Types of Love
The same four-letter word covers a man's wife, his mother, his brother, and the team he watches on Saturday, and he means it every time.
The walnut in his grandmother's yard came down in a straight-line wind the summer he turned forty, and it came down whole. It did not snap. It lifted. A slab of lawn the size of a truck bed stood up on its edge with the tree still attached, and when he got there the next morning the man with the chainsaw was standing in the hole looking up at the underside of it. The root plate was as wide as the crown had been. He had climbed that tree for ten years of his boyhood and had never once thought about what was holding it up.
"Everything you ever climbed was standing on this," the tree man said. "Nobody ever sees this part."
His grandmother watched from the porch. She was ninety and had raked under that tree for sixty-two autumns. When the saw stopped she said the only thing she said all morning. "Your grandfather planted that the spring we married. He dug the hole with a hand spade for a week because we couldn't afford to rent anything." The man had admired the crown his whole life. He had never once asked who dug the hole, or why, or what it had cost a young man with no money to put a tree in the ground for a woman he had just promised everything to.
The page above this one said that love is the second question and that a man comes back to it every time the warm version and the real one disagree. This is the room where he finds out that the warm version is not one thing either. It is at least five, and the word he uses covers all of them, which is why he cannot tell what he is offering or what he is being offered. The old tradition kept five words for five true forms. This room hands him the five, in the order a man actually meets them, and then it hands him the climb: eight rooms, from the soil of the household up through the brother he chose and the fire that found him, a turn where love stops being what happens to him and becomes what he does, the cost paid underground where the tree man stands, the love that moves toward the man who wounded it, and a summit no man holds.
The shape of the climb is the shape of the walnut. Everyone sees the crown. The crown is the only part anyone praises. And the crown stands exactly as high as the root runs deep, which nobody sees until the wind takes it, and the two are not two things. They are one life moving in two directions. A man who walks the eight rooms in order walks that shape from the soil to the top, and he learns on the way that the part of love he was praised for was never the part holding it up.
Types of Love
"and godliness with brotherly affection, and brotherly affection with love"
— 2 Peter 1:7
The apostle who denied his friend three times wrote a ladder near the end of his life, and the last two rungs are two different words for love. Brotherly affection, then love. He did not say they were the same, and he did not put them in the other order. A man supplements the one with the other, and the second is the top of the ladder. That is the whole claim of this room in one verse: the forms are distinct, they are learned in a sequence, and the sequence runs upward toward a love that does not stop at the brother. Peter would know. The night he denied his friend, the Lord had asked him for one word and Peter had been able to give him the other, and the Lord took it, and kept asking.
One Word Doing Five Jobs
The Greeks kept five words because they were watching five different things happen, and a man who learns the five can finally name what is in the room.
Storge is the affection that grows between people who share a household and a history. Nobody chooses it. It comes with the proximity, and it is the soil most men learned love in, for good or for damage. Philia is the brotherhood a man chooses and keeps choosing: the friend who stays, the man who tells him the truth, the one he will bury or be buried by. Eros is the fire between a man and a woman, desire and devotion arriving together, and the love most often mistaken for the whole mountain. Pragma is what the fire becomes when it has been tended long enough to turn into a vow: practical, enduring, anchored in a decision rather than a feeling, and the English language has no single word for it. Agape is the love that gives toward the undeserving and pays the cost without bookkeeping, the love Scripture commands and only one Being has ever held in full.
They can be named because they can be taught, and Scripture says so in passing, as if everyone knew. Paul told an old pastor to have the older women "train the young women to love their husbands and children" — Titus 2:4. Train them to love. Two words in the Greek, one for the husband and one for the children, and both of them trainable. A love that can be trained is a love that has a shape, and a man who cannot name the shape cannot be trained in it. He can only feel it or not, and call the feeling by the one word he has.
Root and Crown
Three of the loves arrive on their own, and the first three rooms hold them in the order a man meets them. He was born into a household. He chose a brother. A fire found him. Everything in those three rooms is love that largely happened to him, and a man who stops there has been loved and has loved and has never yet done anything.
Then the walk turns, and the turn is two disciplines rather than two loves. Attention, the gap between the impulse and the act. The self coming off the throne. From there love goes underground, to the cost paid where no one is watching, which is the root plate: the thing the crown is standing on that nobody ever praises because nobody ever sees it. Above the root, the crown. Favor toward the man who caused the wound. And above the crown, the one love no man dwells in, which the last room reaches and does not keep.
