溫故知新 Old wisdom, today’s insight — ONGO
Is Love to Will the Good of Another?
Is love the feeling I feel, or the will that the other should have what is good?
To love is to will the good of another.
The definition Aquinas inherited honed the question of whether to place love in feeling or in will. This current, beginning in Aristotle, saw love as the active goodwill that wills another's good, and the Stoics carried it on as a governable direction of reason. Romanticism and modern psychology, by contrast, returned love to an event of feeling beyond the reach of will, holding that willing another's good and being drawn to them are not the same. Is love a goodwill one chooses by will, or a passion that overtakes one? The question still divides love seen as will for the other's good from love seen as a passion that seizes the self.
In an age that measures love only by flutter and attraction, Aquinas's question — that love is willing another's good — asks back for whom my love truly is.
Aquinas takes up Aristotle's words to define love briefly: to love is to will the good of another.
📝I, Too, Stand Before It
Aquinas takes up Aristotle's words to define love briefly: to love is to will the good of another. He sets love not as a fluttering feeling but as the will that the other should fare well. I feel this definition is love's touchstone. To be glad because of someone is different from wanting that someone to fare well: the first is a heart for me, the second a heart for them. Does my love truly will the other's good, or do I want the joy they give me? On that boundary I watch, carefully, the direction of my love.
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