Is "Willing the Good of Another" Really the Best Definition of Love?

"To love is to will the good of another." This quote of St. Thomas Aquinas is often invoked as a definition of love. I tend to see it tossed around in online discussions and I am really starting to hate how this quotation is used, because it has become plain to me that most people take it entirely out of context. Generally happens is someone will be having a conversation about some relationship problem with someone else, discussing their feelings or challenges in the relationship when someone will try to dismiss that person's emotions by reminding them that "to love is to will the good of another," generally meaning "Your emotions don't matter because love isn't a feeling; love is something you do, so stuff your emotional concerns and just keep doing loving actions regardless of how you feel." 

I do get why people say this. In modernity, love has been reduced to a mere  feeling, and a flighty one at that. Catholics are eager to affirm a concept of love that is more objective, more enduring, more committed than whatever passes for love out in the world, and accordingly they trot out this Aquinas quote to argue for a love that is purely volitional. By this they intend to save the Catholic concept of love from the destructively reductionist view of modernity.

The only problem is it is wholly inaccurate, both as a description of experience of love and as a reflection Aquinas's definition of it. 

Love is Not Merely Volitional

For one thing, our experience of love is not merely volitional. Whether we are discussing romantic love, the love of friendship, or the love of God, it is never something that is merely active. All love has a passive quality as well—that is, it is never solely something that we do, but something that happens to us. Love is both active and passive. To paint love as merely active, as something we just "will," completely omits discussion of its passive aspect, the part of love by which we feel "carried away" by desire for the object of our love, the sense of being drawn. In his 1972 essay on love, Josef Pieper observes:

Despite the active grammatical form, everyone knows that loving is not exclusively, and perhaps not even primarily, something that we ourselves actively do. It is additionally and perhaps much more deeply something that happens to us...Who, strictly speaking, is the active subject when someone "pleases" us or when we find someone "enchanting"? Ordinary usage, at any rate, would scarcely term it truly human love if the "lover" displayed, no matter how heroically unselfish he might be, nothing but consciously directed (inner or outer) activity but not a grain of passivity, no sign of having been affected. [1]

Imagine if your romantic lover was not affected by you in a passive sense whatsoever, if there was no sense of being drawn—if his or her love was consistently and only that which was consciously directed through the will. We would (or at least should) feel disappointed at this, for I think we all wish to be loved in a way that is, to some extent, "automatic." We do not merely want our beloved to do loving acts for us; we want them to be drawn to us in a way that is not entirely within their control. We do not want it to be something we merely will, nor do we experience it in this way. This is why the ancients were fond of the allegorical image of Cupid firing arrows of love at people, as it exemplifies the experience of love as something that "strikes" us or happens to us—as something that seems to erupt into our lives from without.

The Aquinas Quote in Context

This is why Aquinas classifies love as a passion, that is, an appetitive movement that attracts us towards something [2]. It is precisely because love exercises an attractive power that it is a passion. Aquinas has a detailed explanation of why love is a passion, which I shall quote at length:

Passion is the effect of the agent on the patient...the appetible object [that which is ldesired] gives the appetite, first, a certain adaptation to itself, which consists in complacency in that object; and from this follows movement towards the appetible object. For "the appetitive movement is circular," as stated in De Anima iii, 10; because the appetible object moves the appetite, introducing itself, as it were, into its intention; while the appetite moves towards the realization of the appetible object [i.e., obtaining that which is desired], so that the movement ends where it began. Accordingly, the first change wrought in the appetite by the appetible object is called "love," and is nothing else than complacency in that object; and from this complacency results a movement towards that same object, and this movement is "desire"; and lastly, there is rest which is "joy." Since, therefore, love consists in a change wrought in the appetite by the appetible object, it is evident that love is a passion: properly so called, according as it is in the concupiscible faculty; in a wider and extended sense, according as it is in the will. [3]

There is a lot to unpack here, but essentially Aquinas is saying that love is a passion because it draws our appetitie by causing us to desire something. It is only volinitional in a secondary or "wider and extended sense," because we acclimate our wills towards obtaining that which we desire—but only because we are first drawn to desire that which we love. The volitional aspect comes after the appetive; or, to put it another way, we first feel love before we choose to act on it. Any comprehensive definition of love must take into account love's passive quality by which we are drawn towards the object of our love. This why defining love as "to will the good of another" fails to capture the essence of what love truly is.

