The Primacy of Love

By Ilia Delio

In an age of anxiety where reason is deified, what is the role of love? This short book centralizes love as the core reality of all cosmic life. From the cosmological to the theological dimensions of existence, love is shown to be the irresistible force of attraction that leads straight into the heart of God. The book is divided into three short chapters based on a metaphysics of love: we are born out of divine love, we exist in love, and we are oriented toward the fullness of love. In a world of evolutionary convergence and global consciousness, love may be the singular ethic that binds us together, heals our wounds and draws us into a new unity of planetary life.

In the My Theology series, the world’s leading Christian thinkers explain some of the principal tenets of their theological beliefs in concise, pocket-sized books.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Release date: Jan 25, 2022
• ISBN: 9781506484389

Book preview

Introduction

WHAT IS LOVE? I was once asked this question by someone who was married for over fifty years. I was startled by the question since everyone knows what love is – or do we? I assumed that after fifty years of marriage my questioner would have had some inkling of love, so I proceeded to give the definition of the medieval Platonists: love is the highest good that goes out to the other for the sake of the other. Love transforms because love unites. My definition, however, left a certain emptiness and longing for a deeper meaning of love. My abstract philosophical answer simply did not get to the heart of the question: What is love?

The inspiration for this book comes from the Spanish mystic, Ramón Lull, whose words written in the thirteenth century, continue to illuminate the mystery of God in the twenty-first century:

The lover was asked to whom he belonged.

He answered, ‘To love.’

‘What are you made of?’ ‘Of love.’

‘Who gave birth to you?’ ‘Love.’

‘Where were you born?’ ‘In love.’

‘Who brought you up?’ ‘Love.’

‘How do you live?’ ‘By love.’

‘What is your name?’ ‘Love.’

‘Where do you come from?’ ‘From love.’

‘Where are you going?’ ‘To love.’

‘Where are you now?’ ‘In love.’

‘Have you anything other than love?’

‘Yes, I have faults and wrongs against my beloved.’

‘Is there pardon in your beloved?’

The lover said that in his beloved were mercy and justice,

and that he therefore lived between fear and hope.[1]

I have pondered these words for years because I, like many others, thought of love simply as an emotion, helpful but not essential. For a long time, I thought that love was a nuisance, prickly and flimsy. I had a platonic notion of divine love and tried to minimize human love in order to avoid the pain of love. As I move now into the late afternoon of life, I realize that Blaise Pascal had it right: the heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of, for the mind can be deceived what the heart does not know. One cannot live on reason alone but on every act of love that flows through the human heart into the heart of the world.

This little book, therefore, is about love in its many dimensions and its ineffable depths, for love is an irresistible ocean of attraction whose infinite goodness leads into the heart of God.

¹Lull, Ramón, The Book of the Lover and the Beloved, trans. E. Allison Peers. https://www.yorku.ca/inpar/lull_lover_peers.pdf↵

1

Created Out of Love

Types of Love

Years ago, the Swedish theologian Anders Nygen wrote a book called Agape and Eros which helped distinguish types of love found in Scripture. Agapic love, he said, is unconditional, spontaneous or unmotivated love, indifferent to any type or reward or reciprocity and opposed to what can be called ‘self-love.’ When the Franciscan priest Maximilian Kolbe offered his life on behalf of a fellow prisoner, he showed the power of agapic love. Agape is a person’s ‘self-giving’ or a person’s spending oneself freely and carelessly for the other person, the unconditional willing of the good. Eros, on the other hand, reflects desire and longing.[2] Edward Vacek defines eros as ‘loving the beloved for our own sake.’[3] Eros is that ineffable longing, a deep, aching desire, not in contrast to agape but in relation to it; it is a stretching of the