There are those who say that we should not love anything “more” than God. Some use the technical term “inordinate love” to describe a love that over-values the thing it loves. The idea is that we should love in an “orderly” way, with the degree of our love calibrated to the worth of its object. Since God is the most worthy thing to love, we should love him “more” than anything else.
This idea wandered its way into Christian thought by way of Augustine. In his view, based on Plato and Neo-Platonic thought, the universe is ranked by degrees of greatness, corresponding to degree of value. We should “love” the greater thing to a degree appropriate to its value, and love the lesser thing correspondingly less.
One of the problems with coming to grips with such issues is that the Bible was written in Greek, but by the time of Augustine most of the thinkers in the Western Roman Empire spoke and worked in Latin. So Augustine used the Latin word for love: charitas. Since our thinking is shaped by the means we have to express our thoughts, this mean that Augustine’s notion of love was split off from the Biblical notion, characterized by the use of the Greek word agape.
And in fact, Augustine’s view of love was more consistent with the notion of the Greek eros or desire. Note that eros is not necessarily sexual desire — that is actually the least important idea associated with it. In its highest form, eros is the desire for the divine. It reflects the spirit within us seeking to be rejoined with the divine from which it came.
For Augustine, a person’s love motivates him to “move” toward the object of desire. So a rightly-ordered love would be directed toward God, and toward God in man, and so on. Our charitas would cause us to seek and draw near to God. The reason for this is that we seek happiness and our happiness is bound up with our union with the divine. Thus in seeking God we seek our own happiness.
From this it is clear that it is possible to love something “too much.” That is, we love something in a way that overvalues it. We love something — that is, desire something — of lower value more than something of higher value. This is obviously a mistake, since our happiness depends on union with that which is of highest value. If we desire something of lesser value we will move toward that and so miss our happiness.
However, the idea of agape as it appears in the Bible is different from all this. Agape is not motivated by the lover’s desire for happiness for himself. Instead, the lover loves for the sake of the happiness of the beloved. Agape is self-giving, pouring itself out. Paul, for example, says, “And I will most gladly spend and be spent for your lives, though the more I love you the less I am loved” (2 Corinthians 12:15). Paul is willing to pour himself out even to those who do not return his love.
Now, suddenly, we see that it is impossible to love “too much” for the simple reason that we are no longer seeking anything for ourselves — our own happiness. Instead, we are giving. But we also see that what we give is not our own — it is God’s love poured into our hearts. John tells us: “In this is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the place of mercy for our sins” (1 John 4:10). He goes on to say, “We love because he first loved us” (v. 19) and continues by saying that the sign of God’s love is our love for brethren.
So we see that, far from love being something that bubbles up from inside us and causes us to move toward good things out of a desire for our own happiness, love (agape) is given to us from its source, God, and impels us to pour ourselves out for one another in an overflow. Jesus talks about this overflow as “rivers of living water” that flow from our bellies (the empty place everyone else is trying to fill).
The kind of love Augustine talks about is ultimately self-love for the simple reason that it seeks its own happiness. The agape love of the Bible is an other-directed, other-filling love that springs from God’s love for the whole universe and floods into and through and out of us as we “spend and are spent” for those we love. We need not seek our own happiness because God is already blessing us. We need not fill the empty place because the Spirit pours God’s love into us.
There are many complications, many twists and turns that make all this hard. Often when we say, “I love you,” we mean “I want you to love me.” If we can truly say, “I love you,” then there can never be too much love, because it is God’s love that we share. But if we mean “love me,” then we are not even really loving but confessing our own need. But that need must be directed at God because he is the only one who can really fill it. When we direct it at another person we are asking for something they do not have and cannot give.
And here you see that the question of love is one of direction, not magnitude. Because our need must ultimately be directed at God who fills our needs. Our love — in the agape sense — must be directed at one another. In a paradoxical sense, to restrict agape to God alone is to deny it, because God desires his love be poured out and shared so as to reach to everyone.