Harsh stuff. But since the L-word can be employed in so many ambiguous and manipulative ways, suspicious Mildred Bangs Wynkoop may have had a point.

Almost everybody talks of love, but few define it. It often seems to mean whatever anyone wants, covering everything from a one-night flirtation to dying for justice for an enslaved people.

Some people love sushi, shoes and sports. Others love the “Almighty.” One loves sex. Another loves the mentally disabled. Many say they love their mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers and partners.

The world’s Christians will be focusing on love on the fourth Sunday of Advent. That’s when they will light the fourth candle of Advent: the candle of love. Many do so believing God is love.

The ADVENT series: 

“Advent 1: Amid darkness, Hope is deeper than optimism”

“Advent 2: Peace, with an edge”

“Advent 3: Easier to sing of Joy than define it”

But what, in all seriousness, is this emotion, this virtue, this state of being called love? It’s a question that, for much of the last few centuries, has been largely ignored by anyone with clout.

EFFORTS TO STUDY LOVE RIDICULED

Scholarly efforts to scientifically study love in the 20th century were ridiculed by the Western elite. The powers that be thought it smarter to funnel research dollars into better household products and more destructive weapons.

Of course, the military-industrial complex was not alone in opposing exploration of love. Poets, musicians and artists also tend to believe it’s wise to not get too precise about it.

Michelangelo's Pieta, Rome

“Those who write best about love devote very little space to considering what love is,” wrote Jules Toner, author of the classic book The Experience of Love.

Still, since many don’t consider something real until scientists say it is, it seems reassuring to know research scholars in the past decade have begun digging into love.

They’re getting help from grants from foundations set up by spiritually open-minded benefactors, such as Americans John Templeton and John Fetzer.

One of those researchers, Thomas Jay Oord of Northwest Nazarene University, takes a concerted stab at describing the emotion in his far-reaching book, Defining Love: A Philosophical, Scientific and Theological Engagement.

After prudent deliberation, Oord offers this definition: “To love is to act intentionally, in sympathetic response to others (including God), to promote overall well-being.”

Which is a pretty decent definition, even though it’s not quite Shakespeare. Nor Jesus, who is said to have embodied the love of God.

With apologies to the poets and artists of love, we will see how Oord’s rather dry definition of love, as life-sharing mutuality, is evocative – for both everyday and metaphysical situations.

For starters, Oord points to the work of Stephen Post, a professor of bioethics, who received a grant to open the Institute for Research on Unlimited Love.

Based on social and medical science, the author of Why Good Things Happen to Good People has discovered sympathetic love can lead to positive physical and mental health.

“Post identifies ten ways that the gift of love promotes well-being: ” writes Oord, “Celebration, generativity, forgiveness, courage, humour, respect, compassion, loyalty, listening and creativity.”

MOVING BEYOND SCIENCE

Spiritually inclined people have long sought to go farther. They wonder whether love is restricted to human, or even mammalian, relationships.

Many have asked: Is it possible to understand the sacred by understanding love?

John Haught, the author of God and the New Atheism: A Critical Response to Dawkins, Harris and Hitchens, argues that love is, indeed, the answer – to the ideological grenades being lobbed by today’s celebrity atheists.

Haught, of Georgetown University, says it is almost impossible to scientifically, objectively, measure whether love, or divinity, is real. To be understood, both seem to require a lens other than science.

Human love needs to be encountered and felt through a “stance of vulnerability,” Haught writes. So, he adds, must art, the beauty of nature and the holy.

“In our everyday existence the love of another person matters more to us than almost anything else, but gathering the ‘evidence’ for that love requires a leap of faith on our part, a wager that renders us vulnerable to their special kind of presence,” he writes. “Would it be otherwise in any conceivable encounter of human persons with an infinite love?”

Still, Haught’s conviction that realities such as love cannot be “proved” in a laboratory do not yet prevail among the academic establishment.

As a result, it is not at all satisfying when some scientists, such as evolutionary biologists, act as if they have been able to reduce the wonders of love to what they believe is a material thing – such as the hormone oxytocin.

Psychology has often been just as simplistic about love. The founder of psychotherapy, Sigmund Freud, taught that love was nothing more than “aim-inhibited sex,” or sexual frustration.

It has taken decades for most psychologists to get over Freud’s false start. Some, fortunately, have recently been following the lead of psychiatrists such as Britain’s John Bowlby, who developed “attachment” theory.

Bowlby’s followers have shown how mammalian “love” is characterized by deep bonding, which includes affection, unconditional attachment, forgiveness, positive regard, altruism and gratitude.

