On Reading Well by Karen Swallow Prior

Author:Karen Swallow Prior
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Christianity and Literature;REL013000;REL012000;LIT007000
ISBN: 9781493415465
Publisher: Baker Publishing Group
Published: 2018-06-18T16:00:00+00:00

TOO MANY LOVES

When it comes to love, we who communicate with the English language are at a great disadvantage. We have essentially one word to cover a wide variety of loves. We love our children; we love our dogs; we love mint-chip ice cream (at least, I do!); we love summer; and we love our spouses. All of these are, obviously, different kinds of loves. We have to rely on context in order to know that the word love when we talk about “making love” does not have the same meaning as when we say we “love” our grandmother. (Nor did it as far back as 1880, when Henry James used the phrase “making love” in Portrait of a Lady.)

Other languages have more words for love. The Indian language of Boro has a word for the kind of love that is temporal. Chinese has a word for the kind of love that is eternal. Danish has a word for the sense of falling in love. Hindi has a word for the realization of love that comes only from being separated. Portuguese has a word for the love felt for someone who was part of your past. Spanish has a word for the love of things, as opposed to people. And Greek has several words for the forms of love that define various human relationships.

It’s more than simply a vocabulary problem, however. In each of these usages above, the context makes the meaning clear. However, when a single word bears the weight of so many different meanings, the distinctions between those meanings are inevitably blurred. When Wayne Pacelle, president and CEO of the Humane Society of the United States, met NFL player Michael Vick for the first time while Vick was imprisoned for convictions related to his dog-fighting operation (which involved horrific abuse of the animals, along with other crimes), Vick insisted to Pacelle that he “loves” dogs. As that conversation unfolded, it became clear that Vick, sadly, was confusing pride in possession with love.8 He’s not entirely to blame. The meaning of the word love has become so broad that the incoherent slogan “Love is love is love is love is love . . . ,” proclaimed by the creator of a wildly successful Broadway show, has become the mantra of a generation.9

The Christian understanding of love offers a sharp contrast to this linguistic and moral fuzziness. The Greek of the New Testament uses a variety of words to refer to various kinds of love. In his book The Four Loves, C. S. Lewis famously explored four types of love, each associated with words from the Greek language: empathy (storge), friendship (philia), desire (eros), and the highest form of love (agape).

Godly love or agape is the kind of love meant in the First Epistle of John when it says that God is love (4:8). The King James Bible often translates agape as “charity” (e.g., 1 Cor. 13), which comes from a root word meaning “valued” or “dear.” Agape is sacrificial

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