Étienne Gilson on Love

“all human love is a love of God unaware of itself,” and thus “the question is not how to acquire the love of God, but rather how to make it fully of itself, of its object, and of the way it should bear itself toward this object.  In this sense we might say that the only difficulty is the education, or if you prefer it, re-education of love.”

The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy, 272-273.

We must understand in the first place that the very insatiability of human desire has a positive significance; it means this: that we are attracted by an infinite good.  Disgust with each particular good is but the reverse side of our thirst for the total good; weariness is but a presentiment of the infinite gulf that lies between the thing loved and the thing within love’s capacity. In this sense the problem of love, as it arises in a Christian philosophy, is a precise parallel to the problem of knowledge. By intelligence the soul is capable of truth; by love it is capable of the Good; its torment arises from the fact that it seeks it without knowing what it is that it seeks and, consequently, without knowing where to look for it. If we regard it from this standpoint the problem of love is either insoluble or already in fact resolved. On the plane of nature, it will never be solved, for the confused desire for the infinite will never be satisfied with creatures.

Spirit, 27-28

If the love of God were not already within us we should never succeed in putting it there for ourselves. But we know that it is, since we are all essentially created loves of God, and since all our acts, all our operations, are directed of their own spontaneity towards the being that is at once their end and source. The question, then, is not now how to acquire the love of God, but rather how to make it fully aware of itself, of its object, and of the way it should bear itself towards this object. In this sense we might say that the only difficulty is that of the education, or, if you prefer it, the re-education of love.

The first point to be cleared up, if the problem is to be solved, relates to the notion of love itself. Is it, after all, quite so certain that all disinterested love is impossible? Would it not be much nearer the truth to say, on the contrary, that if it is to be real love all love must be disinterested?

What hides from us the authentic sense of the word love is our habit of more or less mixing it up with desire pure and simple. Obviously, almost all our desires are interested; but to say that we love a thing when we desire it for our own sake is a faulty mode of expression; what we really love in such a case is precisely ourselves, and the other thing is simply desired for our own benefit. But to love is quite another thing: it is to will an object for itself, to rejoice in its beauty and goodness for themselves, and without respect to anything other than itself.

An attitude of this kind is, in itself, equally removed from the opposed extremes of utilitarianism and quietism. Love seeks no recompense: did it do so it would at once cease to be love. But neither should it be asked to renounce joy in the possession of the thing loved, for this joy is co- essential with love; love would no longer be love if it renounced its accompanying joy. Thus all true love is at once disinterested and rewarded, or let us rather say that it could not be rewarded unless it were disinterested, because disinterestedness is its very essence. Who seeks nothing in love save love receives the joy that it brings; who seeks in love something other than love, loses love and joy together.

Love, then, can exist only if it seeks no reward, but once it exists it is rewarded. Thus the idea of a love at once disinterested and rewarded contains no contradiction, quite the reverse.