How has the English language shaped "love"?

I was listening to Relevant Radio the other day, and one of my favorite programs, “Go ask your Father” was on. “Reverend Know-It-All,” as he is affectionately called, began the program with his usual “rant” (as he says). Each day begins with a different topic, and on Wednesday, January 9, his “rant” really caught my ear and made me do a lot of thinking since then. I would highly encourage you to go to the Relevant Radio archives, download the show, and give it a listen. The whole show is an hour long, beginning with this discussion point and then answering questions. Since I thought his discussion was so important, and that few people would take the time to actually download the show and listen to it, I transcribed most if it below. I left out some non-essential parts, and the emphasis is my own. At a minimum, I would encourage you just to read the emphases—essentially the cliff notes. More of my thoughts are below the transcript.

I did teach Greek for many, many years.. Ancient Greek.. and I really believe that there is a very, very precise difference between the different words for “love” in Greek and that means that in order to understand what the Bible is talking about when it says, “Love one another,” you’ve got to know those distinctions.

There are four words that were used for “love” in ancient Greek, principally. One was storge which was not that common, but it meant “familial affection.” Then there was eros which was very common from which we get the word “erotic.” It meant a love that desires to possess the beloved. It can apply usually to people and even in ancient Greek applies to things sexual, but it could be more than that. It could be a desire, a love for beauty—that sort of thing. Then there was phileo which is mutual affection. We get the words “philanthropy” and believe it or not, Philadelphia from it, the city of brotherly love. Mutual affection. And then there is agape. The translators of the Hebrew Scriptures used the word agape exclusively when they wrote the Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures about 300 years after Christ which we call the Septuagint, and Christians throughout the ages until the time of Luther universally regarded the Septuagint as “The Bible,” the Old Testament, and 3/4 of all Christians still do. Then there was the 4th word which in classical Greek was a very little used word--agape. It meant to be content with, to be well-pleased with. It was a love that referred to the relationship of a parent to children. Of a father’s love for his wife and family. And we go, “Well isn’t that romantic and sexual?” Oddly enough in the ancient world it wasn’t. You know, your wife was picked for you, you did your duty, you enriched the family with children, and then you had fun away from home. A very different approach to family morality than we have. Now of course that was not universally true. I’m sure many wives and many husbands were very much in love with each other but that was not the reason for marriage. Romance, eros, was not the reason for marriage. Nor was phileo. It was nice if they happened. But, agape came to mean in Christian parlance, “sacrificial love.” And it is translated into Latin, not as amor, but as charity, caritas. And you’ll notice that in the Catechism they use caritas, not love, not amor. So that’s a very important distinction. Caritas is a Latin word that means “dearness”—something that is dear to you. Caros means “dear” or even it can mean “expensive” but all that said, I am postulating that you can almost—now I say the word “almost” underlining and in capital letters. You can ALMOST take the word love out of the Bible and put in the word “sacrifice” instead because love, agape, is sacrificial love. So when you say “God is love,” what you’re saying is, “God is sacrifice.”

Let’s look at this morning’s reading with that. [1 John 4:11-18] “Beloved, if God has sacrificed for us, we must also sacrifice for one another. No one has ever seen God, but if we sacrifice for one another, God remains in us, and His sacrifice is brought to perfection in us. This is how we know that we remain in Him and He in us, that He has given of us in His Spirit. Moreover, we have seen and have testified that the Father sent His Son as the Savior of the world. Whoever acknowledges that Jesus is the Son of God, God remains in him and he in God. For we have come to know and to believe in the sacrifice that God has for us. God is sacrifice and whoever remains in sacrifice remains in God and God in him. In this is sacrifice brought to perfection among us that we have confidence on the Day of Judgment because as He is, so we are in the world.”

How is He in the world? Just look at the crucifix. That’s the process of being formed to Christ. Okay let me continue with the reading, “There is no fear in sacrifice.” People say there is no fear in love. I got a question about, oh I think it was last week, about some poor fella whose kids have gone to some Evangelical church and said, “We shouldn’t be afraid of God. You Catholics are afraid of God.” OH! We should be VERY afraid of God! The Bible says we should work out our salvation “with fear and trembling” in St. Paul’s first letter to the Thessalonians. Well, it says love casts out fear. Uh-huh-huh, there is no fear in SACRIFICE.

