption

God’s love is boundless, even for this world to which he sends his Son (“For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life” (Jn III, 16)). It was the freedom given that made the Fall possible, and it was the Incarnation that made the Redemption possible: the renewal of Love’s offer in freedom, always preserved.

The great particularity of the first two commandments, as taught by Christ, is that they deal with Love and, moreover, are said to be similar by Christ Himself, in response to Matthew asking which is the greatest commandment:

Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. And here is the second, which is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself… The whole law and the prophets depend on these two commandments (Mt XXII, 37-40).

Stemming from this teaching, we then understand S. Augustine saying: “Love, and do what you will”¹³); the other commandments flow from it!

Above all, we understand that it’s not a matter of God and self, but that there is a solidarity between all men, and it’s Christ who makes the link between all men and between man and God. Present in every human being since his resurrection by the grace of the Holy Spirit, he is the divine “hologram”¹⁴, who is “all in all” (Col III, 11), for “You are the body of Christ, and members of it, each for his own part” (1 Co XII, 27).

Love in human life

God, the neighbor, ourselves.

The love we have to bear must therefore be total: for God, towards ourselves and towards our neighbor. If love for God is self-evident: He gave us being and “He loved us first” (1 Jn IV, 19), what about the other two?

The neighbor to be loved is not only the nearest. From near to near, the neighbor is every brother or sister on earth; thus, a Mother Teresa will leave Albania for Calcutta. It’s certainly not a question of having an emotional or sentimental love for everyone (feelings don’t respond to orders), all the more so as the neighbor may very well be an enemy (“Love your enemies”, Mt V, 44). So, when a Jew asks Jesus: “Who is my neighbor? Jesus, through the parable of the Good Samaritan, means that the neighbor is also the stranger, the enemy, regardless of religion (cf. Lk X, 29-37), hence Christ’s call to love enemies: “Love your enemies and do good to those who hate you. Bless those who curse you, pray for those who defame you”. (Lk VI, 27-28). The point is to love them as God loves (however we may understand it), hence the ultimate injunction: “Be perfect, then, as your Father is perfect”.

As for loving oneself, it’s difficult for some. All you have to do is cling to your essential dignity: to be part of God’s creation and to be saved by Christ, in the grace of the Holy Spirit.

Prayer:

My goodness, I’m nothing, I’m worthless, I deserve nothing;

My only dignity, It’s being received from God, By the Son, In the Holy Spirit.

Four paths to love.

There are at least four paths to love in Christianity. These are the two traditional paths of husband and monk, the latter realized in an eremitical or cenobitic way, and to which we must add that of dedication to many others, such as the path followed by a Mother Theresa or by many others.

All these paths involve asceticism and charity to varying degrees.

In particular, we’ll be looking at the potential of the act of love in a couple, a unique case where it’s possible to share body, soul and spirit.

We’re not going to follow Kant – who died a virgin – when he says that it’s a matter of establishing a contract for the use of another’s body ¹⁵, nor Tolstoy – affected by the sexual misery of his milieu and his time – claiming that “love is something ideal, something noble, whereas in practice love is something sordid that degrades us to the rank of pigs”¹⁶, nor Henri Barbusse writing: “then, twisting their necks, they avert their eyes in that moment when they make the most use of each other“¹⁷.

Of course, whether each lover is simultaneously working for the pleasure of the other, or each is using the other for his or her own pleasure, the result may seem identical. But it’s the intention that makes all the difference. :

We must not consider what a man does, but the spirit, the intention in which he acts […] Such is the power of charity! See that it alone can make distinctions; see that it alone differentiates between human actions.¹⁸

Associated with this intention is the way in which the other is considered. In the union of sexual love, the other has the rank of subject, of alter ego, and his or her body has all the dignity of that, even though there are, as we know, other kinds of unions.¹⁹.

The result is a veritable mystique of sexual union. In other words, this union is a unique and privileged place, transcendental to the lovers. Love and Gift are the names of the Holy Spirit (cf. S. Thomas Aquinas, S. th. I, q.37, q.38 a.1.); no surprise then that the flesh, in the union, is the instrument of the Spirit and the lovers pneumatophores:

Through the budding of bodies, the Paraclete buds, at work in the conjunction of lovers and the seminal hatching. Genitality engenders flesh, which means it is the instrument of the Spirit. Carried by Him, it carries Him, making man and woman united in the embrace of pneumatophores ²⁰.

And there’s more. If the Spirit is the substance of the world and the immanence of God, and the Father represents absolute transcendence, what about the human being, doubly feminine and masculine? Jean Bastaire sees it this way:

If in relation to transcendence the human being is feminine immanence, in relation to immanence he is virile transcendence. His double nature is there, in this condition of creature and creator, represented by his erotic duality.²¹

And the final marriage is in Christ, as the new theologian Simeon puts it:

No longer seeing the shame of our body at all, but made entirely like Christ in our whole body, each member of our body will be the whole Christ: for, becoming many members, He remains one and indivisible, and each part is He, the whole Christ.²²

If we can say that in paradise the body is in the soul and the soul in the spirit, after man’s materialization in the world, the soul is now in its body and the spirit in its soul. Now, in the act of sexual love, far from the contract of exchange of property (cf. Kant) or the use of one by the other (cf. Barbusse) or the body of the other as an object, the latter is “subsumed” in the person or soul of the beloved. What’s more, in this act as prayer, union in spirit means that the soul that has subsumed the body is itself subsumed in the spirit; not even the body is not, of course, pneumatized. It’s a return, as it were, to the paradisiacal state, or rather, an experienced reminiscence of that original state.

