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Designs for Loving
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 September 2024
Extract
What is this thing called love?’ The question has been debated times without number: by the great poets, philosophers, mystics; by alert little logicians and portentous statisticians; by playwrights, novelists, songsters; and of course by lovers of various kinds, from those who indulge in a fever of passionate introspection to the simpler souls who sometimes briefly wonder in a bemused and befogged sort of way what has hit them. The plain man may well find himself confused by the variety of often conflicting answers given to the question, the variety of names given to the experience or to different aspects of it. In an interesting analysis of Moral Values in the Ancient World Professor John Ferguson discusses such concepts as the Greek eros, philia, philanthropia, homonoia, the Latin amicitia, pietas, humanitas, and the Hebrew chesed and ‘ahabah—the former of these last two being the steadfast, covenanted loving-kindness of God and pietas of man, the latter the deeper, unconditioned love that has in it something alike of eros and of philanthropia. But the two worlds of thought, the Jewish and the Graeco-Roman, were fundamentally different and could impinge but little on one another until Christianity brought to the world its new inspiration, its new concept of love, and what was in effect a new word to describe it: agape.
Again there has been a great deal of discussion about the difference, and the relationship, between eros and agape; and again the discussion has led to confusion because of the varying interpretations or emphases put on the words by various writers.
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- Research Article
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- Copyright © 1959 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers
References
1 Methuen, 256 pp., 22s. 6d. Eight chapters deal with Greek ethical ideas; two with Roman; one with ‘the contribution of Judaism’: the final chapter discusses the concept of agape in the light of the New Testament evidence. The author’s wide learning enables him to introduce in passing some interesting asides, such as the fact that Marx borrowed his ‘opiate of the people’ dictum from Canon Charles Kingsley; but does not prevent such a surprising remark as that in the study of love Plato is Europe’ profoundest thinker ‘apart from Freud’ (pp. 165, 90).
2 op. cit., pp. 218, 224-5.
3 Ferguson, op.cit., p. 224.
4 op. cit., p. 101.
5 Faber and Faber, revised and augmented edition, 1956, 336pp., 30s. The author has largely re-written Book I1 and added to Book VI; he mentions the substantial criticisms of his thesis made by Fr D’Arcy in his The Mind and Heart ofLove, but has not allowed these to lead to a substantial alteration of the thesis.
6 P. 277.
7 Longmans, Green, 212pp., 16s. The author leans heavily on Professor Lewis and still more on the late Charles Williams: some readers may well find his style, and sometimes his thought, too reminiscent of the latter’s particular brand of romanticism, which incidentally leads him sometimes into over-emphasis: it is surely an exaggeration, for instance, to say that passionate love without sexual fulfilment is always ‘frustrated’ (p. 54)-or for that matter that Williams himself ‘blazed an entirely fresh trail of thought’ (p. 82).
8 p. 2.
9 P. 14.
10 p. 21.
11 ibid.
12 op. cit., pp. 80-1.
13 op. cit., p. 314.
14 P. 313.
15 The Mind and Heart of Love, p. 40.
16 op. cit., p. 115.
17 P- 133.
18 op. cit., p. 101.
19 op. cit., p. 158.
20 Burns Oates. 118 pp., 10s. 6d. The fact that the author’s style is sometimes a little laboured, pedestrian, not without its clichés, sometimes a little careless, or that a few statements may seem at least to need qualification (can we truly say that love is never the cause, only the occasion, of pain? Is it not truer to say with Ferguson that love ‘may sear its object’ since, refusing to achieve good by evil means, it prefers to overcome ‘by redemptive suffering’?) should not be allowed to obscure the fact that we are here dealing not with abstract theorizings but with reality, with the problems and dangers and pains we all know, and with the (real) glory to which, if properly dealt with, they may lead.
21 op. cit., pp. 69, 72.
22 op. cit., p. 72.
23 op. cit., p. 219.
24 It is quite true that ‘you cannot have too much goodness’ (p. 40); but that is surely not what the doctrine implies. You can fail in courage either by defect (cowardice) or excess (rashness) : but the excess is not (using words strictly) an excess of courage; it means that the energies which might have been the material of an act of courage become, because for example of excessive precipitation, the material of an act of foolhardiness; once one has so to speak found the formula of true courage then of course one cannot have too much of it.
25 op. cit., p. 219.
26 Cf. Ferguson, op. cit., pp. 76-80.
27 op. cit., p. 310.
28 op. cit., p, 311 (italics mine).
29 op. cit., pp. 117-8.
30 op. cit., p. 231.
31 op. cit., p. 85.
32 op. cit., pp. 294, 304.
33 op. cit., p. 315.
34 op. cit., p. 235.
35 op. cit., p. 12.
36 Ferguson, op. cit., p. 214.
37 Watkin, op. cit., p. 88.