The Nature of Love: Plato to Luther
Irving Singer
Abstract
This first volume of the author’s trilogy The Nature of Love begins by studying love as appraisal and bestowal as well as imagination and idealization, and then examines the contrasting views of Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Ovid, Lucretius, Saint Augustine, Saint Thomas Aquinas, and Martin Luther. After having described the nature of erotic idealization, the author analyzes the religious idealization in Judeo-Christian concepts of eros, philia, nomos, and agape. Medieval Catholicism sought to combine these four ideas of love in the “caritas synthesis”. Luther repudiated that attempt on the grou ... More
This first volume of the author’s trilogy The Nature of Love begins by studying love as appraisal and bestowal as well as imagination and idealization, and then examines the contrasting views of Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Ovid, Lucretius, Saint Augustine, Saint Thomas Aquinas, and Martin Luther. After having described the nature of erotic idealization, the author analyzes the religious idealization in Judeo-Christian concepts of eros, philia, nomos, and agape. Medieval Catholicism sought to combine these four ideas of love in the “caritas synthesis”. Luther repudiated that attempt on the grounds that love exists only in God’s agapastic bestowal of unlimited goodness upon humanity and all of nature. In relation to the different modes of theorizing, the author explores the humanistic implications of each.
Keywords:
love,
appraisal,
bestowal,
imagination,
idealization,
eros,
philia,
nomos,
Medieval Catholicism,
caritas synthesis
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2009 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780262512725 |
| Published to MIT Press Scholarship Online: August 2013 |
DOI:10.7551/mitpress/9780262512725.001.0001 |