An Oxford don who wrote the book on the four loves split every love a man has into two kinds: the love that reaches up because it is empty and the love that pours down because it is full. A child's love is nearly all the first kind, and that is not a flaw; it is where every man starts. God's is all the second. The climb from the soil to the summit is the slow conversion of a man's love from the one kind toward the other, and Scripture shows the conversion happening in a single sentence. God "loves the sojourner, giving him food and clothing. Love the sojourner, therefore, for you were sojourners in the land of Egypt" — Deuteronomy 10:18-19. Therefore. The love a people had received when they were the ones with nothing is the love they are told to give. The root feeds the crown. Nothing comes out of the top of a tree that did not come up through the bottom of it.
The first time the word appears in Scripture, it is already carrying both ends. "Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love" — Genesis 22:2. Whom you love. A father's affection for the boy he waited a hundred years for, the soil love, the first room; and the sentence it sits in is the sentence that asks the father for everything. The word was never introduced as a feeling. It was introduced with a cost attached, going up a mountain.
Reading What the Moment Asks
The failures men cannot name are nearly always the right love in the wrong room. The wife who needed the vow and got the fire has been married to a man who never matured past the climb. The son who needed the soil and got only correction was raised by a man who replaced affection with duty and called it fatherhood. The brother who needed a brother and got rescued has been treated as a case instead of a friend, and he can feel the difference even when he cannot say it.
Scripture records the first time one of the loves was aimed at the wrong amount, and what came of it. "Now Israel loved Joseph more than any other of his sons... But when his brothers saw that their father loved him more than all his brothers, they hated him and could not speak peacefully to him" — Genesis 37:3-4. The father was not cruel. He was running the soil love, and he ran it unevenly, and the uneven affection of a good man produced ten brothers who could not say a civil word and a pit in the ground. That is the cliff at the far end of this column reached from the first room, by a man who loved. The loves are also ranked, and the ranking is the hardest sentence in the gospels for a man who loves his family: "Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me, and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me" — Matthew 10:37. More than. The soil love is real and commanded and it is not the top, and a man who has put it at the top has built a household on a love that was never designed to bear that weight.
So the discipline is reading. Before the act, what is the moment asking for? Attention or presence, the truth or the silence, the fire or the vow, the gift or the refusal. A man who can read what kind of love the room is asking from him has a precision the one word cannot give, and he will spend less of his life loving people correctly in the wrong way.
Several at Once
The five are not in competition, and a mature man runs several at the same time toward different people. The clearest picture of that is the Lord's own week before he died.
He had a friend. "Lord, he whom you love is ill" — John 11:3, the sisters wrote, and the word is the brotherhood word, the chosen one. He had a particular man at his side at supper, "one of his disciples, whom Jesus loved" — John 13:23, which is a sentence the other eleven had to make their peace with. He had a mother, and from the cross, out of breath, he arranged her care: "Woman, behold, your son!... Behold, your mother!" — John 19:26-27. The soil love, discharged as a last duty with the nails in. And over all of it the sentence John chose to open the night with: "having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end" — John 13:1. To the end. Four loves in one week from one man, each aimed at the person who needed that one, none of them confused for another.
The loves also cross lines a man would not expect. The women of Bethlehem told a grieving widow that her foreign daughter-in-law "who loves you... is more to you than seven sons" — Ruth 4:15. A love that began as a chosen loyalty between two women who shared no blood outranked, by the town's own count, the soil love of seven sons. The categories are real and the walls between them are not as high as the Greeks drew them. What crosses the wall is cost.
The Drop-Offs Beside the Trail
The page above named three ways love goes wrong and put every sin a man commits on that map. This room only adds what the drop-offs look like from the trail, because the trail runs along the edge of all three.
Love aimed at the wrong object, the self, which the Greeks called philautia and Paul put first in his list of what the last days would be full of, lovers of self, using the same root word as brotherhood, pointed at the mirror. Love too thin to carry weight, ludus, the flirtation that was a fine doorway and is a ruinous residence. Love grown so large it eats what it loves, mania, the one nearest the cliff, because a love that consuming is one betrayal from turning over into its opposite. The wisest man who ever lived went off the trail at the third drop-off with his eyes open: "Now King Solomon loved many foreign women... Solomon clung to these in love" — 1 Kings 11:1-2. Clung. The word is the one Genesis uses for a man and his wife, and he used it a thousand times over, and the nation split in his son's hands.
Each of the three wears modern clothes. Love performed, where the act is right and the thing underneath is a calculation. Love bonded by shared wounds, which feels like depth and is only shared pain. Love that worships, which makes a god of a creature no creature can survive being made into. None of the three is the absence of love; the absence is the cold, and the page above holds it. Every one of them is love, off the trail and still falling, and every fall from this mountain lands at the same cliff.
