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This chapter discusses the nature of religious love. It suggests that affective imagination in religious love operates on a large ontological scale. Religious love can be seen as the imagination reaching beyond the limitations of self, friendship, family, nation, or humankind in a supreme attempt to embrace and accept all reality. Almost all love approximates religious love when it becomes sufficiently dominant and all-inclusive.

This chapter discusses how the Hegelian dialectic is similar to the dialectical play within the thinking of the Middle Ages when it comes to the conflict between religious love and courtly love. If the notion of self-transcendence, as proposed by Hegel, is used as an occasional tool, this conflict may be resolved in ways that cause both religious and courtly love to change. This double self-transcendence does not always occur, as it did not with either Aquinas or Andreas, but both antagonists changed significantly, as Hegel would have predicted. In a way, each destroys but also preserves the other, keeping one another alive so that they can regenerate in the future in better circumstances. In medieval philosophy, religious love was such a dominant force that it modified the courtly ideas of poets such as Petrarch, Dante, Cavalcanti, and other practitioners of the dolce stil nuovo.

This chapter discusses the model of thinking put forth by Dante in his effort to establish harmony between human love and religious love. This model has been put to good use by philosophers in the Italian Renaissance, most importantly by Marsilio Ficino, whose goal was simple; he endeavored to combine Plato’s philosophy with the orthodox dogmas of the Christian faith. Ficino, who dedicated himself to Platonism and became a parish priest, aiming to be wholly Platonic and wholly Christian, searched for complementary truths in each tradition so that he could strengthen both. It can be argued that his mission had already been accomplished, since medieval Christianity cannot be understood without its Platonic element. Ficino himself did not feel that his attempts to merge Platonism and Christianity were in any way revolutionary.

This chapter discusses how religion turns the idea of love into a form of submission. In Christianity, all must believe that man is created in the likeness of God; because a likeness is always inferior to the original, the religious soul must submit to the superiority of God. Spiritual marriage not only entails unanimity but also conformity; man’s will must yield to the will of God. This aspect of Judaeo-Christian love based on submissiveness is referred to as nomos, a concept fundamental in a number of respects to all religious love. Freud believes that Christian nomos, inasmuch as it implies a renunciation of the world, is a mechanism by which civilization controls the individual’s antisocial impulses. It originates from the universal fear of some external authority.

This chapter attempts to dissect the relationship between religion and love. Being the main advocate of religious love, and with love being mainly a product of the Judaeo-Christian tradition, Christianity is the only religion that defines itself as the religion of love. It is the only religion that uses love as the main principle in all areas of dogma. Christians have always been in search of a love that might be God, for, in Christianity, God and love are the same. Although there is not a single, common doctrine for Christianity, it has encompassed varying attitudes toward love from generation to generation. Through time, Christian ideas about love endure because they are derived from a mixture of scriptural revelation and classical philosophy.

This chapter elaborates on how all of Western philosophy can be treated as a series of footnotes to Plato, even on theories about love. To some, Platonism may seem to be a critique of the lack of creative originality of later philosophy, but it must be the starting point of every discussion of the philosophy of love because courtly love, Romantic love, and religious love all take root in Plato. Even the involvement and influence of Christian dogma, popular folklore, and Moorish idealism can be traced to Platonic origins: Christian dogma via St. Augustine, popular folklore via Hellenistic fables reproduced by Ovid, and Moorish idealism via Avicenna and Plotinus. In fact, most of Plato’s theories and ideas about love occur in what is considered one of the greatest works of philosophy and literature: the Symposium.