PASSIONATE LOVE, SYMBOLIZED BY WINE

During much of the past 100 years or more, science and psychology could have benefited from looking to religion and philosophy for a richer understanding of love.

Love is paramount in the Hebrew Bible (which Christians call the Old Testament). Abraham Joshua Heschel, a noted American philosopher and rabbi, describes how the Jewish prophets experienced both divine and human love as passionate (as well as compassionate, like a “mother’s tenderness”).

As with the love experienced in a rich marriage, Heschel says God’s love in the Bible is characterized by its “sublimity” and “nobility.”

At the same time ancient Jews were trying to figure out love in the Axial Age, five centuries before Jesus was born, so were the philosophical, myth-making Greeks.

The Greeks discerned at least three major kinds of love.

One is eros, or sexually energized love.

Another is philia, or the love between friends.

The third is agape, which is akin to compassion and altruism.

The Christian church picked up on these Greek and Jewish ideas of love, but ended up sending out contradictory messages. Indeed, one of the church’s most influential theologians may have badly missed the mark.

In the 13th century, philosopher Thomas Aquinas seized on the Greek teaching that the Almighty God was “impassive,” or unfeeling, to conclude that the source of all reality “loves without passion.” Aquinas compared God to a well-intentioned father who has no real feeling for his children.

In the 20th century, however, Christian theologians inspired by the original Hebrew teachings, Jesus’s insights and process philosophy have been among those trying to put the passion back into God’s love.

They say divine love, like human love, has many elements – including eros, which could also be called the aim toward enjoyment.

Authentic love, they say, is not controlling, but persuasive and open-ended. It is a love that is creative, which takes risk.

Perhaps most of all, these new theologians, such as Oord, say love is always sympathetic.

Instead of being coldly impassive, these theologians claim real love passionately feels the feelings of others, the highs and lows, the sorrows and joys.

What about the love of Jesus Christ, the birth of whom Christians await in eager anticipation through the four Sundays of Advent, including this Sunday devoted to love?

Christian thinkers throughout the ages have often emphasized that Jesus’s main form of love, like that of God’s, is compassion.

Wine symbolizes love in its intoxicating forms

But there are streams within Christianity – as well as within Judaism and Islam – that highlight a form of love that, even while it includes compassion, goes further.

In their search for the ideal metaphor for love, mystics within all three Western religious traditions have often used the symbol of wine.

Many are aware Jesus drank wine while attending communal dinners and weddings. They believe he was not at all averse to the enjoyment that wine signifies.

If God is love, then wine to such mystics exemplifies holy love in its many deep and intoxicating forms – as eros, as friendship, as tenderness for all, especially those who are suffering.

Indeed, there are many mystics – from Sufism’s Hafiz to Christianity’s Hildegard of Bingen – who have urged the faithful to go through each day as if they were head-over-heels in love.

DEEP CONNECTIONS

Love has much in common with the other three feelings and virtues that are extolled during Advent: hope, peace and joy.

As with love, humans can only actualize hope, peace and joy by being deeply connected – with other women and men, with animals, with the Earth, with the sacred.

Hope, signified in the first candle of Advent, arises from working for a better future for everyone, even in the dark times symbolized by winter’s dormancy, which can often appear bleak. Hope builds on the faith there is something in the universe helping us reach a better place.

Peace, the second candle of Advent, is also beyond human control, coming as a gift. More than the ending of violence, true peace is an unverbalized feeling of serenity, even in the midst of inevitable tragedy. It lures individuals to transcend themselves.

Joy is a strong emotion. It frightens many. But like hope and peace, joy only comes when we are able to acknowledge suffering. Similar to music, joy seizes us only when we open our hearts.

What of love?

The apostle Paul famously held up the centrality of love, hope and trust, but passionately emphasized that “the greatest of these is love.”

Shakespeare, the bard of love

Despite the complexities of love, few in the secular West today are ready to contradict Paul, the man who arguably did the most to spread the wisdom of Jesus to the world.

Likewise, William Shakespeare, the English-speaking world’s most celebrated bard, was almost obsessed with love, which comes in so many forms – romantic, fraternal, sacrificial, communal and holy.

Why is God so often equated with love? It is no simple question.

But Shakespeare knew in his heart what many have tried to express for millennia: Love appears to be a self-replenishing spiritual force, beyond human understanding.

As Romeo exclaims to Juliet in one of history’s most famous love stories:

“My bounty is as boundless as the sea, my love as deep, the more I give to thee, the more I have. For both are infinite.”

Twitter:@douglastodd

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