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In English, love is an ambiguous word that can mean sexual attraction, affection for another, or even a strong like, say for a particular sport or food. In Koine Greek, on the other hand, love is divided into four kinds, storgē, erōs, philía, and agápē.[1] Storgē, often called familial love, is a natural affection that arises from the familiarity of persons, such as two women who daily sit next to each other on a commuter bus. The most intense form of storgē is that of a parent for an offspring; however, storgē is so broad that it even refers to the relationship between pets and their owners. In American English, the word that corresponds most closely to storgē is “affection.”
Erōs
Erōs is an intense, passionate desire to be joined to another person, to beauty, to truth, or to any good outside of oneself. We were born radically incomplete.[2] When we emerged from the womb, we sought a human face and listened for a soprano voice. Our very first experience in life was connecting ourselves to another person. The first word spoken about us was either “boy” or “girl,” a word that drew attention to our anatomy that exhibited that we were physically incomplete but had the latent desire for a profound union with another person. As a baby, we were a lovable bundle of erōs, the natural desire for full existence. This self-love is not a selfish love, although like any love, it can become selfish.
Perhaps, as an adolescent, we fell in love with Mozart’s music. Such erōs developed our hearing, attuned our soul to beauty, and conformed our emotions to a rational structure. When we heard Mitsuko Uchida play K. 545, the Sonata Facile, we also fell in love with Ms. Uchida, the embodiment of musical perfection; such love is often called earned or deserved love; we hoped in some small way to return the great good she had given us.
In the ancient world, two lovers under the sway of erōs strove to gain an intimate knowledge of everything that pertained to the beloved, to penetrate the other’s soul. Such lovers sought to possess each other perfectly by entering the heart of the other. At times, two lovers wished to be united into one, a union that would destroy one or both. Aristophanes claimed that if the god Hephaestus came to a pair of lovers and offered to weld them together, no lovers would refuse to be merged into an utter oneness.[3]
In Modernity, erōs is usually taken to be romantic love as depicted by movies, magazine ads, popular songs, and romance novels. Psychoanalyst Eric describes how this intense, all-consuming love happens: “If two people who have been strangers, as all of us are, suddenly let the wall between them break down, and feel close, feel one, this moment of oneness is one of the most exhilarating, most exciting experiences of life. It is all the more wonderful and miraculous for persons who have been shut off, isolated, without love.”[4]
Fromm points out that in Modernity because of individualism, “One can often find two people ‘in love’ with each other who feel no love for anybody else. Their love is, in fact, an egotism à deux; they are two people who identify themselves with each other, and who solve the problem of separateness by enlarging the single individual into two.”[5] The love of such lovers is exclusive; friends, family, and previous interests must be brought within the sphere of their love or abandoned outside. In practice, little can be incorporated into their love; so, in effect, they are separated from the rest of humankind; in their view, this makes their love more magical.
As I or any older adult can testify to personally, almost no one escapes the madness of being crazy in love. When a young couple falls in love, they are primarily in love with the pleasurable emotion produced by the other person. Such lovers wish to be together all day and to live together forever. When apart, life is flat, and each lover dreams of the other. Such a love frequently dissolves, often painfully, because ultimately, when push comes to shove, it becomes clear that each lover is pursuing his or her own ends and wishes to receive more than to give.
Philía
Philía is usually translated as friendship, although the ancient understanding of philia is much wider, for philia holds the members of any association together, whether it be a city-state, a business partnership, or even a buyer and a seller. Philia between buyer and seller should exist before, during, and after an exchange of material goods. In capitalism, the relationship between buyer and seller is contractual. In the ancient world, no genuine community exists without philia.
In his Nichomachean Ethics, Aristotle argues that we love what is good, pleasurable, or useful about another person, and thus there are three kinds of friendship.[6] When the motive of friendship is usefulness, we do not feel affection for another as such but seek to fulfill the desire for some material good through them. These friendships are not always morally reprehensible. Many friendships of utility, for instance, are founded on the exchange of favors. These relations are common among neighbors and acquaintances and include such everyday associations as carpools and food co-ops. In the workplace, where utility generally reigns, many people, because of ambition, wish to receive affection from superiors and use flattery, pretending to be a friend in an inferior position. In the vernacular, ass-kissing is a common way to advance a career since most men and women love flattery, for they wish to be loved rather than to love.
Friendship based on usefulness is subject to complaints and rapid dissolution. The sharing of money, power, and honor invariably leads to disputes. The desire for more is insatiable, and the feeling of being treated unfairly is seldom absent. Aristotle, in his realistic manner, observed over 2,300 years ago, “Most people wish to be recipients of good deeds, but avoid performing them, because they are unprofitable.”[7] Some things in human life never change.
