Can Love Be Commanded?

Love lies at the heart of the Christian faith. According to Christian belief, to love is the highest commandment, and God is the source of all love. Yet when we speak of love in general, we tend to think first of romantic love – the kind that begins with stolen glances, candlelit dinners and dancing through the night. We think of relationships between couples. But love needn’t be romantic. It’s more widespread than that. We love our children, siblings and friends, perhaps even our pets. We want to know how they’re doing and keep in touch with texts and calls. We worry about them, bring them food when they’re sick or comfort them when they’re sad. We miss them when they’re away and enjoy having them back. “We speak of love when another being, another person, matters to us in a particularly meaningful way – so much so that we care about them and for them,” says Michael Coors, professor of theological ethics at UZH.

Indeed, the concept of love is something of a cornerstone of theological ethics. Given its importance, research on the subject had been surprisingly neglected in recent years – which is where the international research network ExiL – Explorations in Love came in. Over the course of two years, under the co-leadership of Michael Coors and Kinga Zeller, professor at Utrecht Theological University, the team examined and debated the Christian concept of love. “We wanted to understand how Christian love can contribute to theological ethics,” Coors explains.

To love means to empathize with others. And empathy is a good thing, as a broad cultural consensus confirms. “The positive moral value of compassion is a legacy that holds to this day, not least thanks to the role that Christian culture plays,” Coors says. The Christian ethic of compassion – or love of neighbor – first arose in antiquity, when early Christian communities began caring for the poor and elderly. “Those early efforts gradually developed into systems of care,” he says. Over time, care became increasingly institutionalized – first in nursing hospitals during the third and fourth centuries, later through Christian orders and eventually in diaconal institutions. “The connection between love of neighbor and caregiving has always carried a certain ambiguity,” Coors says. Under the banner of Christian charity, deaconesses were often obliged to provide care, effectively leading to their exploitation. Nursing did not become an independent profession until the twentieth century, thanks largely to Agnes Karll, a German nurse and president of the International Council of Nurses who campaigned for the professionalization of nursing in the early 1900s. “Even though care work today is largely secular, its ethos of caring for those in need is still deeply influenced by Christianity,” Coors says. Many nursing facilities, after all, still have church affiliations.

But what does love of neighbor look like in private life? What does compassion mean when it comes to family? “Love thy neighbor as thyself,” the commandment says. But can love really be commanded? It’s a question many churchgoers have probably asked themselves as they sit on a hard pew listening to a Sunday sermon on Christian love, their back aching from caring for an elderly great-uncle. This would be particularly understandable if he’s the type to lash out with cruel remarks, even after having been heaved out of bed into a wheelchair and wheeled out onto a sunny balcony.

Love of neighbor might be what motivates us to keep caring for such an uncle despite his ingratitude. But what if affection gives way to aversion? Do we still have to love him? And is that even possible – to prescribe a feeling? After all, love is also a feeling – and feelings have a habit of arising on their own rather than appearing on demand.

So how do we deal with morality and feeling? What exactly is the moral obligation here – the action or the emotion? The commandment to love can be deeply perplexing. Trying to love while fulfilling a duty can feel like squaring the circle. “This is where it gets interesting,” says Lea Hümbeli, a member of the ExiL research network and research assistant at the Institute of Social Ethics. Her work focuses on the role of feeling within the Christian concept of love. “Christian love certainly can’t be reduced to an emotion,” she says. “But it is also an emotion.” The commandment doesn’t compel people to feel specific emotions. It can, however, be understood as an invitation to practice the art of loving. “This kind of love might mean making the commitment to remain open towards others,” Hümbeli suggests.

A church congregation can be a place to practice this. “In this mixed group of people – who, among other things, sing together – individuals try to remain open to one another, even if they don’t particularly like everyone.” In her view, the commandment to love asks more of us than tolerance, respect or recognition – and even more than the Golden Rule, the universal moral principle that teaches us to treat others as we would like to be treated ourselves. After all, following the Golden Rule doesn’t necessarily require emotions like empathy or compassion.

To love also means to truly see another person. Hümbeli draws on the work of Danish philosopher and theologian Søren Kierkegaard, whose concept of the ethics of love informs her research. “His concept can be understood as a kind of training in how to see”, she says, “that helps us to practice loving.” According to Kierkegaard, love is initially blind because it’s directed at everyone – as in the commandment to love thy neighbor. Unlike preference or attraction, it isn’t based on a person’s special qualities or status. But when a specific individual stands before us, and their uniqueness and significance becomes visible, love is the act of seeing. “In that moment, love is realized in that particular person,” Hümbeli explains.

Love, however, can also be abusive and dangerous. In recent years, the very idea of love has increasingly been seen in a negative light: toxic relationships, abuse within church institutions, sexual misconduct in both private and public settings, and harmful dependencies. What exactly makes love toxic? And how does it differ from healthy, constructive love? Are there criteria that set constructive and destructive love apart? For the research team, grappling with these distorted or dangerous forms of love was essential, Coors says. The problem lies in the way the commandment to love links moral instruction with emotion: “Love thy neighbor as thyself,” the Bible instructs. Yet emotions can be difficult to control. They can be excessive, self-centered, forceful, and ultimately unmanageable – creating the conditions for toxic relationship patterns to emerge.

This makes it important to consider how a relationship is governed from an ethical standpoint. There’s more to it than the fact that we should love. It’s also a question of how we should love. “The Christian ethos of love needs its own ethics of love – an ethical corrective that prevents paternalism and toxic relationships,” says the social ethicist. Such an ethics of love must counter manipulative behavior and critically examine power imbalances, dependencies and injustice.

So what constitutes good love? “Constructive love values freedom,” says Coors. “It recognizes the beloved person in their uniqueness as a free individual.” Or, as Søren Kierkegaard wrote in Works of Love in 1847: “If it’s a duty to love the person we see, then loving an actual person means not imposing on them an imagined version of what we think or wish they should be.”