«Il Nostro Tempo e la Speranza», Nuova Serie, n.

2 (febbraio 2011)

Vincenzo Cicero

EROS, AGAPE AND BEAUTY IN D. VON HILDEBRAND*

Love is a response to the beauty of the beloved – this is concisely the basic thesis of Dietrich von
Hildebrand’s The Nature of Love. The general conception to which the German philosopher has
brought back categorial modalities, for him authentic, of love – parental, filial, friendly, spousal
(bräutlich), conjugal (ehelig), towards God, towards the neighbour – is more precisely one of
«value-response to the overall beauty of the beloved», in which the typically hildebrandian notion
of Wertantwort (value-response) stands out. My short account, which starts from its analysis,
intends to think again the relationship between eros, agape and beauty in a dialog with von
Hildebrand’s deep and powerful meditation on love.

1. Responsiveness of love: will, volition, affection

Technically speaking the response (cfr. Ethik, c. 17) is not to be considered here as a mere verbal
act, but as an eminently spontaneous intentional phenomenon, in which a spiritual being adopts a
position towards an entity or factuality. Von Hildebrand distinguishes three basic kinds of response:
a) theoretical, when its topic, that is its explicit primary interest, is the existence or the truth of
the entity (as, for example, in the conviction, in the doubt, in the expectation);
b) volitional, when its topic is the realization, through the acting of the subject, of a meaningful
factuality (the pragmatic will, namely the willing);
c) affective, when its topic is the full involvement – sensitive, rationally enlightened, spiritual –
of the heart in relation to a meaningful factuality (for example, joy and sadness, fear and hope, ...
love and hate).
In relation to the last two kinds of response, two important inferences in this classification stand
out concerning, respectively, the will and the importance.
The first inference concerns the twofold meaning of will, which is widely considered as the
faculty to turn to the importance of an entity or factuality, whereas, strictly speaking, it is regarded
as a specific act at the base of actions; widely speaking, will also includes in itself the affective
sphere. In order to avoid confusion between the two meanings, I would suggest to use “will” (Wille)
only by referring to sensus latus, and “volition” (Willensäußerung) by referring to strictus sensus;
and for simmetry’s sake I would call “affection” (Affektion) the other kind of voluntary response, in
which von Hildebrand includes love (in Ethik, c. 17, the philosopher rejects the words “emotion”,
“feeling”, “passion” [Emotion, Gefühl, Leidenschaft] because they are inappropriate to express the
affective involvement, conversely acknowledging as appropriate the augustinian affectio).
In the context of this responsive taxonomy, therefore, love comes out as an affective response,
and its general intentional features stand out at their best in the very direct comparison with the
second kind of responses. In fact the volitional act always aims to fulfill a factuality, so that there
cannot strictly be a volition of things or persons (Nature of Love [= NL], c. 2), and it is a free act

                                                                                                               
*   Paper
read on May 27th 2010 at the International Conference “The Christian Personalism of Dietrich von Hildebrand:
Exploring His Philosophy of Love” (Rome, May 27-29, 2010).
 