Friendships based on pleasure are not that different from friendships of utility. We love witty people not for what they are but for the pleasure they give us. Children call one another friends because of the pleasure they have when playing together; yet, such childhood friendships advance human growth and development.
When he was four years old, my grandson Yasu told me he had “lots of friends.” He played more intensely and more imaginatively when one or two of his friends were present. I watched one of his friends imitate Yasu jumping from a stool to the floor. The two friends soon developed a game in which the two boys took turns standing on one leg on the stool, shouting something about pirates, and then jumping to the floor. In their play, Yasu and his friend developed physical dexterity, social skills, and imagination.
The friendships of adolescence are based on pleasure, too. The lives of young adults are guided by emotion, and thus, for the most part, their friendships are short-lived.
In the third kind of friendship, based on the good, a common life is shared. Whatever makes life desirable is pursued together. Some friends engage in sports together, others perform music, yet others pursue social justice. Unlike erōs where lovers gaze at each other, friends under the power of philía gaze at a third thing outside of themselves. What friends love most in life is what joins them together; their mutual love enhances their love of the third thing that binds them together. Such friends feel pleasure and pain from the same things, judge the same way, and understand the same things — in a sense, they are one soul, and such unity of souls, in itself, is pleasurable.
In the truest, most long-lasting friendship, a friend acts for his friend’s good for the friend’s sake, as if his friend were another self. In this highest form of friendship, we love our friends in the same way we love ourselves. Aristotle defines the highest form of friendship as the love that wishes another everything we think good, and moreover for the other’s sake, not for our own, and to bring these goods things about for the other, as far as we can.[8]
Human life, of course, is messy and never fits the neat compartments of philosophical analysis. Consider a teacher, say of philosophy, physics, or poetry. The teacher needs the student’s tuition money, and the student needs a good grade from the teacher for a diploma and a good job. Being human, especially when young, a teacher desires adulation from his students and sees teaching as performance, after which students praise how smart and talented he is. A teacher and his students find a public display of witty erudition mutually pleasurable. Some teachers pursue the truth with one or two of their students and, in this way, develop friendships based on the good. Teachers generally have friendships with their students based simultaneously on the useful, the pleasurable, and the good.
Agápē
In the New Testament, the Gospel of Love, the Greek word erōs does not occur once, while agápē, infrequently used in ancient Greek, occurs 116 times and stands for a new understanding of love. In the King James Version of the Bible, agápē is translated as charity, a word that now means to most people giving handouts to the homeless or contributing to United Way. In the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, agápē is translated as love, an ambiguous word in English that can mean romantic love or even a strong like, say for major league baseball or Italian food.
In the Christian tradition, agápē means God’s selfless love for human persons, a love that cannot be earned and excludes no one.[9] Such love gives and expects nothing in return. God needs nothing. Since no English translation accurately renders how agápē is used in the New Testament, probably the best recourse is for the reader to stop, ignore the proper Greek, which only a minority of us know, and try substituting agápē and agápēd for “love” and “loved.” For example,
John 13:34: A new commandment I give to you, that you love [agápē] one another; even as I have loved [agápēd] you, that you also love [agápē] one another.
Or,
Matthew 5:43-46: You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love [agápē] your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, [agápē] your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust.
Despite the butchering of the Greek, this substitution shows that Jesus is calling upon us to practice a new love, to love the way God does, to love our neighbors and even ourselves selflessly and unconditionally, without desiring a reward, without wanting something in return.
But as we have seen in our discussion of erōs, all human love begins with self-love, and thus many see Jesus’ call for a new love as humanly impossible. Thomas Aquinas argues that “agápē itself surpasses our natural facilities” and that we can only exceed human nature by the Holy Spirit infusing agápē into our souls.[10]
Hence, for Aquinas, agápē is beyond ordinary mortals like you and me; not one of us will ever be a Mother Theresa ministering to the dying homeless in Calcutta. However, if we relax the selfless characteristic of agápē and focus on the unconditional aspect, we will see that agápē is not beyond us.
Unconditional Love
As we have seen, the very first experience in any baby’s life is connecting himself to another person. Within days, he can distinguish between his mother and others by her looks, voice, and smell. The mother, on her part, desires to cradle her infant, to soothe him when he cries, to keep him warm and protected. The infant shares an interior life with the mother. If she becomes startled or anxious, the baby becomes frightened and cries. If she coos, the infant coos back. A mother and her infant often play the cooing game, each taking pleasure in sharing emotion.