Eight Rooms Off This One
Eight rooms sit beneath this page, and they are walked in order because each one hands to the next. None of the eight is the road's next step. The road's next step is the checkpoint, and the eighth room lets out there.
Familial Love is the soil: the affection a man was planted in before he could choose anything, the father's and the mother's, the broken version, and what a man owes the household that made him.
Brotherly Love is level ground: the first love a man walks into on his own feet, what men owe each other, and what the absence of it costs a man who has only adjacent men.
Romantic Love is the climb: the fire that reaches and wants, the responsibility that falls on the man who lit it, and what the fire becomes when it is tended into a vow.
Thoughtfulness begins the turn: the gap between the impulse and the act, where every other love either lands where it was aimed or does not.
Selflessness completes it: a real self taken off the throne and put to use, which is not the same as a self erased.
Sacrificial Love is the root: the cost paid underground, counted honestly and paid without bookkeeping, and the difference between a sacrifice and a loss.
Grace is the crown: favor moving toward the man who caused the wound, the first love on the walk that nature alone never produces.
Unconditional Love is the summit: the one love no man holds, and the room where a man finds out who was standing at the top the whole time.
How Men Mistake One Love for Another
The man with one word. He loves his wife, his truck, and his mother with the same word and the same operation, and every relationship in his life is confused in a way he cannot name because he has no second word to name it with.
The man who stopped at the crown. He has the family, the brothers, and the fire, and he has never once done a thing for any of them that cost him what he would have preferred. He has been loved his whole life and calls it loving.
The man who ran the fire into the vow's room. His wife needed the decision and he kept giving her the feeling, and when the feeling thinned he concluded the marriage had.
The man who rescued his brother. The friend needed a friend and got a project. He is thanked and he is not known, and the brother drifts, and he cannot understand why generosity drove him off.
The man who loved unevenly. He had a favorite and told himself the others could not tell. They could. Israel's ten sons could not speak a civil word, and a good father's affection dug the pit.
The man in the hole. He stood under the root plate of a tree he had climbed for ten years and understood for the first time what had been holding it up, and who had dug it, and what it had cost. He went home and looked at his own crown and asked where the root was.
Three Questions at the Root Plate
TRUTH: Which of the five is a man actually running toward the person in front of him? Not which one he says. A man who cannot name the operation is running the one word, and the one word is usually the fire or the soil, whichever he was handed first.
LOVE: Which love is the moment asking for, and is it the one he brought? The son needs the soil and the man brought correction. The wife needs the vow and the man brought the feeling. The right love in the wrong room is the commonest failure in this column, and it is committed by men who love.
LAW: What is the part of his love that nobody sees, and is there one? A man is answerable for the root, not the crown. If every act of love in his life has been witnessed, he has been growing a crown on nothing, and the first wind will show it.
Love Them Freely
Every love on the climb has a reason a man can name. He loves his mother because she is his mother. He loves his brother because the brother stayed. He loves his wife because of a thousand things about her, and he could list them. The love that gives toward the undeserving has a reason too, and the prophet who had married a woman who left him wrote it in four words. "I will heal their apostasy; I will love them freely, for my anger has turned from them" — Hosea 14:4. Freely. Not because they had come back in better shape, and not because there was anything in them to point to; the sentence is spoken over people who had just been described as a nation that had left. Every love below the summit points at something in the beloved. The one at the summit points at nothing but itself, and holds.
And it is the root, not the crown. "No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us" — 1 John 4:12. No one has seen the root plate. It is known by the crown. The grandmother never saw the week with the hand spade either; she was inside, being a new wife. She knew it the way the whole street knew it, by sixty-two years of shade. A man who walks the eight rooms to the top will find that the love he was climbing toward was never up there waiting to be reached. It was the thing in the ground the whole time, holding up every love he had ever been praised for.
Where the Climb Lets Out
A man who has walked the eight rooms can name the five, tell the root from the crown, read what a moment is asking before he answers it, run several loves at once toward the people who need each one, and see the three drop-offs from the trail. He knows what the real thing looks like at every altitude, because he has stood at every altitude.
That is exactly why the next room waits until now. Every one of the five true forms, at full strength, points away from the man toward the one he loves. And every one of the five has a counterfeit that looks the same from the outside and points the other way, back toward the man, and the counterfeit can wear any of the five faces, which is why no man can run the test on himself until he knows all five. The checkpoint does not ask him what love is. He knows. It asks him, ten times, in ten rows, about the people actually in his life, which direction the thing he calls love is pointed, and it does not accept the word for an answer. The tree man said the quiet part at the hole: nobody ever sees this part. The next room looks.