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because it is able to control activities and start a new causal chain of events (Ethik, c. 21). On the
contrary, love is an affection which refers only to personal beings, it has a fullness and a warmth
volition doesn’t have, and its inherent freedom is not directly operating (we cannot compel
ourselves to love), but rather co-operative or dis-operative (we can accept but also reject a love
which involves us totally). Co-operative and dis-operative freedom generally consists in being able
to keep an unconditional attitude towards backgrounds already existing in our soul, in other words it
brings about the possibility to express our final “yes” or “no” to the above background (for
example: to say yes to a sacred life; to say no to a love which would imply conjugal unfaithfulness)
– this brings about a full actualization of freedom, whether you approve the existence of affection or
disapprove it by wishing its disappearance (Ethik, c. 25).
Love is not, however, an affective response like others, for example like veneration, enthusiasm,
admiration etc. In it two peculiar intentional directions are shown which place it above all the
affections: the intentio unionis and the intentio benevolentiae. The unitive intention is the wish of
spiritual union with the beloved, an aspiration to the unity of hearts which is in itself also virtus
unitiva (unitive power), that is effective power of unification before love is requited and the union
actually fulfilled. The benevolent intention is, in its turn, the wish to make the other happy, a
yearning which is also essentially, inasmuch it is donation of yourself to the other («we give
him/her our heart», NL, c. 7), a real and irreplaceable moment of the beloved happiness. (By the
way, this will that the beloved is happy would look contradictory if confronted with its affective
feature, without the former distinction, both terminological and notional, between will and volition.)
The hildebrandian characterisation of love as an affective response or affection doesn’t suggest
something structurally transient (like an emotion), or a position kept only in virtue of its intrinsic
validity (for example, like esteem or veneration). In authentic love «not only the validity endures,
but the act itself continues with fully reality at a deeper level of ourselves» (NL 45). Von
Hildebrand termed “full superactual existence” this kind of duration in which the affectional act still
exists in a deeper layer of our soul than the one in which our backgrounds linked to it get gradually
actualized: love for another person (similar to deep faith in Christ) always exists even if it’s not
actualized, for example if you are concentrated on a delicate job or if the heart is pervaded by an
acute pain. From this special dwelling in the core of our being, like a setting or antiphony on which
all the rest is occurring, love doesn’t only spread out a light brightening every present background,
but it also urges to get actualized again and again. That is how the philosopher expresses himself:
«If we love someone with spousal love, we are strongly inclined to return again and again to the full
actualization of this love. If we are forced to concentrate on other things – to tend to our work, to
speak with other persons – afterwards we are strongly inclined to turn with full actual consciousness
to the beloved person, to think of him, to speak silently with him, or simply let the stream of our
love reach him» (NL 45foll.). In my opinion, the notion of superactuality, which is also applied in
epistemology and theology, is one of the most original and interesting by von Hildebrand.

2. The overall beauty of the beloved

The second consideration, which becomes necessary in the hildebrandian classification of
responses, leads to the protophenomenon of value, which in this context of thought indicates what
can motivate volitions and affections inasmuch it is important in itself, what is worth and important
not with reference to something else, for example to a subject or to an extrinsic end, but in itself:

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«The value is the real, the valid, the objectively important in itself (Der Wert ist das Wahre, das
Gültige, das objectiv Bedeutsame selbst)» (Ethik, c. 3).
Therefore, when the importance motivating volitional and affective responses is not – or firstly is
not – connected to a subjective fulfilment, but becomes objective, self-subsisting, they become
specifically positions towards a value, which von Hildebrand calls Wertantworten (value-
responses). Love is affektives Wert-ant-Wort, literally: a word uttered in front of an affectionating
value.
Now, the above value in the affective value-response of love is the overall beauty
(Gesamtschönheit) of the beloved: «It is always the [overall] beauty of a particular individual
person which engenders love in us» (NL 66; cfr. Ästh., c. 2). Here beauty is seen as a full
importance in itself, and a genuine valual facies is acknowledged to it which is not compromised by
its pleasantness – and that also explains why it plays such an important role in love. One of the
strongest and most characterizing theories of hildebrandian thought, in fact, is that the authentic
meaning of beauty generally consists in being an original self-manifestation, an apriori absolutely
independent from the presence of existing objects and from the mind of man, and at the same time
the loveliest of protophenomenons because of its irresistible attractive virtue (cfr. Plato’s Phaedrus,
250DE; for the complex “phenoumenological” development of Schönheit in von Hildebrand, see
my introduction to the Italian edition of Ästhetik).
Every real beauty is attractive to itself and a source of happiness. The same is for the overall
beauty of the beloved for the one who loves: an attraction independent from the bearer, from the
beloved, a magnetism necessary in itself not only to the lover, in whom it causes the response, but
consequently to the bearer itself, provoking his/her co-response. «Love ... desires a return, or
requital, of love» (NL 57; cfr. § 5 of John F. Crosby’s Introduction to The Nature of Love). If there
is no requital by the beloved, there is no actualization of love, therefore there is no true love,
because here its unitive structural intention is hanging on a chasm, groping in an empty space,
sterile.
The expression “Gesamtschönheit/overall beauty” implicates that not only sensitive beauty helps
in the beauty of the beloved, considered as a person in its entirety, but also its metaphysical beauty
which is almost a irradiation of all his other vital, moral, intellectual and spiritual values (cfr. Ästh.,
cc. 2 e 5).
On this subject, however, I would like to underline an inconsistency by von Hildebrand. Love, as
already shown, responds axiologically to the overall beauty of the beloved; at the centre of the
explicit attention and of the direct involvement of love affection is therefore beauty-value. That’s
why I consider von Hildebrand’s statement in Ästhetik (c. 2, I91) at least inadequate: «This role of
the beauty in love is not however to be considered as if its subject were beauty». Just the opposite, I
cannot see a different subject in love, inasmuch it is the response to the beauty-value of the beloved,
if not his/her overall beauty. While trying to argue his own theory, the philosopher compares love
and aesthetic affection (still quoting from Ästhetik, ib.):