Indian psychoanalyst Sudhir Kakar reports that “well up to the fifth year, if not longer, it is customary for Indian children to sleep by their mother’s side at night. . . . Constantly held, cuddled, crooned, and talked to . . . the young child has come to experience his core self as lovable: ‘I am lovable, for I am loved.’ Infancy has provided him with a secure base from which to explore his environment with confidence.”[11]
As Kakar points out, unconditional love is the foundation that supports the further growth and development of the child. For the young child, everything pivots around the mother or continuous caregiver; she is the entire world. John Bowlby, a psychiatrist and the recognized authority on the emotional attachment of children to their caregivers, gives the example of “a healthy child whose mother is resting on a garden seat will make a series of excursions away from her, each time returning to her before making the next excursion.”[12] The little excursions the child makes beyond her are rooted in the confidence that she will always be there for protection and comfort. The mother’s love provides the child with a secure base to explore the world.
Patterns set in childhood generally persist throughout a person’s life. The child who never doubts that she is loved unconditionally later in life can safely explore the world and can repeatedly fail at sports, the arts, or career advancement, yet not doubt her worth, unlike the child who never secured a base of unconditional love, for whom failure is devastating, instilling personal worthlessness.
Fromm observes that “unconditional love corresponds to one of the deepest longings, not only of the child, but of every human being.”[13] No one wants to be loved only for economic success or artistic achievement. Earned love always leaves the lingering doubt that one is not loved for oneself but for the status and pleasure that accrues to the “lover.” A doubt about earned love often becomes the nagging fear that one is not loved at all but used.[14]
On rare occasions, we witness that leap from erōs to agápē in a person’s love of another. Consider Lasandra Carter, a Black woman in Detroit, probably in her late thirties, poorly educated, and pregnant with Giovanni. In utero, he was found to have major genetic abnormalities guaranteed to drastically shorten his life after birth.
Before his delivery, Lasandra appeared depressed and lifeless. After the birth of Giovanni, Lasandra seemed happy and in love with tiny Giovanni. “Everything is so big on him; he’s such an itty-bitty guy!” she exclaimed. She took off one of his tiny socks and said, “He has a little clubfoot, such a cutie,” and then caressed his clubfoot. Lasandra showed unconditional love for Giovanni: “We have some time with him, but not a lot. The only thing I can do is love him until the time comes.”
Undoubtedly, Lasandra never heard of erōs and agápē; yet, her heart had, for the video of her loving Giovanni shows the miracle of an ordinary person leaping from erōs to agápē, from being concerned with only herself to her selfless love for another. (See Dying in Your Mother’s Arms.)
If we carefully observe the social life around us, we see the meanspirited, the ambitious, and the selfish, but we also see numerous physicians, nurses, teachers, and caregivers making the miraculous leap from erōs to agápē.
To love well, we must be loved unconditionally first. Psychologist René Spitz discovered through the study of hospitalized children that a child’s very first bond with another person is the basis for the later development of human love and friendship.[15] A child under two years of age, if deprived of a single person’s continuous care for three months or more, develops emotional trauma that may result in death, even though the child is provided with perfectly adequate food, shelter, hygiene, and medication by a succession of compassionate nurses. In such circumstances, no one is exclusively responsible for loving the child, so she cannot form an attachment to another person.
Spitz recounts the suffering of one baby girl deprived of her mother: “She lay immobile in her crib; when approached she did not lift her shoulders, barely her head, to look at the observer with an expression of profound suffering sometimes seen in sick animals. As soon as the observer started to speak to her or to touch her, she began to weep. This was unlike the usual crying of babies, which is accompanied by a certain amount of unpleasure vocalization, and sometimes screaming. Instead she wept soundlessly, tears running down her face. Speaking to her in soft comforting tones only resulted in more intense weeping, intermingled with moans and sobs, shaking her whole body. This reaction deepened in the ensuing two months. It was more and more difficult to make contact with the child. Seven weeks later, it took us almost an hour to establish contact with her. During this period, she lost weight and developed a serious eating disturbance; she had difficulty in taking food and in keeping it down.”[16]
If the separation continues, the child shows a rapid decline in mental and motor development, eventually being unable to sit, stand, walk, or talk despite the best of institutional care. In the extreme case, when love is totally absent, or nearly so, the child simply dies, or if it survives, its emotional life is permanently damaged. What a child, and even an adult, needs over and beyond food, shelter, and other physical necessities is the love of another person.
Spitz also discovered that when a child experiences a mother or a primary caregiver as a source of both intense pain and comfort, all the child’s emotions are blurred, and its capacity for friendship is severely diminished. A child severely deficient in love is not interested in his toys and is prone to violence in later life. An empty, uninterested facial expression is a characteristic of a child lacking love. Many a child’s life has been saved from ruin by the sustained, unconditional love of a grandmother, an aunt, or a nanny. If a mother or continuous caregiver showers the baby with gratuitous love, the infant feels, “I am wonderful, just because I am.” The child learns to love itself the way the mother or caregiver loves him. The young child then extends this self-love to a love of the world. The child feels, “It’s good to be alive; it’s good to be surrounded by such good things.” With unconditional love, a child learns to trust life.
