I wrote this some while ago after some studying. I could expand on this, and add some more of my personal feelings but I think it's ok for now.
The love between a man and woman makes all the great poems
contemporaneous with each other and with ourselves. There is a sense in
which each great love affair is unique- a world in itself, incomparable. That is, at least the way it feels to romantic lovers.
But even to observers like you and I, we can see that difference
between the relaionship of Paris and Helen in the Iliad and that of Prince Andrew and Natasha in War and Peace, or Tom
Jones and Sophia, Don Quixote and Dulcinea, Aeneas and Dido, Othelo and
Desdemona, Henry V and Catherine, Samson and Delilah, Antony and
Cleopatra, Orlando and Rosalind, Haemon and Antigone, and Adam and Eve.
The analyst can make distinctions here and classify these loves as
the conjugal and the ilicit, normal and perverse, the sexual and the
idyllic, the infantile and adult, romantic and Christian. He can group
these partners despite thier apparent variety and set them apart from
still other categories of love: Friendships of human being, family
ties, the love of man for himself, for his fellow men, for his country
and for God. All these kinds of love are no less than the love between
a man and a woman.
The friendship of Achilles and Patroclus dominates the actions of
Iliad even more than perhasp the passions of Paris for Helen. The love
Hamlet had for his father and, in other mood, his mother overshadows
his evenesent tenderness for Ophelia. Don Quixote and Sancho Panza,
Rozencrantz and Guildenstern, Sam and Frodo seem to be bound more
closley by companionship than Cupids knot. The love Cordelia had for
King Lear surpasses, though dosn't defeat, the lusts of Goneril and
Regan. Brutus lays down his life for Rome as ready as Antony gives his
life for Cleopatra.
Self Love. "Amour-propre" varies its several different degrees and
prompts the actions of Odysseus, Oedipus, Macbeth, Faust, and Captain
Ahab. All finds its prototype in the infinate amour-propre of Lucifer
in Paradise Lost. This self love, which in extreme form is called
"Narcissism" competes with every other love in human life. Yet, self
love, like sexual love, can be overcome by the love which is charity
toward the compassion for others.True "self love" according to Locke,
necessarily leads to love of neighbor and in Dante's view of the hierarchy of love, men ascend from loving their neighbors as themselves
to loving God.
Still other of the great books deal with Love's exhibition of its
power. A few of the early dialogues of Plato discuss love and
friendship, but more dramatically set forth the love his followers bear
Socrates, and Socrates' love of wisdom and truth.
In the Bible, the history of mankind itself is told in terms of
love, or rather the multiplicity of loves. Every love is here- of God
and Man, perverse and pure, the idolatry and vanity of love misplaced,
every un-natrual lust, all hates in which love engenders.
Aristotle classifies different kinds of love in his analysis of the
types of friendship. Since the lovable consist of "the good, pleasant,
or useful", he writes, "there are three kids of friendship, equal in
number to the things that are lovable: for with respect to each there
is a mutual and recognized love, and those who love each other wish
well to each other in that respect in which they love one another".
Freud's theory places the origin of love in the secular instincts and
so for him the many varieties of love are simply the forms which love
takes as the libido fixes upon various objects. "The nucleus of what we
mean by love naturally consist...in sexual love with sexual union as
its aim. We do not separate this. On the one hand, self love and on the
other love for parents and children, friendships and love for humanity
in general. and also devotions to concrete objects and abstract
ideas..All these tendencies are an expression of the same instinctive
activities".
At the opposite pole, theologians identity God with love and see in
God's love for Himself and for his creatures the principle not only of
creation, and of salvation, but also the measure of all other loves by
with created things turn toward or away from God. Saint John writes,
"For love is of God; and everyone that loveth is born of God, and
knoweth God. He that Loveth not knoweth not God; for God is Love".
There is a second fact about love which poetry and history bear
testimony. Love often turns into hate. Sometimes there is love and hate
of the same object; sometimes love inspires hate, as it ocasions
jealousy, of things which threaten it. Anger and fear too follow in the
wake of love. Love seems to be the primal passion generating all the
others according to the oppositions of cause and effect. But not all
the anylyst of love seem to agree upon this point.
Love is all opposites- the only reality, the great illusion; the
giver and consumer of life. Men fall in love with love and fight
against it. Omnia vincit amor, Virgil writes, "Love conquers all".
<a href="http://media.photobucket.com/image/perhaps%20love/KIM419/p.jpg?o=19" target="_blank"><img src="http://i16.photobucket.com/albums/b24/KIM419/p.jpg"></a>