Love is the most used word in the world and the least understood. Plato thought it was longing for a lost unity. Augustine — that it is the pull toward God in another person. Dante turned it into a road to God through a woman. Spinoza said: love is joy at knowing the cause. Kierkegaard: it demands an infinite choice. Fromm: it is not something you find — it is something you do. Six answers — and not one of them has gone out of date.
In the Symposium, Aristophanes tells a myth: human beings were once double — round, with four arms and four legs. The gods cut them in half. Ever since, each of us goes looking for his other half. Love is longing for a lost wholeness. Then Socrates speaks more seriously: love is the drive toward immortality through beauty. Either by bearing children. Or by beautiful deeds. Or by the contemplation of Beauty itself. This is a ladder — not a story.
"Thou hast made us for Thyself, and our heart is restless, until it rests in Thee." Augustine — a former Manichaean, a former libertine — arrived at this conclusion: every human desire is in the end a desire for God. We look in another person for what only God can give. This explains disappointment in love — and it makes love possible.
Dante saw Beatrice once — he was nine years old. The second time, at eighteen. She died at twenty-four. He wrote the Divine Comedy — and she led him through Hell, Purgatory and Paradise. This is not a metaphor — it is theology: a particular love for a particular person can become a road to God. Augustine said that love for a human being draws one away from God. Dante answered: no — it leads you there.
Spinoza — excommunicated from the Jewish community, dead alone — gave the coldest and the most exact definition of love: it is joy accompanied by the idea of an external cause. We love what is the cause of our joy. Love of God is intellectual: to understand God as the one substance and to rejoice in that understanding. It sounds inhuman — and at the same time it is absolutely right.
Kierkegaard was engaged to Regine Olsen — and broke the engagement off. He spent his whole life explaining why. His answer: love demands an absolute choice of another person, without guarantees, without certainty — like a leap of faith. But precisely because he loved Regine absolutely, he could not take her: he could not give her what she deserved. This is a paradoxical logic. And there is something true in it.
The Art of Loving is the most widely read book about love since the Symposium. Fromm says it plainly: love is not what you find — it is what you practice. To love means to give yourself, to care, to know, to respect. Most people are not looking for love — they are looking to be loved. That is a passive position. Love is active.
If love is an art and not a feeling, why do we wait for it to "arrive" — instead of making it?