A Human History of Emotion

The idea that God is love comes straight from Augustine. Augustine is also the source of the idea that Jesus’s crucifixion was not a blood sacrifice, as the early Christians believed, but an act of pure grace and love—an act of forgiveness by God, who understands how difficult it is to control the will and who came to earth to demonstrate how powerful the will can be, even in the most extreme circumstances.

Still, for all that complexity, Augustine’s love was simpler than Plato’s ladder.

To Augustine, when you love your neighbor, you’re loving the sacrifice Jesus made for you.

But there’s another side to this discussion. Some philosophers argue that love isn’t an emotion at all. Instead, it’s an emotion complex—the sum of a range of feelings that you attach to something or someone over time. That might be a mix of lust, attraction, attachment, care, perhaps even frustration at times.

Love is also thought of as a process of attaching some sort of value to a person. This is known as an “appraisal of value.”6 The more you value someone or something, the more you love her or him or it—or, perhaps, the more love neurochemicals are released.

that might allow him to kill three birds with one stone.

Some of the arguments were seemingly mundane, such as those over which kind of bread should be served at the Eucharist.

That kicked off nearly fifty years of violence in what has become known as the Investiture Controversy.

On the other hand, Paul tapped into the Stoic idea that happiness can only be gained by focusing on what is genuinely virtuous—in this case, wishing, if not desiring, that your sins will be forgiven.

On the one hand, there’s the ancient Hebrew idea that you should avoid sinning so as not to cause God aversion.