The Limits of Love: Semantics

The word “love” gets thrown around a lot.  It’s a handy word to have in your vocabulary because it can mean so many different things.  But for that reason it is also hard to know what a person means when they say they love something or someone.  The Greeks resolved this problem by having several different words for the phenomenon that we simply call love.  Friendship and family love were described by the words storge or philia.  Romantic love was described by the word eros.  Most of what gets sung about or written into movie scripts is eros.  It’s a kind of love that keeps us at the center of the world.  It loves another because of how they make us feel or what they do for us.  It is a self-serving love.  But that doesn’t mean it’s bad.  It’s how nearly every romance begins.  We would never fall in love without eros.

When the New Testament of the Bible talks about love, it is very precise.  The word is agape.  This kind of love passionately seeks the good of others.  Agape longs for the best for another.  Agape practically forgets about itself.  This kind of love originates with God.  It’s too bad that we can’t have a series of different words to describe what we mean more precisely when we talk about love.  Human language will always be limited in that way.  But the love of God knows no limits.