Another Word for Love

"Love."  Among four-letter words in the English language, it is one of the most spoken (and most sung).

Sculpture by Robert Indiana,
 in Manhattan

Students of the New Testament are often taught that the Greek language has more than one word translatable as "love."  The Greek word eros is often used for sexual love but is more generally the experience of falling in love.  A second word, philia, expresses the fondness that can develop between people, as in friendships.  A third Greek word, agape, was less specific in the Hellenistic world, thus enabling New-Testament writers to sometimes use it in developing a concept of self-giving love.  Over time, Christianity used that word agape for emphasizing our ultimate experience -- that of knowing God's loving orientation toward the world.

The Greek language, however, also contains another world for love: storge.  It is used to speak of instinctual affection, one example being that of a mother for her child.  Christian writers today sometimes delineate the first three Greek words but make no mention of storge.  (An exception is C.S. Lewis, who in his book The Four Loves writes that "the human loves can be glorious images of Divine love.").  We should not underestimate the power of storge.

Although by using words, we can distinguish between this variety of meanings of the word "love," we can see especially in human relationships how the forms of love overlap:  Two people can love each other in more than one way.  Nevertheless, by possessing that fourth word -- storge -- we can explore better our relationships to non-human animals.

That fourth form of love, not usually mentioned by teachers of New-Testament Greek, is nevertheless implied at times in the Bible.  Being an instinctive response to the feelings of another living being, storge extends to our human affection for animals, which can evoke our care for them.  For example, in the Biblical book of Deuteronomy (25:4, NRSV), farmers are instructed, "You shall not muzzle an ox while it is treading out the grain," thus emphasizing that the ox gets hungry too.  And one verse in the book of Proverbs (12:10a, NRSV) states that people who live rightly "know the needs of their animals."

Victorian painting
by Joshua Reynolds

The treatment of animals down through European history is a long, complex story, not reducible to modern enlightenment overcoming medieval darkness.  Nevertheless, especially in England in the 1800’s, the movement of people into cities and the emergence of a middle class with some leisure hours meant that more people kept pets. That dog or cat, rather than being a working animal in the barn, would be kept right beside a person, even on the person’s lap, making it easier for the person to experience the animal’s emotions as being like their own.  In her Jubilee address in 1887, Queen Victoria (a dog owner) spoke of her "real pleasure [in] the growth of more human feelings towards the lower animals."  The contemporary writer Richard D. Ryder spotlights one major cause of that change:

"Was not the growing interest in animal protection also an effect of the increasing stability of society and the extension of affluence?  Never before had so many felt economically and
socially secure. They could afford to show some compassion for the underprivileged,
both human and nonhuman."

An additional advantage of having a word for animal-affection is that it can enable us to recognize that quality between animals of the same species -- not just among mammals, but also, for example, in parent birds' bonds with their offspring. Love is indeed a many-splendored thing!

~ ~ ~

As a child, did you have any pets that helped you learn how to care for others?

(The quotation by Lewis is from The Four Loves, © 1960, p. 9.)

(The quotation by Ryder is from his Animal Revolution, © 1989, p. 152.)

(Love is a Many-Splendored Thing was the title of a 1955 movie and song.
The phrase "many-splendored thing" dates back at least to a 1913 poem by James Kenneth Stephen.)
(Both photographs are in the public domain.)