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Necessary, Kenotically-donated, & Self-giving Love

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McCall B.

Studia Ełckie

2019

vol. 21

issue 2

231-241

For the God of self-giving, kenotically-donated love, the decision to express love at all times comes first. In my conception, “full-Oorded” love would encompass what is ordinarily contained within the definition of agape love, but it would also include “eros love”, for the latter is the love of co-laborment. In my appropriation has of this terminology of eros love, it would be the type of love that the desires to, e.g., expand one’s territory or one’s domain, which makes it applicable to the modern theory of evolution by natural selection. Evolution – i.e., “descent with modification”, to invoke a Darwinian phrase – then, recognizes self-giving love, and the goodness thereof, in that species regularly undergo commensalist symbiotic relationships in nature, whereby one is aided by the other, while the “other” is neither “aided” nor “harmed”. This is self-giving love in its entirety, and a proper demonstration of it. My understanding of necessarily-expressed, “full-Oorded” love also includes dimensions of philia love. Philia could be akin to the symbiotic relationship known as mutualism in biology, especially since philia love has historically been associated with friendship or the interrelatedness of the natural world. Notably, Aristotle indicates that even nonhuman animals can express philia love . The relationships marked by philia, then, could be identified by mutuality, reciprocity, and cooperation , which fits the above biological connotation well. While agape or eros might benefit from cooperation, reciprocity, and mutuality, those two forms of love do not require any of those three nouns. Philia does. I contend, in fact, that the kenosis of the Spirit into creation amounts to self-giving, betrothed love through self-donation. The union, then of agape, eros, and philia love could be expressed as mutual aid, or full-orbed, or even as I like to say, “full-Oorded” love. Flourishing lives – be they human or some other mammal – I aver, consistently and necessarily express “full-Oorded” love. Oord suggests that Process philosophy can aid one to see that full-orbed love – that which I have designated “full-Oorded” love – plays an important part in the work to increase the common good of society as a whole. Indeed, “full-Oorded” love would repay evil with good as agape would; such a “full-Oorded” love would additionally welcome the intrinsic value and beauty in others, just like eros love does; and “full-Oorded” love would also recognize the import of friendship and mutuality as does philia love. Following Oord and Wojtyla again, since God commands that we show necessarily “self-giving”, “self-donating” love, we therefore indeed have the ability to love others as kenotically-donating entities, just as the creating Spirit does. When we act as a genuine conduit and amplifier of the creating Spirit’s self-donating and self-giving love, we can truly and entirely and infinitely love others, just as God does. Of course, we cannot expect that we humans will always love alike unto how God does because we do not have an eternal and unchanging nature that is necessarily inclined toward love , but we are at least always able to do it.

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1 Studia Ełckie

1 McCall B.

1 2019

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Necessary, Kenotically-donated, & Self-giving Love