Love in Christian Ethics

Abstract

Love is understood in Christian thought, following Jesus’ teaching and New Testament reflection, as the summative category of moral value and obligation, comprehensive and interpretative of all other moral norms. But since love is not a uniform phenomenon, distinctions of types of love have been a major feature of Christian discussion. After an introduction (1), the article begins (2) with a review of how these distinctions emerge from the vocabulary of love in Christian Greek and Latin texts. Then (3) six related strands of thought about love are identified. (3.1) The asymmetry between the objects of the twofold love-command, God and neighbour, led patristic theologians to conceive of an ‘order’ in which neighbour-love subserves love for God. Yet since God and neighbour are united in the person of Christ, the two loves are also united in participative imitation of the divine love manifest in him. (3.2) Law is fulfilled in love as it is internalized in practical reason. ‘Shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Spirit’, love authorizes and interprets moral laws, but also transforms law in moral history, fulfilling prophetic anticipations of a ‘new covenant’. Similarly, love imposes a new form upon the many virtues recognized in Hellenistic Judaism. Not itself a virtue, it fulfils the human capacity for virtue. Of the three virtue-like qualities that preside over all specialized performances, love is ‘the greatest’, since it anticipates the eschatological vision. (3.3) Yet love cannot be conceived apart from faith and hope; Jesus taught the need for self-loss in the hope of self-recovery. ‘Love of self’ was valued both negatively and positively, as it was associated with either of these poles. Radical self-love was thus seen as the root of sin, and yet there was no excess of virtue beyond the love ultimately due to the self as God’s creature. Duties to the self, however, were recognized only through duties to God and neighbour. The ‘ascent’ of love, a popular theme in the Middle Ages, was interpreted either as a gradual elimination or as a perfecting of self-love. But the idea of a ‘pure love’, free of all interest in the self, was viewed with suspicion as ignoring faith and hope. (3.4) The psychology of the ‘indifferent’ will, which came to the fore in later scholasticism, lay behind the theory of two distinct mental faculties, voluntative and cognitive, in early modern philosophy. This tended to deprive the love of God of its sovereign unifying role, and elicited theological counter-strategies. A Lutheran response situated the love of God in faith, while a Reformed one recovered the Augustinian theme of love of God as the final term of love of the world, awaiting purification and eschatological disclosure. (3.5) Love of neighbour was often expounded in terms of universal and equal regard. Yet practical considerations could not ignore differing degrees of proximity. Specific types of relation, among them proximity to the poor, assumed special importance; the brotherhood of the church made a particular claim on love, from which positive, if limited, endorsements of friendship and marriage followed. (3.6) Political institutions, too, were to be renewed by the subordination of justice to love. Patristic Christianity hoped for a unified world-order initially, though its initial welcome for the christianized empire of Constantine cooled. Still the hermeneutic of love encouraged hopes for a reformed practice of justice: penal institutions that could assist the offender’s conversion were an early and persistent Christian ambition. The separation of love and justice into discrete institutional spheres was envisaged only in later modernity, radicalized in twentieth-century oppositions, where justice, understood in formal and procedural terms, demanded suspicion of all concrete relations of affinity and affection