There is a radical difference between the value-response of love for a person and the value-
response to a work of art, in which the subject is beauty. The beauty of the beloved is almost a
irradiation of all his other values. The subject is formed by these values (...). Metaphysical beauty,
which spreads from them, not only doesn’t damage the theme of these values, but also emphasizes it in

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a special way. As soon as this «glory» of the other values were chosen as a theme, the beauty coming
from them, love would be buried.

The topic would be effective if the overall beauty of the beloved hinged only on the values
spreading in the metaphysical beauty, and if the contribution of the sensitive beauty were totally
marginal. But it is not like that. According to von Hildebrand, overall beauty is the union between
metaphysical beauty and sensitive beauty (I do not agree with the conceptual modalities of this
union, but this is not the right place for such debate*); therefore, if the value at stake in love is the
overall beauty, if this is the importance in itself to which we are now responding, it would be a
contradiction to state that this value would not be the subject on which love affection is centered.
I still consider very effective, on the contrary, the determination of love responsively, because it
is here that the term “response” is indeed correct. In fact, if responding really characterizes every
authentic relation to the values, all the more it is closely requested by the beautiful, by the kalón, the
caller par excellence, to which the calling (kaleîn) essentially belongs. (Several etimological data
show that the Greek adjective kalós, “beautiful”, derives from tha Akkadian kalûm, “full, perfect”.
Anyway, in my opinion there can be no doubt that kalûm met the other Akkadian word qara’u,
“call, invite”, and the Hebrew qol, “voice, cry” (cfr. G. Semerano, Dizionario della lingua greca,
Olschki, Firenze 2002, s.vv. kaléo, kalós). In English the consonance with the verb to call can be
heard at once: ho kalós calls – the beautiful calls, voices, appeals.)
Beauty is convocation. And love responds to the structural call of beauty. However, differently
from von Hildebrand, I consider beauty the centre from which all other values spread: they are like
the words through which it convokes and claims lovers to itself.

3. Eros and agape (thought in a radical way?)

The physiognomy of beauty-response covers, according to von Hildebrand, both natural and
supernatual love, both eros and agape. But the German philosopher, intentionally, doesn’t deal with
the above couple thoroughly, and states he cannot do that because they are placed at the borders of
his phenomenologic investigation. This point is very delicate, and I think it is a serious, though
suggestive aporia. I will try to explain why.
Before reviewing the categories of agape (Gottesliebe/love for God, Nächstenliebe/love of
neighbour, Liebe in Christus/love in Christ) in contrast with the main categories of eros (parental,
filial, friendly, spousal, conjugal), at the beginning of chapter XI of The Nature of Love, von
Hildebrand states he methodically cannot take into consideration the tremendous theological
superiority of agape to eros, because it «is after all an object of faith and not a datum available to
our natural experience» (NL 235), and therefore he can only analyse the differences between agape
and eros which are comprehensible in the natural experience.
On the grounds of these words the analysis is expected to turn only to the natural experiential
data. Nevertheless, to realise that it is not like that, we just need to come closer to the enunciation of
those methodological premises and wonder: what does having a natural experience of supernatural
love mean? Doesn’t agape itself, as it takes decisively shape in the christian tradition starting from
                                                                                                               
*   The
distinction between is, in my opinion, too rigid. See, for example, Ästh., c. 5, I136: «In the pure sensitive beauty
[of the human face] we don’t have a different reality from the forms ones, of colours and material. The man’s character
doesn’t alter anything in it». Actually, there is no pure sensitive beauty of the human face.  

