Love can be thought of as a commitment of the will to the true good of another.[1] Love is identified conventionally with the “feminine,” which would not have recommended it to Nietzsche or to Aristotle. Of the Seven Virtues—courage, temperance, justice, prudence, faith, hope, and love—Courage is I repeat stereotypically male, Love stereotypically female. “Love is the general name of the quality of attachment,” said Iris Murdoch, something which sounds to a man suspiciously cloying.[2] “The disdain for . . . words like ‘love’ and ‘giving,’” the literary critic Jane Tompkins notes, “is part of the police action that [male] academic intellectuals wage ceaselessly against feeling, against women, against what is personal.”[3]
The gendering of the virtues makes even Christian males a little nervous. It has troubled Christian ethics since the beginning. As Basil Willey once wrote, “There has always, perhaps, been a latent contradiction between our official lip service to the Christian standard in all its rigor, and the pagan ideal of `the gentleman’ which is what we [men] have really admired and sought to practice.”[4] The French Jansenist Pierre Nicole wrote in 1671, “There are an infinity of small things which are extremely necessary for us to live, and can be given for free; and which cannot be traded so that they can be purchased only by love.”[5] He sounds like a modern male economist, thinking of love as an exchange. And said so: “human civility . . . is only a sort of commerce of self-love, in which one endeavors to arouse the love of others by displaying some affection towards them.”
A large group of philosophically savvy women, such as Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Judith Shklar, Iris Murdoch, Carol Gilligan, Nel Noddings, Mary Midgley, Martha Nussbaum, Sissela Bok, Amélie Rorty, Susan Wolf, Nancy Chodorow, Joan Tronto, Virginia Held, Annette Baier, and Rosalind Hursthouse, have since about 1958 turned a woman’s eye on ethical philosophy. They have noted that love is not self-love. Ethical theory had been for a long time, oddly, a guy thing. I suppose that’s an entailment of “theory” in general having been for a long time a guy thing. Women from Sappho to Virginia Woolf did their ethical thinking in poems and stories, not in philosophy.
This program of Aristotle in modern dress, I say, has been strikingly feminine. Its leaders have been women, though as Kathryn Morgan observed none of them is a “star” in the style of John Rawls or Robert Nozick. “The community of feminist theoreticians is calling into question the very model of the individual autonomous self presupposed by a star-centered male-dominated tradition. . . . We experience it as common labor, a common task.”[6] Let’s get this kitchen cleaned up. No quarterbacks. Speak of thee, not me: “tuistically,” from Latin tua, thy.
The theology and ethics and science of Love is not that of bodice-ripping romance novels. It is hard nowadays to get beyond the Romantic idea of Love, according to which one “falls” into it with no ethical restraint. Stendhal, for example, wrote a long treatise on the subject in 1822, De l’amour, in which love other than an adolescent version of eros is neglected. Alice Monroe calls eros “a tingling contentment in the presence of the other person,” Nick Hornby, “the mad hunger for someone you don’t know very well.”[7]
Such “love” is, as C. S. Lewis put it, one of God’s little jokes, “that a passion so soaring, apparently transcendent, as Eros, should thus be linked in incongruous symbiosis with a bodily appetite. . . . [W]e are composite creatures, rational animals, akin on one side to the angels, on the other to tom-cats.”[8] To give free rein to the tom-cat in us would hardly be a virtue. It would be the vice of lust, a “love” unbalanced by other virtues, a yielding to passion.
Yet eros is not an ethical zero. As Lewis noted it can touch the transcendent. The Song of Songs is erotic yet religious, loving yet Loving. The version of eros that Jane Austen’s novels study, for example, is hardly animalistic. It is ethical, that is, it is concerned with the education of the will to the end of good character, and indeed is precisely about coming to know someone’s character.
Mr. Knightley (note the name) rebukes Emma for her making merry of poor Miss Bates. Emma is instantly ashamed, and at length in love. As John Casey puts it, “Emma’s love for Mr. Knightley has something to do with her sense of his moral rightness and authority.”[9] The result is a marriage of true ethical minds, not mere bodies locked. The same can be seen in homosexual unions, the Boston marriage for example of Stein and Toklas, or of Socrates and Charmides. The special, deep friendship between lovers, a hunger that evolves into admiration, is not sinful.
* * * *
The folk anthropology of “the traditional marriage” makes we moderns feel superior by imagining an alien Other. Modern romantic marriage is widely imagined to have superseded supposedly loveless arranged marriages in “traditional” societies—though, by the way, if you speak to women with arranged marriages they will often give you a different opinion.
The lovelessness of traditional society appears anyway to be a myth. Loving marriage and economically independent women was widespread for example in Europe. Aquinas in the 13th century attacked polygamy precisely because it makes the wife into a slave, a mere possession.[10] Aquinas classifies conjugal love as superior even to the manly friendship so much admired in his tradition, the tradition of Cicero especially.[11] Jews had a little before Aquinas outlawed polygamy on similar grounds. The historical anthropologist Alan Macfarlane finds “companionate marriage” in English society “as far back as we can conveniently go” in English history, expressed repeatedly as the union of souls reminiscent of Plato’s metaphor in the Symposium. Macfarlane quotes a “Wife’s Lament” translated from Old English as “we have vowed/ Full many a time that naught should come between us/ But death alone, and nothing else at all.”[12]
In short, love and marriage/ Going together like a horse and carriage is not a modern bourgeois invention, as for example Marx and especially Engels believed. In Macfarlane’s account the English have always been in this sense bourgeois. Macfarlane finds agreement on the point from a surprising quarter, again from E. P. Thompson, who wrote in 1965 of a “bourgeois arch, which stretches [in England] from the twelfth century to our own time.” “The central ideology” of English society, writes Macfarlane, has always been “a [nuclear] family pattern [focused on husband and wife, not children or ancestors or clan] and individualistic philosophy,” to achieve the “ends . . . [of] equality of the sexes, physical comfort rather than misery, and responsibility for one’s own decisions.” [13] Bourgeois virtues.
One would expect the same from the Dutch, who in the 11th and 12th centuries were pioneers in an empty, tide-flooded swamp, to be taken for cultivation by busy dike-building, unlike the Muslim gardens of Iberia to be taken by heroic reconquista. Wives on a non-military frontier are too useful to devalue, which may perhaps explain the autonomy of Dutch women compared with the Spanish women of the 17th century or even the French.
The alleged novelty of modern love run parallel in recent scholarship to that of an alleged break in the 16th and 17th centuries in European conceptions of childhood, first claimed in 1960 by the French historian Philippe Ariès, and reaffirmed by Edward Shorter for the American case and Lawrence Stone for the English. The bourgeois family against which the young men of the 1960s were rebelling was seen, as Eamon Duffy described it in a recent review, as “oppressive; it de-eroticized children and women; it turned wives into baby machines, children into subordinate versions of their parents.”[14] But the 1960’s anti-bourgeois interpretation of the old and new family appears now, like the lovelessness of traditional marriage, to have been mistaken. “As far back as we can tell,” writes Linda Pollock (note the similarity to MacFarlane’s words), “most parents loved their children, grieved at their deaths and conscientiously attended to the task of child-rearing.”[15] It is continuous, even one might speculate hard-wired. Thus in England the Pearl poet of the late 14th century longed for his dead daughter, though as in The Song of Songs the longing is refigured as Love for God.
Love’s expressions vary by culture and era, that is, but are not lacking anywhere. Parents love children, spouses love one another. The Puritan settler in Massachusetts, Anne Bradstreet, writes in 1656 of the loss to migration of her children, imagined as birds (”Four cocks there were, and hens the rest”). She comforts herself with her utility in their utility: “Farewell my birds, farewell adieu,/ I happy am, if well with you.” [16] One can try to read her as utilitarian or conventional in expression, but it seems a misreading. Likewise for conjugal love. Puritans were in fact well known for insisting on a loving, unslavish relation between husband and wide. “To My Dear and Loving Husband” expresses more than Puritan patriarchy:
If ever two were one, then surely we.
If ever man were loved by wife, then thee;
If ever wife was happy in a man,
Compare with me, ye women, if you can.[17]
Love rules.
* * * *
Love can also be called a “peasant” virtue, the modern label being “proletarian.” Courage is claimed to be above all the virtue of the aristocrat. As Prudence is of the bourgeois. Love, Courage, and Prudence. When she witnessed a religious procession one night in the late 1930s in a Portuguese fishing village it was suddenly plain to Simone Weil, a French secular Jew on her way to Christianity, that “Christianity is pre-eminently the religion of slaves, that slaves cannot help belonging to it, and I among others.”[18] Love—even in its social forms as an abstract Solidarity—is pacific, Christian, and yielding. It is Nietzsche’s “slave morality,” subordinate to the Greek and aristocratic virtues he admired. So did Aristotle admire them, and disdain any Love but a friendship among men. Alasdair MacIntyre notes that “Aristotle would certainly not have admired Jesus Christ and he would have been horrified by St. Paul,” with all their embarrassing talk of Love.[19] The pagans were not lovelorn, at least not in their philosophies.
The feminine side of the stripped-down, two-virtue, Love-or-Courage way people speak of exercising a will to do good might, I say, also be called “Christian.” I mean the word “Christian” here as evocative, not exclusive. I do not mean to praise Christianity or attack non-Christians. I am well aware that Christendom has not always been a feast of love, as Moslems and Albigensians, Jews and Hussites know. A Buddhist nun I know has shown me centered virtues similar to those of the best of the Christian monks. And I’ve seen the virtue of love in many a loving atheist and anticlerical. Nor am I, though a Christian—a progressive Episcopalian, if you care, the quasi-Quaker branch of the Frozen Chosen—willing to claim that Christianity brought new ethics into the world. Yet some of the virtues have acquired a spin in the talk of literal Christians, carrying over into the minds and hearts of non-believers in the bourgeois West, loading faith with doubt.[20] Bear with me, then, exercising if you please a Christian charity, when I use the loaded word.
In the West before Christianity the most admired virtues, the “pagan virtues,” were manful and military, not feminine and loving. In Plato’s opinion, elaborated by other pagans and by Jews and Christians, with parallels in Chinese and other traditions, they were four, named by St. Ambrose in the 4th century AD the “cardinal” virtues: first physical and other varieties of that Courage; then Temperance, Justice, and Prudence.[21] Thus the Wisdom of Solomon (8: 7) “teaches self-control [viz., temperance] and prudence,/ justice and courage;/ nothing in life is more profitable for men than these.” And 4th Maccabees, an instance as Luke Timothy Johnson has put it, of “Jews thinking like Greeks,” reinterprets Jewish law as expressions of a natural law of prudence, justice, courage, and temperance (for example 1:2-4, 18).[22] Cardinal means “hinge-like” or by extension the imagined corners on which the earth turns. So the four virtues made the pagan world go ‘round, absent Christian or romantic Love
The so-called Christian virtues, what St. Thomas Aquinas and his tradition called the “theological” virtues, are three. Thus St. Paul: “And now abideth faith, hope, and charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity,” agape, spiritual love, “the divine friendship of graced human beings.”[23] St. Paul was already accustomed before he wrote 1 Corinthians to bundle them, for example 1 Thess. 1:3, 5:8, as perhaps were still earlier Christians. The word “charity” is the King James Bible’s attempt, and that of some translations in other languages, such as that of Louis Segond’s La Sainte Bible of 1910, to distinguish a higher Love from lower loves. “Charity” or “ charité“ translates Greek agape, spiritual love, distinguishing it from eros, physical love, or philia, friendship.
Most people read 1 Corinthians 13 as recommending love for your husband or your girlfriend, and for this purpose the passage appears on many Hallmark cards. That’s not what St. Paul had in mind. Modern European languages—to the confusion of Romantics in love with love—use the same word “love” for both agape and eros. Until the gender anxieties of recent modernity interfered with the usage, indeed, French and English and Italian and German used it also for philia, friendship of men for men and women for women. That is, “love” signified all four—God’s love for us, our love for God, sexualized love between humans, and non-sexualized love between humans. Amour, for example, seems to have about the same range of meaning in French as “love” has in English.
In Latin on the other hand amor/ cāritas/ amicitia parallels the Greek distinctions eros/ agape/ philia. Cāritas at Rome was from cārus, “dear,” as in “expensive” or “beloved,” and signified “esteem” or “high valuation,” what C. S. Lewis called “appreciation love,” as against amor, desire.[24] But modern languages blur the distinctions in their word “love.” In French too the attempt to make charité into the word for agape did not take, as “charity” for this purpose did not in English. Later revisions of Segond’s bible gave in and used amour, as in modern English translations: “love,” with its vulgar ambiguities.
