The idea of love is, of course, deeply precious to us – it’s the name we give to our most emotionally invested, generous, tender, complex and (at times) most bruising relationships with other people. Our love for a partner, for our child or for a parent is (with all the attendant drama of longing, fear, and loss) central to our identity.
But there has always been an impulse to enlarge the realm of love outwards from this intimate circle. A curious feature of early Christianity for instance, in the eyes of pagan observers, was the notion that one might love a god – not simply worship them as a power.
The single thinker who, perhaps, was most focused on love was the Islamic scholar Abu Ali ibn Sīna, known to the Latin world as Avicenna. In his , he sees love as the central concept for understanding all things: birds
