Do I have to spell it out again? Love itself is an emotion, but to act on that love is volitional. Where is the paradox here? I feel like I am talking to people with seriously limited understanding. Do I have to spell out everything in each post?
Hi again Spock. I came across the paragraph below just today. Since I’m not too good at expressing things well, does the paragraph, and
the whole post in its context for that matter, contribute anything as an answer or insight to your original question?
*In one of the two greatest lines of world poetry, Dante bows gently toward “The Love that moves the sun and all the stars.” Many moralists speak of love as the one fundamental and universal moral principle, the golden rule honored in all traditions. But what do we mean by love? In English we are hampered by having but one word for many kinds of loves. In Latin at least five different terms are available for five different loves.
The most general term is amor – the term that Dante used for the force that moves the sun and choreographs the stars in their millennial dance across the skies. Amor means pull, attraction, being driven together. One can use it of Earth’s gravity, the passions that pull the sexes to cohabitate, and “the force that through the green grass drives” (e. e. cummings).
A more limited term is affectus – a term referring to those movements of our feelings that kindle within us admiration for our beloved and a desire to be with her, feelings of compatibility and comfort, feelings that tend to have a longer run than the hotter passions, and yield in daily life a quieter security.
The term dilectio introduces a more restricted notion still, that of a love born of deliberation and reflective choice; it comes from, but intensifies, the root electio (choose) and means a love of commitment: “You are the one I choose to love forever.” That love can be relied upon, because it is deliberate; it follows from a weighing of the consequences. I am not swept off my feet. I mean it. It is the love on which friendship is built.
The term amicitia adds to dilectio the note of mutuality. If (perhaps as a teenager) you have ever loved anyone who did not reciprocate that love, you know the pain caused by the lack of mutuality. All the more, you appreciate the gift of love that someone freely makes when she returns the love you offer. Mutual love – amicitia (friendship) – is far more powerful than any love, save one.
That love is a special form of amicitia, but its origin does not lie in us. We would not dream of pretending to it. We would not know how. It exceeds our powers utterly. It is caritas. It is God’s own love, the love that is the fire of his nature, that in him is so strong it generates another Person, and then their mutual love generates a third. Caritas is the inner action of the Trinity.
Now when we Christians speak of the Trinity, the inner being of our God, we know not whereof we speak. The point we seize upon, however, is that our God has spoken of himself in such a way that we are to imagine him – not as one in eternal solitude, as Plato, Aristotle, and many of the ancients imagined him, but rather as more like a community of love and friendship than like any other phenomenon of our experience. No one has seen God. Strictly, no one knows what he is like. Yet he himself points our minds in these directions: He is to be thought of as a Communion of Divine Persons – radiating his presence throughout creation, calling unworthy human beings to be his friends, and infusing into them his love so that they might love with it. Caritas is our participation in a way of loving not our own. It is our participation – partial, fitful, hesitant, imperfect – in his own loving.
We can even say, in a certain way of speaking, that our Creator’s whole point in making the world was that some of his creatures should share in his love. The Love that moves the sun and all the stars is ours to give to others.
To make us able to share in his love, he had to make us capable of reflection, deliberation, choice, and commitment. He had to make us in his image. He had to make us provident of our own destiny, as he is provident. He had to make us free. Responsible, too. Capable of saying “no.” And capable of evil.*
Read the whole context here.
Again, does this contribute anything to your question?
I’m also thinking I’ll also post this in our other discussion of yours
here and ask a question there. Thanks for reading my poor attempts at answers.
