reconciling things

(I wrote this six years ago. It was first posted in 2019 on the blog of the Catholic Club at University of Maine Farmington.)

I love love.

You can blame it on my personality type (ENFP) or being Enneagram 4 or my heritage or my Patron Saint (St. Therese of the Child Jesus, the patroness of a vocation to love).

I have a deep need to love others and to be loved. I get excited about loving others–my kids, my friends, strangers. Have you ever hugged a perfect stranger in the grocery store? I have.

To love and to be loved is essential; it is what we were made for and from. God is love and we were made from a creative act of the love of God. The first paragraph of the catechism says, “God, infinitely perfect and blessed in himself, in a plan of sheer goodness freely created man to make him share in his own blessed life. For this reason, at every time and in every place, God draws close to man. He calls man to seek him, to know him, to love him with all his strength. He calls together all men, scattered and divided by sin, into the unity of his family, the Church. To accomplish this, when the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son as Redeemer and Savior. In his Son and through him, he invites men to become, in the Holy Spirit, his adopted children and thus heirs of his blessed life.”(CCC n.1)

But what does it really mean to love? 

The Greeks didn’t just have one word for love that they applied to everything the way we do. In the course of a single day I could say that I love my 3 year old, my husband, my best friend, and cheesecake and it all means something kind of different. The Greeks used four different words: Eros, Agape, Storge, and Phileo.

I propose to love well we need to know the difference and appreciate each unique expression of love. For to understand these unique expressions of love means that we can encounter a different aspect of God. All forms of love lead us to back to God in one way or another, because God is love. Apart from God, we can do nothing.

Let’s break it down:

Eros: CS Lewis called this Romantic Love. This is intimate love, that has the underpinnings of procreative urges. It sees beauty in another and leads to an appreciation of beauty itself (if you believe Plato). But this isn’t to be confused with lust or simple sexual urges. Eros is not sex. It may result in intimacy, but it is not interchangeable with it. It wills the good of the other (to borrow from Thomas Aquinas) to such an extent that the lover will literary lay down his life for the beloved. “Better to be miserable with her than happy without her. Let our hearts break provided they break together. If the voice within us does not say this it is not the voice of Eros.” (CS Lewis, The Four Loves)

Storge: Lewis translates this Affection. This affection is tenderness, and often familial love. It’s what makes us go “aaawwwwwww…” when something is so cute. It’s what parents feel when looking at their adorable offspring.  Lewis writes, “Affection is responsible for nine-tenths of whatever solid and durable happiness there is in our natural lives.” 

Phileo: Lewis calls this Friendship. “To the Ancients, Friendship seemed the happiest and most fully human of all loves,” says Lewis, “the crown of life and the school of virtue. The modern world, in comparison, ignores it.” Why is this? Could it be that Friendship is “unnecessary”? Lewis thought so. He writes, “I have no duty to be anyone’s Friend and no man in the world has a duty to be mine. No claims, no shadow of necessity. Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art, like the universe itself (for God did not need to create). It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.”  It’s this amazing affectionate regard, usually between equals. This is also the “brotherly love” that wills the good of our fellowman and society.

Agape: Also called Charity. This is the love of God for mankind and the love of an individual for a good God. It’s unconditional, self-sacrificing, and mature. It is the love of I Corinthians 13, that you have no doubt heard at countless weddings. Patient, kind, hoping all things, believing all things, does not fail. God shows us exactly what this looks like in the passion and death of Jesus. “God, who needs nothing, loves into existence wholly superfluous creatures in order that He may love and perfect them. He creates the universe, already foreseeing – or should we say “seeing”? there are no tenses in God – the buzzing cloud of flies about the cross, the flayed back pressed against the uneven stake, the nails driven through the mesial nerves, the repeated incipient suffocation as the body droops, the repeated torture of back and arms as it is time after time, for breath’s sake, hitched up. If I may dare the biological image, God is a “host” who deliberately creates His own parasites; causes us to be that we may exploit and “take advantage of” Him. Herein is love. This is the diagram of Love Himself, the inventor of all loves.” (The Four Loves)

What’s Love Got To Do With It?

