Religious to Philosophical and Literary

¶ … religious to philosophical and literary to have left the theme of love untouched. From love stories to love poems and love studies we get an almost fantastic number of love theories or discussions, all resulting in an intricately complex perspective on love. Love as such has been identified with all the greatest ideals of mankind, with the beginning and the end of everything, it is held to be the most prominent attribute of divinity, with eternity and infinity, with the absolute center of human society by sociologists and so on.

Therefore, the Japanese writer Shusaku Endo is entitled to believe that:" love is [...] at the core of this world we live in [...]." So many other writers and artists from all over the cultural world and from all through have shared this belief, and to provide just a few examples: it was Dante who concludes his Divine Comedy with the famous lines about love:

But now was turning my desire and will,

Even as a wheel that equally is moved,

The love which moves the sun and other stars."[1] similar point-of-view is that of the modern essayist Jose Ortega y Gasset, who said that the notion of "love" is equivalent to the gravitational pull, that is with what is believed to be the most important force governing our physical world; Ortega y Gasset states that love derives its unique nature within the specter of human consciousness due precisely to its quality of relating one man to another: love is a gravitational pull towards the object of love (Ortega y Gasset, 13). Also, sociologist Erich Fromm believed that love is at the core of human society, and that isolation, the opposite of the union realized through love, is the basic cause for the feeling of shame in a man. Thus, man's profoundest need is to find a way out of isolation, and this can only be done through love (Fromm, 14).

Poets and writers are the ones who most often and deliberately expressed their views on love, almost generally considering it a divine feeling, that reaches through its special nature beyond everything else that exists:

Love -- is anterior to Life

Posterior -- to Death

Initial of Creation, and The Exponent of Earth -- " [2]

Perhaps the basic reason for which this attachment between two people or the attachment for an object or for something abstract, is seen as a force able to transcend everything else, is its immateriality and the traditional view that the material world has to be something finite, and the spiritual world is infinite. Even in the modern times human consciousness itself and its levels and particularities have not been satisfactorily defined, and seem to be escaping any logical or theoretical explanation. What we call "love," is almost unexplainable outside its own context, that is when related to the other facts that have been established by the various sciences and fields of knowledge over the time. This is why love is seen as the very core of everything, through its association with mystery and secrecy, and the intimations it gives of infinity and the divine. It is basically a state of mind, or a spiritual state, but one that can invade far beyond its scope and overcome its own limits, just as the gravitational force does in the physical world.

In contemporary times however, the feeling of love as it was traditionally understood seems to have been pushed somewhere in the background of the main life-scene. Shusaku Endo saw that a certain displacement took place, and although people still fall in love and live their love stories, the status held by love in society has been greatly modified. The evolution of mankind on all levels, and especially the new focus of the modern society on technology and material development, has brought about an estrangement from the spiritual life.

The new world offers "alternatives," as it were, to love, through a complexity of personal, both material and social developments, that seem to been able to replace or fill the spiritual needs.

Although men and women still interact what happens between them seems to be different from what was called love before, and it is often said that more and more isolation and solitude result from these interactions. The pressure of the material complex world and of the various social facts do not allow for the openness required by love. It can be said that the complexity of the modern society influence the emotional sates of the individual and make it impossible for him or her to return to the purity and simplicity of love.

What happens in our society today seems to be similar to what happened to the first legendary pair of lovers on Earth, Adam and Eve. Like them, people take interest in knowledge and material development, in building and creating and making use of all their powers and abilities, which gives them very little time to discover themselves firstly, their own spiritual disponibilities and then those of the people that surround them.

However, it seems important to point out that perhaps it is not love as such that which is lacking from our world today, but that in fact love itself has changed as part of the structure of the new-formed society, where new values have developed. In the modern world love has to be molded on the new type of society and values. The form of expression has been mostly modified, and not necessarily the feeling as such. As DH Lawrence points out, in the modernist vein, nothing can be said to remain the same or endure, including love, therefore the basic features attributed to love in the past are changed, as its permanence for example: