Love is an overwhelmingly powerful, implacably demanding, and intensly pleasurable biological energy which impels humans towards union and towards stability in that union. Love bonds humans together. It entered the hominid condition before the species could become as fully human as it is today. Love is a fearsome propensity, an almost but not quite irresistible impulse to bond, often against what seems to be the obvious self-interest of the organism.
Love was an evolutionary development which enabled/forced the male and the female to bond together so that they could raise their offspring to adulthood. As a cause and a result of this change, hominids were able to produce relatively undeveloped neonates in which they would invest considerable time and energy in education, an infant with little instinctive "hardwiring" (as in other primate animals) and enormous ability to "soak up" education. In this process of bonding, the male and the female found each other powerfully and almost (but not quite) permanently attractive, and presumably learned (through evolutionary selection) slowly the meaning and practice of tenderness, which is close to being the essence of love. Some pre-hominid footsteps which have been preserved suggest that long ago a male and a female walked hand in hand with one another.
The female was had already bonded with her child. The emergent tenderness between the male and the female seems to have extended to the male a propensity to bond with the child and perhaps transformed both the existing bonds between female and child and between the adults and the rest of their band. tenderness seems to have metamorphosed the nature of the hominid condition so that the creatures took care now not only of their mate and their offspring, but also of one another. this was the process in which we became human. Love first, humanity second.
Bonds exist among other creatures, even bonds with a permanent life-time mate. But proto-human love differs from that of any other creature of which we know that it is , as I said above, not quite irresistible. As Helen Fisher has pointed out, the love-created bond was at odds with other powerful imposes that the proto-humans had acquired in the evolutionary process. There were potential pay off sin both genders in "cheating," the male to spread his seed more widely and the female to have a "fall-back" mate in case something happened to her present one. Those who had these propensities to cheat were paradoxically the most likely to have descendants who would survive. Because of these "anti-fidelity" propensities (with which the contemporary descendants of the protohominids are not unfamiliar) and because of the different approach to the sexual union in the two genders, the bonding energy between the male and the female had to be extremely powerful, the most powerful indeed of any such bonding force of which we are aware.
The emergent mix of tenderness and sexual hunger which tended to hold the two genders together was (and is) only less demanding than the drive to eat and to survive. In the evolutionary development of humankind the ability to engage in sexual activity at any time and not merely on the occasional days when the female was in heat, certainly played a major part in producing a sexuality which is unique among the species we know. It made the bond between the male and the female even more insistant, more overwhelming more poignant, and more problematic than in any other early creature. hence the male and the female, each in their own way, was (and of course is) preoccupied with sexual longing and erotic imagery, not only occasionally but always. Without constant and demanding sexual longing and endless sexual fantasizing, humankind would not have come into existence; love and tenderness and the other virtues in the train of love would have never appeared. One scholar says that there is no other primate in which sexual coupling has so little to do with procreation and so much to do with bonding. Vatican please note.
Let us image two young proto hominids, alone with one another on the edge of a watering pond in the African savanna, both of them experiencing sexual hunger. Caught up in such implacable needs, such a creature might have sought another partner (and on not a few occasions in the history of the species some did), but the mate is present, more or less available and attractive (especially as one's hunger increases), has been a rewarding partner in the past, and excites feelings of tenderness as well as desire, which in the moment are quite indistinguishable. In the experience which follows, the bond is not only acted out, it is renewed. Sometimes. Not only love and tenderness, but also reconciliation seem to have been experiences which were preconditions for the emergence of humankind as we know it.
Such at any rate seems to have been the scenario on which most students of human sexual evolution seem to agree. The details of the process remain speculative because of the absence of data and need not detain us in this volume.
Some will find this image of the emergence of the greatest and most spiritual of human virtues (though neither great enough nor spiritual enough to make if into the book of Virtues) disgusting. The picture of two young animals rutting (without the benefit of estrus, a truly revolutionary development) at the side of a pond in the savanna with passionate tenderness - and perhaps walking off hand-in-hand afterwards - does not seem a very dignified beginning of human love. Surely those who reject evolution will be deeply offended.
To the first objection, I reply that we still do the same thing as they did (most of us anyway) and only those that reject completely the beauty of the human pleasure can afford to be disgusted. To the creationists, I can only respond that I'm sorry but I'm a Catholic. I think God can create anyway She wants, and evolution seems to be a remarkably ingenious way for her to give life to such an extraordinary creature as homo sapiens sapiens.
Nor do I find it astonishing or offensive that love is precisely what makes humans human, what distinguishes us from the other higher primates. Saint Paul was more right perhaps than he realized. That love is a biological energy does not mean that it is not simultaneously a spiritual energy. Humankind is an embodied spirit - or if that goes too far for you then at least an embodied consciousness, are inextricably linked. What is more spiritual or more biological than tenderness? Indeed when tenderness appeared in the human condition, might proto-spirit also have appeared? Was there not proto-spirit in those two hominids who walked away from their love making, hand in hand?
There also exists an odd conviction that love is somehow a soft and weak virtue, not as strong as, say, courage or justice. How can one, for example, expect such a soft thing as love to create peace in the Balkans or Israel or Northern Ireland? Perhaps the correct answer to that question is that only love can accomplish such miracles, only the capacity to imagine the enemy as an "other" capable of and needing tenderness. In the late Ithzak Rabin's words we do not need to make peace with our friends. Is the good Samaritan to be written off as a weak and soft person?
Love soft? Ask a parent who has raised a child from diapers to marriage: was this an easy take? Or an adult who must care for an aged parent, just as the parent once cared for her: is this a soft job? Or a person who has sustained a marriage through trials and tribulations, through joy and disappointments, through conflicts and reconciliation's, through tragedy and triumph, through pleasure and pain, through love and ambivalence, through life and death: is this a task for the weak and faint hearted?
How could anyone think that the virtue about which Paul sings in First Corinthians (and the Singer, perhaps a woman, sings in the Song of Songs) is soft and easy and mushy?
Like all other efforts to put down love, this misconception is nothing more than an attempt to escape its demands which as the Singer tells us are as implacable as death.
God - is erotic because all the many bonds that humans from form are driven in some fashion by this primary and powerful human propensity to bond. Sexuality pervades our whole being and shapes all our bonding - with - out (under ordinary circumstances) distorting that which is unique and special to each particular bond. Quite the contrary the power and the pleasure in the capacity for sexual bonding deepens and enriches all other human bonds. If we weren't creatures always on the edge of sexual arousal, our other relationships would not be nearly as rich as they are.
I don't like it when a man is aroused by hunger for me, a woman once told me, and I am deeply offended that anyone should suggest that God fells the same way towards me . I reject the notion that God wants to possess me. I do not want to be the object of passionate desire.
I let go, but the only appropriate answer was that God is even more aroused than a man who wants her. To be human is to be desirable. If the metaphor errs it is by defect: God is more hungry for us than any human lover could be. Moreover, He is more implacably aroused. His desire for us is not periodic, never vacillates, and is as constant as the music of the cosmos. Else why would John the Divine dare say that God is love?