Three Aspects of Love and SK on Neighbor Love

Perhaps we can see what SK is up to by considering what he says about commanded love and what I think it the best account of the nature of love in general. 

Nature of Love: Pulling together insights from Scripture, Augustine, Aquinas, and SK, contemporary philosopher (and mathematician!) Alexander Pruss argues that the following is the most accurate account of the nature of love in general:

Love involves appreciation, benevolence, and striving for union. Briefly, appreciation is grasping the value of the object of one's love. Benevolence is willing THE good for the object of one's love. Striving for union is seeking unity with the object of one's in various ways that are appropriate to the type of love. 

I think the above is an acocunt of love that is both consistent with God's Word and helps illimunate it in various ways. 

In erotic love and friendship what gets appreciated, the good that one wills for the beloved, and the union one seeks with the beloved is different from what one appreciates in the neighbor, the good that one wills for the neighbor and the union one strives for with the neighbor. When I love my neighbor as myself, that is when I love every human as though they are me, when I love myself as I love my neighbor, I am appreciated their humanity, their image-bearing nature. The good that is sought is the ultimate good, because it is the good of all who are made in God’s image. It is the same good for each and every human, namely union with God. The union that I strive for with my neighbor is the exact same union I strive for with everyone. I want to be united with neighbor as he or she is most fundamentally. I strive to be united with them because they are human, because they bear the imprint of God Himself. You are, at the most fundamental level, a human being, an image-bearer of God. I am, at the most fundamental level a human being, an image bearer of God. Just about every feature of you and of myself can be changed and we can still exist as humans as image-bearers. But we cannot cease to be human, we cannot cease to bear the image of God and continue to exist. In the same way, we can cease to have erotic love relationships, we can cease to have friendship love relationships, and still love. But we cannot cease to have neighbor love and still have erotic love relationships, or still have friendship love relationships. 

If erotic love and friendship love are not grounded in, or not built upon neighbor love, then what one loves most fundamentally is not the humanity, is not the image of God, but some other feature of the person. The image of God is placed in the background and something else is put in the foreground. But that something else is temporal and changeable. So, the love is temporal and changeable. 

In idolatry we transfer the essential features of God to something else and worship that thing as if it were God. When erotic love and friendship love are most fundamental, we commit a kind of idolatry; we subtly ignore or move to the background in our love the persons most essential feature—their being an image of God—and replace it with something else. It’s almost like a murder. We subtly reject their humanity, their image of God nature and make something else more important to us. But that can only happen by making their humanity, their image of God nature less important to who they are. And that implies in a way a kind of killing of the beloved in our hearts. 

If what I love most fundamentally about you is your hair or your singing ability or your intelligence, if what I love most fundamentally about myself is my hair, my singing ability, or my intelligence, then I have failed to really love you and I have failed to really love me. My love of you and of myself sees you and sees myself not as a human, not as an image bearer most fundamentally. My love sees you, sees myself as something else most fundamentally. It gets you wrong, it gets me wrong. It distorts you, it distorts me. It fails to love you and fails to love me and instead loves something else. In reality, you are not the object of my love, I am not the object of my love. Something else that is not identical with you is the object of my love. For all intents and purposes, you are dead to my love, and I am dead to my love. My love has effectively removed you, and has effectively removed me from the picture. You might as well be dead, and I might as well be dead. We do not exist, when my love is simply erotic love or friendship love. The human, the image of God is not the object. Hence, neither you nor I am the object of my love. 

What SK is doing then is showing in various ways how this distortion distorts everything and how the fix--to be transformed by God--restores everything. 

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