However, this pneumatization must be seen as taking place in two stages. The first stage, that of the state of prayer, is openness to the immanence of the Spirit; it can be voluntary. But the second stage, that of the Spirit’s transcendence, cannot even be provoked; it is He who decides, He blows where He wills (cf. Jn III, 8).

Even more powerfully, the act of sexual love reflects Trinitarian love:

the fact that man, created as man and woman, is the image of God not only means that each of them individually is like God, as a reasonable and free being. it also means that man and woman, created as the “unity of the two” in their common humanity, are called to live a communion of love and thus to reflect in the world the communion of love that is in God, through which the three Persons love each other in the intimate mystery of the one divine life.²³

Conclusion, from God to God.

As we can see, Love is the origin and the end of the journey, and we understand why – and how – it represents the nec plus ultra of existence and of the perspective of the final ends.

We would add that any movement towards or encounter with the other, this alter ego both similar and different, is an experience of horizontal (earthly) otherness and a reference to vertical (divine) otherness. This referral takes place through Christ, who is all-neighbor, and in the love-giving that is the spirit of the Holy Spirit.

This love – or charity – is beautifully described by S. Paul:

I could speak all the languages of men and angels, but if I don’t have charity, if I don’t have love, I’m just a resounding brass, a clanging cymbal.

I could be a prophet, I could have all the science of the mysteries and all the knowledge of God, I could have all the faith to move mountains, but if I lack love, I’m nothing.

I could distribute all my fortune to the starving, I could be burned alive, but if I lack love, it’s of no use to me.

[Love] endures all things, trusts all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

Love will never pass away. Prophecies will be outdated, the gift of tongues will cease, present knowledge will be outdated. What remains today is faith, hope and charity; but the greatest of the three is charity. 1 Co XIII, 1-[…]13.

There’s nothing more to say.

Footnotes

1. “God interpreted as love; in this consists the Christian idea”, will say Balthazar; quoted by Pascal Ide, Une théologie de l’amour. L’amour, center de la Trilogie de Hans Urs von Balthasar, Lessius, Brussels, 2012, p. 45.[↩]
2. Jean-Pierre Jossua, “L’axiome ”Bonum diffusivum sui” chez S. Thomas d’Aquin”, Revue des Sciences Religieuses, t. 40, fasc. 2, 1966 (pp. 127-153), pp. 134-137.[↩]
3. Idem in Mt XXII, 37; Mk XII, 30; Lk X, 27.[↩]
4. Mohamed Talbi, Universalité du Coran, Actes Sud, 2002, p. 37; See also Koran, VII, 156.[↩]
5. Emmanuel Pisani, “L’amour de Dieu en islam”, La Croix, 15-11-2016.[↩]
6. The other four are jnāna yoga (path of knowledge), karma yoga (path of consecrated action), raja yoga (path of physical and spiritual exercises) and tantra yoga (path of “magical” rites).[↩]
7. Nārada Bhakti Sūtra, quoted by Swami Vivekananda, Les Yogas pratiques, Albin Michel, 1988, p. 137.[↩]
8. Following Abbé Henri Stéphane, Introduction à l’ésotérisme chrétien, Dervy, 1979, as summarized in Introduction à une métaphysique des mystères chrétiens (2005), imprimatur of the Diocese of Paris.[↩]
9. S. Thomas Aquinas, Summa de Theologia, Prima pars, Q.3, a.7, s.1.[↩]
10. Cf. Jean Borella, La charité profanée (1979), reprinted in Amour et vérité, L’Harmattan, 2011.[↩]
11. See Théologie pour tous, L’Harmattan, 2024, ch. IX. De la Trinité.[↩]
12. See Théologie pour tous, op. cit., ch. V. De la Vierge Marie.[↩]
13. Cf. Homilies on the first epistle of St. John (treatise VII, 7-8[↩]
14. See Theology for All, op. cit., ch. XIII. De la mort, de la fin du monde et du Royaume, § De l’hologrammité du Christ.[↩]
15. A sexual community (commercium sexuale) is the reciprocal use of the sexual organs and faculties of two individuals (usus membrorum et facultatum sexualium alterius); Immanuel KantÉléments métaphysiques de la doctrine du droit, trans. Jules Barni, Paris: A. Durand, 1853, § XXIV, pp. 112-113 (online). We underline.[↩]
16. Leo TolstoyThe Kreutzer Sonata (1891), trans. Sylvie Luneau, Paris: Gallimard, 1993, p. 152[↩]
17. Henri BarbusseL’Enfer (1908), Paris: G. Crès, 1925, p. 278. Emphasis added.[↩]
18. Homilies on the first epistle of Saint John, treatise VII, 8.[↩]
19. See Métaphysique du sexe, L’Harmattan, 2022, ch. XIV. Spiritualité de l’amour sexuel[↩]
20. Jean BastaireEros saved. Le jeu de l’ascèse et de l’amour, Paris: Desclée, 1990, p. 73[↩]
21. Ibid., p. 119.[↩]
22. Hymn XV, trans. J. Paramelle, Hymnes, t. I, Cerf, 1969, pp. 289-293; cf. Jean Bastaire, op. cit. pp. 130-131. See article “L’hologramme christologique ou le Christ hologrammique”.[↩]
23. John Paul II, Mulieris dignitatem, no. 7.[↩]