Disciplinary Responses to Theology Brief Preview
John L. Loeb and Frances Lehman Loeb Professor of Epidemiology, Harvard University School of Public Health
Co-Director of the Initiative on Health, Religion and Spirituality and Director of the Human Flourishing Program, Harvard University
I thank Professor O’Donovan for his reflections on love and its relation to the will, knowledge, the virtues, and justice; and I appreciate his many succinct insights.
Concerning definitions, however, he states, “We should not, then, expect a taut definition of love.” I think more progress can in fact be made than is sometimes thought. Roughly following Aquinas (1274/1948) and Stump (2006), I have argued elsewhere (VanderWeele, 2023a) that all uses of the verb “love” have either unitive or contributory aspects, or both. More precisely, the position I put forward in the article is that whenever the expression “He/she loves . . .” is employed, then “love” is used to indicate either “a disposition toward desiring a perceived good or desiring union with it, either as an end itself or with it being a source of delight in itself” (i.e., unitive love) or “a disposition towards desiring good for a particular object for its own sake” (i.e., contributory love). I believe such a characterization helps make sense of the vast range of different uses of the word “love” and the objects to which it is applied.
While much attention has rightly been given to love in theology, more work could be done on empirical research concerning love. If love can indeed in some sense unify moral teaching, and fulfills the law, then we should also take its empirical study and measurement more seriously. To that end, the research staff at the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard University have been working together to develop a series of interrelated measures on interpersonal love, including both its unitive and contributory aspects, and extending to parent-child love, romantic and spousal love, friendship love, love of neighbor, love of enemy, love of stranger, and even love of God. Some of these measures are now already available (VanderWeele, 2023b) and we hope that this work will eventually result in insights into how to promote love within society. While considerable work remains to be done, the promotion of love might ultimately be brought to bear in considerations of public health and public policy (VanderWeele, 2024).
Aquinas, T. (1274/1948). Summa Theologica. Translated by the Fathers of the English Dominican Province. 5 vols. Notre Dame, IN: Ave Maria Press.
Stump, E. (2006). Love, By All Accounts. Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association, 80:25–43.
VanderWeele, T.J. (2023a). On an analytic definition of love. Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy, 25:105-135.
VanderWeele, T.J. (2023b). Love to Overcome Hate. Psychology Today. Human Flourishing Blog. October 2023. Available at: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/human-flourishing/202310/love-to-overcome-hate
VanderWeele, T.J. (2024). A Theology of Health: Wholness and Human Flourishing. University of Notre Dame Press. Notre Dame, IN.
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