What is your definition of love?

The English language is handicapped because it has only one word for the many varieties of love. Greek, on the other hand, features different words for the different varieties of love.

Greek varieties of love:

AGAPE is the highest form of love, the selfless love of forgiveness, forbearance, goodwill, sacrifice, and benevolence, and the love of God for man and of man for God. Its opposite is selfishness, hate, and anger.

1 Corinthians 4-7 puts it this way: 

Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

PHILIA is brotherly love, the friendship or affection between two people. The opposite is phobia.

STORGE is familial love, the natural, instinctual affection of a parent for a child and vice versa. Its opposite is alienation.

EROS is erotic love, the romantic desire between lovers. Its opposite is disgust.

However, English has some advantages. We throw the word around with reckless abandon, e.g., “I love my motorcycle,” or “I’d love to punch him in the mouth.” 

True love, whether for God, fellow humans, family, or lovers, is suffused by agape love: forbearance, goodwill, sacrifice, and benevolence. The result is long, happy relationships. 

To love someone truly and well is to be forgiving and understanding of their faults. To do otherwise is to harbor a grudge, to be angry and unforgiving. The Greeks had a way of putting it: 

“Those whom the gods would destroy, they first make angry.”

American writer and theologian Frederich Beuchner (b. 1926) memorably writes:

“Of the Seven Deadly Sins, anger is possibly the most fun. To lick your wounds, to smack your lips over grievances long past, to roll over your tongue the prospect of bitter confrontations still to come, to savor to the last toothsome morsel both the pain you are given and the pain you are giving back—in many ways it is a feast fit for a king. The chief drawback is that what you are wolfing down is yourself. The skeleton at the feast is you.”

I’m a lucky guy for more reasons than I can count. One stroke of that good luck is that it’s hard for me to hold a grudge. I don’t know why. 

The first time it was brought to my attention was in the 1970s. In those pre-internet days, I regularly attended journal clubs, and gatherings of physicians, each of whom reviewed articles in his or her favorite medical journal. We usually met once a month for dinner. During one of these meetings one of the participants, a chest surgeon, began denigrating pathologists, saying, in effect, that we had to settle for pathology because we didn’t have the bona fides to be chest surgeons. It irritated me, but I knew the guy to be a jerk, so I just sat there and let him make a fool of himself. Afterward one of my friends, a guy I knew to be hot-headed, rushed up to ask me why I didn’t take the chest surgeon to task for the insult. He said, “If he insulted internists like that I’d hound him to his grave.” I just mumbled something about it not being worth the effort. Over the years I’ve thought a lot about it, and my conclusion remains the same—it’s not worth the effort. And it can be destructive.

I rummaged around the net looking for material on love and anger. A passage about anger from Dante’s Inferno caught my attention (for those unfamiliar with Dante’s Nine Circles of Hell, I’ve posted below an image. The lowest, most awful circle is the deepest pit, the 9th circle, Treachery, which is reserved for those, like Judas, who have betrayed a benefactor.) 

The fifth circle is for the Angry. It contains two related groups of sinners, the wrathful (expressed anger), and the sullen (repressed anger). The two suffer different punishments appropriate to their type of anger—the wrathful viciously attack one another in a never-ending bitter battle of recriminations and insults. The sullen stew below the surface of the muddy swamp to which they are confined.

So, reducing it to East Texas simplicity—love is better than anger. Be happy. Don’t be mad.