INTRODUCTION: ROMANTIC LOVE

‘Love is an Austro-Hungarian Empire uniting all sorts of feelings, behaviours, and attitudes, sometimes having little in common, under the rubric of “love”.’ Where, then, shall we start to look for a coherent concept of love which can serve as a model for thinking about our relations with God? When we talk of love, most people in our culture think first of romantic love, the sort of love which a lover has for his or her beloved. Since this kind of love is inextricably tied up with sexuality, it might at first sight seem inappropriate for our purpose. Some people might even consider it blasphemous to think of our relations with God in erotic terms. However, there are at least three reasons why romantic love, including its erotic aspects, is an illuminating point of departure for developing a conceptual model for the love of God.

First of all, even if we do not go as far as to claim that ‘God is a sexual God’, we cannot deny that erotic images have often been used in the Bible (e.g. in the Song of Songs) and in the Christian tradition (e.g. in nuptial mysticism) in order to express our relation with God. Thus the Spanish essayist and philosopher José Ortega y Gasset (1883–1955) remarks on the ‘profound similarity between falling in love and mysticism … in view of the remarkable coincidence with which the mystic employs erotic words and images to express himself.’