As modern people, our understanding of love has become so limited. Our modern idea of love is culturally limited to erotic love. By erotic love, I don’t just mean sexual love, but erotic love in the sense that that phrase was used by the early Christian writers, a love that is centred upon ourselves only. It’s easier to describe it in terms of examples. It’s the kind of love which was expressed in the film Fatal Attraction. It’s this obsessive, highly erotic, personal, desiring love that has a tragic dimension – love that ends in death. It’s the kind of love that we see in Wagner’s operas as well, and in much of Western literature; the kind of love that is described often in popular songs, popular music. Erotic love is seen as something tragic because it is impermanent, because it arises and dies in passion. Therefore, it is something that makes us lonely, something that is so individualistic that it traps us in its own impermanence.
(Aspects of Love 1 by Laurence Freeman OSB )