It is fascinating to me how you will see heroic people who will run into a burning building and people will say, “Weren’t you afraid?” And they say, “No, I didn’t have time to think. I just knew what I had to do.” A parent who is a normal parent, when they see their child in grave danger doesn’t stop to think. They run in, they rescue that kid. “Weren’t you afraid?” “No it must have been some parental hormone that kicked in, must have been mother love or fatherly protection.” In love, there’s a lot of fear. When we talk about love as that good feeling, what we really mean is that desire to be liked by people frequently. When a young man falls in love with a young woman, he stands the first date trembling and shaking and sweating with a wilted corsage in his hand and the old man comes to the door and looks him up and down—there’s a lot of fear in eros. There’s even fear in phileo as a mutual affection. “I am afraid that the people who like me might not like me. I might lose friends. I don’t want to lose friends. I’m not going to be unpleasant.” So, when we talk about love as eros, and we talk about love as phileo, well, there’s a lot of fear there. But agape—sacrificial love—it’s like the book of Esther. Esther loved her people. And she knew she had to go to the king, and if you spoke to the king without being spoken to first, you were executed unless the king relented. And she said, “I will take my life in my hands. If I perish, I perish.”—That’s love. “If I perish, I perish.” There is no fear in sacrifice but perfect sacrifice drives out fear because fear has to do with punishment. “I’ve given up my life, how can you punish me?” I remember a young man. This was years ago and I haven’t seen him in many years and I don’t know if he is right with God at this time or not, but he was in our prayer group and he had a very disreputable career as a drug dealer. This was on the west side of Chicago, and I will never forget that he walked out of the church one day and there was a gang waiting there to kill him, and they pulled a gun on him and he said, “Go ahead and shoot. All you can do is bring me closer to God.” And they put the gun away and left. Perfect love casts out fear. Fear has to do with punishment, so no one who fears is yet perfect in sacrifice.

So this is the idea. Now, we are coming up on the great pro-life…I don’t want to say celebrations, but this is the impeding anniversary of the disaster of the Roe v. Wade decisions and we need to be very cognizant of it, but I don’t want to sound dismissive in any way. But in a way, the sterile sexuality that we have indulged in in this country, which includes artificial birth control, which includes abortion, which includes tubal ligation, which oddly enough includes in-vitro fertilization, it includes the gender selection of children, it includes same-sex “marriage,” it includes abortion. These are all sterile sexualities. Well how can IVF be.. well, what’s wrong with that? Well, you’ll understand as I go along, but, it is not necessarily sacrificial love.—“How dare you say a thing like that, Father!” Well, there is a tendency among us to say to people who cannot have children because they are physically unable to do so, “Well that’s just not fair. It’s your right to have children. You won’t have the experience of a child.”—A child is not an experience, a child is a person. Now, I do not mean to be hard on people who have children by IVF, although it is seriously, morally wrong by our standards. When you brought those kids home, you realized your life was going to be sacrificial, but I have known many people who were not sacrificial in their approach to their lack of ability to conceive. That they somehow felt cheated of an experience and believe me, you weren’t. So just forebear with me, I just have to think that part of the equation out, but all the other things I am quite convinced are sterile sexuality.  And this is more serious than all of those problems put together. Now how can I say that the idea that “God is love” as distinguished from “God is sacrifice” is more important than the life of an unborn child? We in our society, I don’t mean to say exactly that, but there is an underlying, philosophical problem that has allowed all of these other barbarities and until we address that, we are not going to succeed in putting an end to legalized abortion, we are not going to put an end to any of the moral wrongs that we see in the world in these areas because the problem is in 1960 or so, we began to redefine love. Catholicism was a sacrificial religion. Catholicism revolved around the sacrifice of the mass. We easily out-fasted the Muslims. 1/3 of our life was about fasting. And if you wanted to go to Communion, you did not eat or drink from midnight on.