Love, charity, cāritas, agape is the greatest virtue of the three theological virtues in Christianity because it is the essence of the Christian God, so unlike His predecessors, at any rate in His opinion. Hope and faith have no purpose in a god, foresighted and immortal. Only beings who can die need those virtues. And the Christian God does not “need” agape. By grace He gives it. No one would have accused Zeus of loving humans, except on occasion in a cheaply erotic sense. (The female gods like Athena seem to take a more motherly and less sexually dominating approach to their favored humans.) Yahweh demanded sacrifice of others’ sons, Abraham’s for example, but revealed no loving plans for sacrificing His own, except in tendentious readings by Christians of what they call the Old Testament. Yet the Christian God so loved the world, said John the Evangelist, that His only begotten Son was ordained from the beginning of time to suffer, really suffer a human death, without sure knowledge of his Godness. Norman Mailer, of all people, has written a gripping novel on this theme, The Gospel According to the Son (1997), turning on Jesus’ doubt, quoting the 22nd psalm: “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”
The Christian or theological part of Love can be brought down to earth, but keeps a whiff of the transcendent. Love is not merely the earthly itch of lust, eros. The Romantic poets Loved Nature. Giacomo Leopardi in 1819 begins his most famous poem with, “Always dear to me was that lonely hill.” He adopts in this as in many other cases the high Romantic arrangement Nature-Reflection-Nature.
William Wordsworth, on the other hand, as the critic Geoffrey Hartman observed, knew at the beginning of “Tintern Abbey” (1798) one thing only, “the affection he bears to nature for its own sake.”[25] Nature is not to be used as an input into a utility function, as the modern economist would wish. Nor even is Nature to be used in moral illustration, as poets before and after Wordsworth did so freely—Shakespeare’s sonnets or Housman’s lyrics for instance. Matthew Arnold begins “Dover Beach” (1851) with the cliffs of England glimmering and vast, turns then to reflections about the Sea of Faith, and ends with a battlefield, in pointed disruption of the tranquil bay and the sweet night air with which the poem begins. The traditions of the pastoral is disrupted for intellectual use.
But Wordsworth’s Nature in Tintern Abbey, I say, is not to be used at all. It is simply a thing to be loved, amandum, sheerly. Note the parallel with love of God. “These waters . . ./ With a soft inland murmur. . ./ a wild secluded scene” do not raise the poet’s blood pressure or bring into his mind the turbid ebb and flow of human misery. They merely “impress/ Thoughts of more deep seclusion; and connect/ The landscape with the quiet of the sky.” Nothing follows. It is pure appreciation-love, earthly agape.
As the theologian David Klemm puts it, “material grace” is the experience in the world that “restores me to my own being” by being the presence of God.[26] “I, so long/ A worshipper of Nature, hither came/ Unwearied in that service.” “Worshipper,” not “enjoyer” or “user” or “national-park customer.” Hartman writes, “This dialectic of love makes up his entire understanding. . . . Wordsworth’s understanding is characterized by the general absence of the will to obtain relational knowledge.”[27] No wonder that early Wordsworth was Mill’s crutch when his Utilitarian life began to feel crippled.[28]
A modern Green Party member can give a utilitarian, consequential, instrumental, scientifically knowledgeable reply to an inquiry into why she loves Nature. She can claim for example that the snail darter has a use as, so to speak, a canary in the world’s coal mine, presaging a disaster that even a non-lover of Nature would want to avoid. But had the snail darter no earthly use the environmentalist would nonetheless go on loving it. You might as well ask why your mother loves you. She just does. Such love has no outside use. It is a sacrifice, a making sacred.
The archangel Raphael admonishes Adam in his love for Eve not to make her his god. Milton combines the Aristotelian doctrine of the mean with Augustine’s and the neoplatonists’ doctrine of human love as that spark off a transcendent flint. Raphael speaks:
In loving thou dost well, in passion not,
Wherein true love consists not; love refines
The thoughts, and heart enlarges, hath his seat
In reason, and is judicious, is the scale
By which to heavenly love [viz., agape] thou mayest ascend,
Not sunk in carnal pleasure, for which cause
Among the beasts no mate for thee was found.[29]
Note the other, pagan virtues preventing the corruption of love into lust: prudence (“reason”); justice (“judicious”); and temperance (“not sunk in carnal pleasure”). And note the characteristically Miltonic ambiguity in the line-ending “scale.” The reader is surprised, led from “scale” as temperance and justice to “scale” (scalae) as a staircase ascending to divine love.
