What is Love, Anyway?

I told Paul I was a little worried about last week’s column, Purpose in Your Life. What if someone already struggling with depression became even more so, at the thought they could find no purpose? After reassuring me, Paul said, "My purpose in this life is to learn how to love before I die."

What a surprise! Those of us who know Paul Warren can tell you one thing: this man loves people. What did he mean, learn how to love? What is love, anyway? An appropriate topic for St. Valentine’s Day!

Poets and philosophers have explored this topic for centuries. In his book The Four Loves, C.S. Lewis noted that the Greeks had precise terms for the different kinds of love. Philia is love between equals, friendship. Eros is that passionate, romantic love we celebrate on St. Valentine’s Day. Storge is the affection of family members, the love of parent and child. Agape is charity, the communal love most associated with the church.

Lewis saw the problems we encounter in our human experience of these loves as inevitable: "The only place outside of Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell." All these loves are created by God, but we in our humanness become confused, misunderstand and misuse them. For example, at times we overemphasize the importance of eros, which is not a love that by itself can sustain a marriage. At other times, we denigrate eros, and make it dirty and dangerous.

Reading Lewis, I wonder if it is possible that there is, at the root of things, only one Love, after all. Jesus said, "Love your neighbor as yourself"—not more than, not less than, but in equal, loving measure. How do we live this? What does this mean, in our families, our marriages, our workplaces? Is it possible that we can learn to live that compassionate, non-controlling love that God lavishes on us?

For more from Paul on love, click here.