If Aquinas believed love is a passion, then what does he mean that to love is to will the good of another? This brings us to the second reason why I dislike how this phrase is used, which is that Aquinas himself does not offer this as a comprehensive definition of love. Some context is necessary here to understand the source of this quote and what Aquinas is intending to prove by it. 

The quote occurs in the Summa's Prima Secundae Partis, Q. 26 Art. 4 when Aquinas is discussing whether the love of friendship is identical to the love of concupiscence. By "love of concupiscence," Aquinas means a love based in the desire of something pleasant, such as the love of a man for a fine Cuban cigar. Clearly these two types of love must have something in common for us to speak both of "loving" a friend as well as "loving" a cigar. That underlying commonality is desire. Aquinas says, "We are said to love certain things, because we desire (concupiscimus) them: thus a man is said to love wine, on account of its sweetness which he desires." Here Aquinas again affirms that desire (not "willing the good") is the trait that is common across different types of love.

This is not wholly sufficient, however, because clearly there is a difference between how we love a cigar or a bottle of fine wine and how we love a friend or spouse, and this is what Aquinas is most interested in; viz., how these two types of love are differentiated. While both love for a cigar and love of friendship share desire in common, Aquinas notes that friendship contains something over and above love of concupiscence, namely, willing the good of the friend. Quoting Aristotle, Aquinas says:

As the Philosopher says (Rhet. II, 4) "to love is to wish good to someone." Hence the movement of love has a twofold tendency: towards the good which a man wishes to someone (to himself or to another) and towards that to which he wishes some good. Accordingly, man has love of concupiscence towards the good that he wishes to another, and love of friendship towards him to whom he wishes good. (STh, I-II, Q. 26, Art. 4)

It is precisely this aspect of willing the good that distinguishes these two types of love. Hence he says, "We have no friendship for wine and suchlike things, as stated in Ethic. viii, 2. Therefore love of concupiscence is distinct from love of friendship" (ibid). In other words, all kinds of love are predicated on desire; if they weren't, we couldn't be said to love them, for how could you love something you did not desire in some respect? But what specifically sets love of friendship apart from utilitarian love is this added notion of willing the good—we can will the good for a friend, but not for a glass of wine or a cigar.

It should be clear, therefore, that Aquinas is not attempting to comprehensively define love as "to will the good of another." His citation of Aristotle is employed in a very specific context. Rather that offering a general definition of love, Aquinas is observing that willing the good is a specific quality that distinguishes love of friendship in particular. [4]

Now let's be clear, none of this is to say that love is merely a feeling or a passion. As Pieper says, "of course, no one fails to recognize that the passively blind process of spontaneously 'being pleased' cannot be everything, that an element of probing judgment and selective preference enters in" [5]. Ultimately, love engages the entire person; properly speaking it is appetitive because it begins as a drawing or desire, but that drawing overflows, affecting what we think and will. Moderns are certainly wrong to suggest that love is merely a feeling, but we are equally wrong if, in our desire to preserve the integrity of love, we make into merely an act of the will.

NOTES

[1] Josef Pieper, Faith, Hope, Love (Ignatius Press: San Francisco, 1997), 153
[2] See Aquinas's discussion on the appetitive nature of the passions in I-II, Q. 22 Art. 2.
[3] STh I-II, Q. 26, Art. 2
[4] Incidentally, this is the context of Aristotle's use of the dictum as well, which occurs in his discussion of friendship. In his Rhetoric, Aristotle says: "We may describe friendly feeling towards any one as wishing for him what you believe to be good things, not for your own sake but for his, and being inclined, so far as you can, to bring these things about." (Rhetoric, Book II, Part 4)
[5] Pieper, ibid.