A child nurtured and protected by love can as an adult suffer the most outrageous misfortunes and still believe she and the world are fundamentally good. If success is measured by human relations and friendship, not wealth and career achievement, then the kind of love a child receives is a better predictor of her course in life than environment, IQ tests, or genes.
No One Is Condemned to a Loveless Life
If a person never received unconditional love as a child, he is not condemned to a loveless life. Consider Godfrey Camille, a participant in the Harvard Study of Adult Development.[17] He had the bleakest childhood in the Study; his parents were upper-middle class, socially isolated, incompetent, and pathologically suspicious. Later in life, Camille confessed that he neither liked nor respected his parents.
As a college student, Camille sought love and care by frequent visits to the infirmary. In his junior year, the usually sympathetic physician contemptuously dismissed him with the evaluation, “This boy is turning into a regular psychoneurotic.”
At his ten-year personality assessment, the Study consensus was that Camille was “not fitted for the practice of medicine.” Nevertheless, he went to medical school, and shortly after graduation, he attempted suicide. He was overwhelmed by the thought that he would have to take care of other people when he could not take of his own self.
At the age of thirty-five, Camille had a life-changing experience. He was hospitalized for fourteen months with pulmonary tuberculosis. His time in the hospital was like a religious rebirth: “Someone with a capital ‘S’ cared for me,” and, of course, he received months of loving care from nurses. Camille gave up his search for love and transformed his life by dedicating himself to the love and care of others. As a result of the change of orientation from the needs of self to the welfare of others, he founded a clinic, got married, and became an excellent father. By loving others, he received the abundant love that had been absent during the first half of his life.
In his fiftieth Harvard reunion autobiography, Camille wrote,
Before there were dysfunctional families, I came from one. My professional life hasn’t been disappointing — far from it — but the truly gratifying unfolding has been into the person I’ve slowly become: comfortable, joyful, connected, and effective. Since it wasn’t widely available then, I hadn’t read the children’s classic, The Velveteen Rabbit, which tells how connectedness is something we must let happen to us, and then we become solid and whole.
As that tale recounts tenderly, only love can make us real. Denied this in boyhood for reasons I now understand, it took me years to tap substitute sources. What seems marvelous is how many there are and how restorative they prove. What durable and pliable creatures we are, and what a storehouse of goodwill lurks in the social fabric.
Godfrey Camille discovered in his journey through life that began with a bleak, painful childhood that virtually no person is unlovable and that the most fundamental principle of human living is a person is meant to love and to be loved. Who can say deep down in his heart, “I do not want to love, nor do I want to be loved.”?
Endnotes
[1] The four loves are loves of the soul and do not exhaust the realm of human love. For example, the love of money or pizza is called concupiscence, defined by the craving for the pleasant that includes both the soul and the body. See Aquinas, Summa Theologica, The First Part of the Second Part, Question 30.
[2] For a detailed discussion of our radical incompleteness, see George Stanciu, We Need Others.
[3] Plato, Symposium in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), 192e.
[4] Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving (New York: Harper, 2006 [1956]), p. 4.
[5] Ibid., p. 51.
[6] For a detailed discussion of the three kinds of friendship, see Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, Bks. VIII and IX.
[7] Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, trans. Martin Ostwald (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1962), Bk. VIII, line 1163b25.
[8] See Aristotle, Rhetoric, Bk. II, Ch. 4, line 1381a.
[9] In The Bhagavad Gita, the Sanskrit word that corresponds most closely to agápē is tyāga, the selfless action that has no desire for personal reward. See The Bhagavad Gita, trans. Eknath Easwaran with chapter introductions by Diana Morrison (Tomales, CA: Nilgiri Press, 1985), pp. 202-204 and 18.11.
[10] Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, II-II, Question 24, Article 2.
[11] Sudhir Kakar, The Inner World: A Psychoanalytic Study of Childhood and Society in India, rev. ed. (New Delhi, India: Oxford University Press, 1981), pp. 80, 82.
[12] John Bowlby, A Secure Base: Clinical Applications of Attachment Theory (London: Routledge, 1988), p. 61.
[13] Fromm, p. 39.
[14] Billy Joel captures the adult desire for unconditional love in his Just the Way You Are.
[15] René Spitz, The First Year of Life: A Psychoanalytic Study of Normal and Deviant Development of Object Relations (New York: International Universities Press, 1965). See also Robertson, J., and J. Bowlby. “Responses of Young Children to Separation from Their Mothers.”Paris: Courr. Cent. Int. Enf, 1952.
[16] Spitz, p. 270.
[17] George E. Vaillant, Triumphs of Experience: The Men of the Harvard Grant Study (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), pp. 44-51 and George E. Vaillant, From emotionally crippled to loving personality (Ted Talk, November 2014).