In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

GRAVITY AND LOVE AS UNIFYING PRINCIPLES If we were stones, or waves or wind or anything of that kind, we should want, indeed, both sensations and life, yet should possess a kind of attraction toward our own proper position and natural order. For the specific gravity of bodies is, as it were, their love, whether they are carried downward by their weight or upward by their levity, for the body is borne by its gravity, as the spirit by love, whithersoever it is borne.1 IN contemporary science, and in popular conceptions, gravitational force accounts for a mutual attraction between all bodies. It accounts for their natural movement towards each other. However, it required the brilliance of Isaac Newton to perceive that the same type force which accounts for a falling leaf or a crashing waterfall also explains why the planets remain in their proper heavenly orbits.2 This latter problem is not our concern here. On the other hand, in the contemporary world love, as applied to the area of human relationships, to the area of man's relation to the world and to God, accounts for the attraction ·between things and for their coming together. It does this in a very fundamental way, for it is the most basic of all the emotions and it is more than an emotion. Attraction toward an object and desire for unity result wherever there is love. This is not disputed by modern science. Nevertheless, to the modern mind love and gravity are basically different concepts about completely distinct characteristics of objects. Saint Augustine in the succinct passage I have quoted has perceived the similar role the two ideas have in ou~ explana1 Saint Augustine, The City of God, Bk. xi, !i!S, Translation by Marcus Dods (New York: Random House, 1950), p. 878. • Explaining the motion of the planets requires use of a) Newton's universal law of gravitation and b) Newton's first law of motion. 184 GRAVITY AND LOVE AS UNIFYING PRINCIPLES 185 tions. In short, each explains the existence of attraction. They cause diverse things to tend toward union with each other. This is why the law of love, beginning with the early Greek philosopher, Empedocles, and developing through Aristotle, Augustine and Aquinas, was the universal law controlling tendency toward union. It could apply as well to the inorganic world, the plant kingdom, the animal kingdom, to man and to God. At the same time they were clearly aware that; the loves in all cases were not completely the same. Saint Thomas summarizes the question in this manner: Now in each of these appetites the name "love" is given to the principle of movement towards the end .loved. In the natural appetite the principle of this movement is the appetitive subject's connaturalness with the thing to which it tends, and may be called natural love: thus the connaturalness of a heavy body for the center is by reason of its weight and may be called natural love: in like manner the aptitude of the sensitive appetite or of the will to some good, that is to say, its very complacency in good is called sensitive love or intellectual love.3 Again, Aquinas says: Natural love is not only in the powers of the vegetal soul, but in all the soul's powers, and also in all the parts of the body, and universally in all things because as Dionysius says (Div. Nom. IV): Beauty and goodness are beloved by all things; since each single thing has a connaturalness with that which is naturally suitable to it.4 These passages occurring in the Thomistic treatment of the emotions are deeply significant because they proclaim the reality of unconscious love. This unconscious love exists not only in the inorganic world and in the plant kingdom where the beings in question have no consciousness but also this unconscious love accounts for some of the activities of brutes and men. Natural unconscious love accounts for a man's actions at times when he is not exercising his highest powers and is therefore not conscious of the motives for his actions. • Summa Theologica, I-II, q. 26, a. l. English Dominican translation...

pdf

Share