We translated the Scriptures, taking the word charity out and replacing it with the more relevant and modern word love, however, love is a blanket idea and it does not convey what the word agape means in our language.  So, we redefined love and in redefining love we redefined God, and I believe this is demonic. In order to redefine God we had to redefine the nature of love. And the great teachers of sacrifice are children and the poor. You’re never going to get out of the poor what you put in. Volunteers used to come in and be indignant because the poor were not ‘properly grateful’ for their philanthropy. We think that by having a good feeling to other people that we are loving them. That is not love. Love is always and only what you give away, and that is the Christian definition. It is sacrificial. That’s why we have the sacrifice in the mass in which we go to offer ourselves with Christ on the cross. On the attitude of, “Well, I don’t get much out of mass”—that is absolutely contradictory. It is blasphemous. To say mass exists so that I can have an experience. It does NOT. It exists for the honor of God. And so this process of redefinition really picked up speed in the 60s and the 70s that love was somehow this good feeling we have for one another, instead of sacrificial love. And people were denied, by the culture, the opportunity to learn to be like Christ because, you see, Christ is the sacrifice of sacrifices. Well, how do you learn sacrifice? Most people in their life learn sacrifice in their marriage and the raising of children, because let me tell you, if you have seven kids, you’re sacrificing. That the sexual act that is between a husband and wife is open to life is a sacrificial act! Sex was meant to be sacrificial! “What?” Yes! When a woman in times past, gave herself to a man, she seriously risked death. Now we have antibiotics, and I am not suggesting that antibiotics are not Christian—no. No woman should have to risk dying in child birth, praise God that things are better. But the sexual act that is open to life, between husband and wife, always takes the risk that this is going to make our life more difficult and it is worth it because we care for each other. A husband is maybe going to have to work extra hours. A wife is maybe going to have to work extra hours and cook and clean more, the way we do it now. The sexual act was sacrificial. IT WAS NOT RECREATIONAL. And artificial birth control made sex recreational. This is a disaster because it redefined the nature of love. Love is the pleasure we take with each other—no, it is not. Love is the sacrifice that, for dearness sake, we offer for one another. We risk sacrifice, we risk our lives. We do not conceive of the sexual union to be sacrificial. We conceive it to be some sort of narcissism and we call it “love.” And the demonic nature of this is that you will not have any sacrificial consequences—you can abort the child, or you can have a relationship with someone of the same sex or someone who is not going to conceive, because sex should never make your life more difficult. That’s nonsense. The danger of this is… to go to Heaven, you need to be conformed to the image of Christ. What is the image of Christ? Well we read in Galatians in the 5th chapter that the fruits of the Spirit are these: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. Those are the fruits of the Holy Spirit. They are the characteristics of Christ. His ultimate personality trait was obedience and it was demonstrated on the cross. The cross sums up the image of God who is Jesus Christ, Son of God, Son of Mary. That’s our religion. That’s the definition of God. Jesus on the cross is the definition of God. And so we have taken it on ourselves to redefine God and this is idolatry. And idolatrous societies do not survive very long. It’s hard to conceive of something more horrible than the slaughter of millions of children in abortion, but the redefinition of God which allows us to make that slaughter possible is even worse. It is idolatry. And we are an idolatrous society because we take it on ourselves to define God by defining sexual relationships in a way that is unnatural and sterile.

Powerful stuff, huh? Even before I heard this, I realized that we only have one word for "love" in English, which is supposed to include everything. In having just this one word, we completely lose meaning. We say, "I love you" to a spouse on our wedding day, or to a parent sick in the hospital. We hear a song on the radio and say, "I love this song!" We "love" certain foods, movies, clothes, ideas, etc etc etc. The real meaning, and all the feelings that come with the word "love" are lost on us because we only have the one word.  How cheap and unfair it is that we can say to a relative or a friend, "I love you," when we also can look at a pair of shoes or a meal and say the exact same thing. Just think about it.

I am changing the way I think about love, especially when it comes to marriage. My husband is not just someone I married for romantic reasons or because he gives me butterflies or because it was easy or convenient. I married him because it was my vocation, and through him, I can carry out God's will. We sanctify each other and someday, will have children and complete our vocation. Marriage isn't easy, and sometimes it's just plain not fun. But when you view your marriage as a vocation, living in total self-giving and sacrificial love for another person, it changes your life.

I think we all have grown up with the idea that love is some sort of happy feeling. Maybe you think of little red hearts, or flowers, or smiley faces, or wide open fields and sunshine. These are all fine and well, but what happens when all those feelings disappear? Does it mean that the love ended, or was it "love" to begin with? It's probably a fair explanation of why we have such a high divorce rate, or even so many couples who live together unmarried. These relationships start on, and are built on, those "happy, fuzzy" feelings and then we call it love. And yes, contraception has a huge hand in this because its purpose is for selfish pleasure, instead of sacrifice. The foundations of these relationships are good feelings, convenience, and "what my partner can do for me" instead of "what I can do for my partner." It's all about how the other person makes ME feel. The moment that those good feelings go away, the relationship is basically over, because the foundation has been wiped out. As soon as the other person stops making me feel happy, as soon as they make things difficult for me, then all of a sudden, we don't "love" them anymore. Feelings and pleasure are replaceable. Certainly other people can make us happy or can feed our bodily impulses, but people are not replaceable. Just look around at what this selfish kind of "love" has done for us. It's truly saddening.

Love is in the will. It is not a feeling that we personally get from other people, but what we do for others. So what are we to do now? Well, for some (or a lot) of us, this should just be something we think about at first. Just take note of how often you say the word "love," what you are talking about (as in, persons or things), and how you mean it. Then think about our close relationships. How do we treat those we love? How does our "love" for them compare to other people that we love? For example, do we treat our parents differently than we treat a boyfriend or girlfriend? Do we treat a sibling differently than a friend? Why is that? How do we feel about a person when they have hurt us? Do we have selfless, unconditional love? Or is it conditional--does it change with our feelings? We must be aware of these things if we are in the least bit interested in changing and improving ourselves and those around us.

I give you a new commandment:

love one another. As I have loved you, so you also should love one another.

 - or -

I give you a new commandment:

sacrifice for one another. As I have sacrificed for you, so you also should sacrifice for one another.

John 13:34