Adam should see Eve as a spark of the divine, as one sees it in Vermeer’s Woman in Blue Reading a Letter, or in Newton’s Principia, or in Paradise Lost. The priest, novelist, and sociologist Andrew Greeley wrote, in line with Aquinian and Miltonian theology, and against Pauline, Augustinian, Cartesian, Spinozan, and Kantian theology stressing the nastiness of eros, that “God lurks in aroused human love and reveals Himself to us through it.”[30]
[1] For example, by Budziszewski, “Escape from Nihilism,” n. d.
[2] Murdoch, “Sovereignty of Good,” 1967, p. 103.
[3] Tompkins, “Me and My Shadow,” 1987 (2001), p. 2143.
[4] Willey, English Moralists, 1964, p. 107f.
[5] Essais de morale (1671), in Clark, ed., Commerce, Culture, 2003, pp. 57, 59.
[6] Morgan quoted in Held, Feminist Morality, 1993, p. 48f.
[7] Hornby, How to Be Good, 2001, p. 200; Munro, “Nettles” in Munro, Hateship, 2003.
[8] Lewis, Four Loves, 1960, p. 142.
[9] Casey, Pagan Virtues, 1990, p. 163.
[10] Aquinas, Summa contra gentiles, c. 1259-1264, III, Part III, Chp. 124, “That Marriage ought to be between one Man and one Woman.”
[11] Plato had applied it of course to both heterosexual and homosexual unions. The Wife of Bath had at church door husbands five, but recent scholarship has found that homosexual unions were routinely honored in the Middle Ages and Renaissance at the same place (Boswell 1994, pp. 191, 264. 267, 280-81).
[12] Macfarlane, Riddle of the Modern, pp. 176, 183, 189.
[13] Macfarlane, Riddle of the Modern, pp. 199, 175 (quoting Steele), 336 (quoting Thompson), 343.
[14] Duffy, “ Cradle Will Rock,” 2002, p. 61.
[15] Quoted in Duffy, “ Cradle Will Rock,” 2002, p. 62.
[16] Bradstreet, Works, 1678, pp. 232, 234.
[17] Bradstreet, Works, 1678, p. 225.
[18] Quoted in Cole, Simone Weil, 2001, p. 116.
[19] MacIntyre, After Virtue, p. 172.
[20] Lewis, “On Ethics” c. 1941-42, pp. 68, 76.
[21] Plato, Republic, IV, Stephanus, 442b-d, p. 1073f.
[22] Johnson, 2002, The Greco-Roman Moralists.
[23] Aquinas, as understood by Schockenhoff, “Virtue of Charity,” 2002, p. 248.
[24] The English word “care,” by the way, is Germanic, as in Old English caru, cearu, “sorrow,” from Indo-European *gar-, “to cry out,” whence via Latin garrīre > “garrulous.” The Latin cousin is cūra. “Care” is not, as you would think, from the Latin cārus (whence “charity,” “caress,” cherish”), which is instead from IE *kā, “to desire,” whence also English “whore,” Sanskrit kamasutra. Amor seems to originate in amma = “mama,” in babbling.
[25] Hartman, Unmediated Vision, 1954, p. 4, italics supplied.
[26] Klemm, “Material Grace,” 2004, p. 235.
[27] Hartman, Unmediated Vision, 1954, pp. 4-5.
[28] As A. N. Wilson observes in God’s Funeral, 1999, p. 45.
[29] Milton, Paradise Lost, 1667, VIII, lines 588-94.
[30] Greeley, The Catholic Imagination, 2000, p. 7; and Chp. Two, “Sacred Desire.” Annette Baier argues that Kant, Descartes, and the rest see humans as despicable and love for them as impossible (Baier 1994, “Ethics,” pp. 36, 38).
The text above is an excerpt from The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce, the first volume of Deirdre McCloskey’s trilogy on the ethical and historical origins of modern prosperity.
That is some very fine prose, Dierdre...hardly a surprise, of course.