In some sense Storge, Phileo, and Eros are a training ground, the baby-steps if you will, that hopefully lead us to Agape. That is not to say, however, that we abandon them when we find Agape. Rather, the are enriched and deepened and we see them for what they truly are.

This time of year, Valentine’s Day, everyone is looking for Eros. The candlelight dinners, chocolates, wine, and flowers. Everyone hoping they will be snuggled up to someone who makes their heart beat faster.

However, I propose that this holiday is far more phileo and storge in its ethos than eros. As the story goes, in the year 269 a priest named Valentine was sentenced to death for defying the emperor and performing Christian weddings in secret, despite an edict outlawing the Sacrament. While in prison the judge asked Father Valentine to pray for his daughter who was blind. When she was healed the judge converted to Christianity. Valentine, who had been sentenced to beating, stoning, and decapitation, allegedly wrote a note to the judge’s (formerly) blind daughter, signing it, “From Your Valentine.” (source)

This should lead us to consider not Romantic love this Valentine’s Day, but affectionate love between friends and family. Is that not what we are really missing in our every day lives? Is it not this affection and tenderness that makes the mundane bearable and the unbearable redeemable?

Yet, it’s a challenge to find, nurture, and grow Phileo in an Eros soaked world. Our culture wants to romanticize and sexualize everything–from advertising for fast food and cars to our relationship with our brothers and sisters in the pews. We often struggle to see one another as occasions of grace because so often we have misused our relationships and sexuality as occasions of sin. But, I believe we can do better. With the help of the Holy Spirit, we can retrain (or shall we say renew) our minds.

Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God—what is good and acceptable and perfect. Romans 12:2

Holy Friendship

The most loving thing we can do, whatever state of life we find ourselves–single and searching, celibate, or married–is to ask for the Holy Spirit’s help in mastering our passions and bringing them under His control. (2 Timothy 2:11-13, Galatians 5:22-26)

We can ask for God’s help in growing in our Phileo and Storge. This is what St. Paul suggests in 1 Timothy 5 when he tells us to treat one another as brothers and sisters. This is risky. To draw close to another person and not have romance in the mix may be uncharted territory. What does that even look like in our hook-up culture?

Of course there are those in the Church and in the world (thank you, Harry and Sally) who say that true friendship without sex doesn’t exist–especially between single men and women. To this, CS Lewis ahead of his time wrote, “Those who cannot conceive Friendship as a substantive love but only as a disguise or elaboration of Eros betray the fact that they have never had a Friend. The rest of us know that though we can have erotic love and friendship for the same person yet in some ways nothing is less like a Friendship than a love-affair. Lovers are always talking to one another about their love; Friends hardly ever about their Friendship. Lovers are normally face to face, absorbed in each other; Friends, side by side, absorbed in some common interest. Above all, Eros (while it lasts) is necessarily between two only. But two, far from being the necessary number for Friendship, is not even the best. And the reason for this is important.… In each of my friends there is something that only some other friend can fully bring out. By myself I am not large enough to call the whole man into activity; I want other lights than my own to show all his facets… Hence true Friendship is the least jealous of loves. Two friends delight to be joined by a third, and three by a fourth, if only the newcomer is qualified to become a real friend. They can then say, as the blessed souls say in Dante, ‘Here comes one who will augment our loves.’ For in this love ‘to divide is not to take away.” 

Bill Donaghy of the Tobin Institute writes, “This is holy ground. This is sacred ground, and in this place we are called to a deep self-mastery, and a healthy recognition of our own hearts and where we stand in the ability to truly see one another. I….encourage readers to go further, to pray more deeply about this lost art of friendship, of holy friendship. It must be rekindled. It will take work and prayer and much patience, especially in this present darkness. But with grace we can reclaim a beautiful gift, and our vision of one another can indeed be restored. It is a hope within reach. It is our inheritance and a promise too. “Jesus came to restore creation to the purity of its origins.” (CCC n. 2336) 

The alternative is to either succumb to lust–which is really a counterfeit eros–or lock up our hearts and not learn to love. I say, let’s do it. Let’s ask the Holy Spirit for new hearts and renewed minds. Let’s learn to master our passions. Let’s learn to love one another well, deeply, truly, purely.

And occasionally hug strangers in the grocery store. (But, ask first. Don’t be that guy.)