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the Synoptic Gospels, from John’s writings and Paul’s letters, belong to the sphere of religious faith
and theology? Doesn’t agape totally depend – in its existence, in its such-being and in its eidetic
essence – on a datum fidei, the Theós-Agápe of 1Gv 4,16?
Von Hildebrand dealt with this problem in the first chapter of Moralia, the posthumous work
published in 1980. This is his argument (I’m translating freely from pp. 63foll.):

Love for God and love of neighbor, which form the axis of natural and supernatural morality, are
cognitively data comprehensible to our natural spiritual faculties, and do not concern faith, as, for
example, the working of grace or the rebirth in baptism; we are also able to understand that these two
agapic categories presuppose the christian revelation. The truth of the christian revelation, which
belongs to the field of religion, cannot be the subject of a philosophical analysis; but philosophy is
certainly able to understand that human agape, inasmuch it is a response to divine beauty, presupposes
the revelation of God in Christ. A philosophical ethic is therefore entitled to show both a sublimity of
the supernatural morals greater than the natural morals, and their deep intimate connection.

With this argument the German philosopher justifies the limits of a non-theological analysis of
the relation between eros and agape, an analysis hinged on the fact that – as we can read in NL, c.
11 – «christian love of neighbor centers around morality, whereas all the other kinds of love for a
person have a different center, a center all its own». He aims to show that there is a difference
between eros and agape, which however is not corresponding to the traditional opposition between
amor concupiscentiae and amor benevolentiae. He gets this result through the distinction – in my
opinion expressed elliptically and not very clearly – between the nature of love in general, its
categorial identities (kategoriale Eigenheiten) and its intercategorial qualities (Quälitaten).
In short, the decisive point of hildebrandian investigation is that the nature of love, as a value-
response to the overall beauty of the beloved, includes all the different categories, both natural and
supernatural, the former characterized by the erotic quality (the donation of our own heart and the
devotion of ourselves to the other, which transcends the affective response itself in a purely
extramoral way), the latter by the agapic quality (the free and holy goodness which, inasmuch it is
also a divine commandment, forms the soul of the supernatural morality and is, therefore, the crown
of natural morality). But, thanks to this structural communion (or communance) preparing them for
the possible unification, «all natural categories of love can be filled and penetrated with this caritas,
and in fact (...) only in this way can they fully unfold their own proper genius» (NL 272). The
agape-caritas qualitatively overcomes the eros in a completely new and unlimited way, but it is not
a contrast with the eros, and on the contrary completes and transfigures it – according to a relation
perfectly analogous to the one between natural morality and supernatural morality.
Now, in this argument by von Hildebrand three things are not convincing.
1) Firstly, I don’t understand the self-limitation to philosophically deal only with the data of
natural experience and the consequent exclusion of the data of faith. As examples of contexts
forming the subject of faith, von Hildebrand rightly offers the effusion of the grace and the act of
rebirth with baptism, on whose truth philosophy must abstain from any judgement. However, in
front of such beautiful hildebrandian phrases like «the neighbor shines forth in the radiance of the
fact that Christ loves him or her infinitely and died on the cross for him or her» (NL 270), I wonder
rhetorically whether Christ’s infinite love for us, confirmed through his death on the cross, is not a
datum of faith much more mysterious than the grace and the baptismal sacrament; nevertheless it is

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mentioned and discussed to emphasize more clearly the difference between it and the love of
neighbor – that is, it is used philosophically, in an implicit but undeniable way.
2) Furthermore, in The Nature of Love John’s “very mysterious” determination «ho theós agápe
estín» is assumed everywhere, but, inasmuch it cannot be dealt with thematically because of the
above self-limitation, it leaves unsolved all the problems concerning the real essence of agape. The
divine Agape is not a response to a value, but Beauty itself is, when it attractively calls men to come
out of the darkness towards the light of mutual love. Without the philosophical consideration of
God-Agape’s givenness (not of its truth, which concerns theology), the agape actualized by man is
unaccountable in its essential core, in its original nature. And it is paradoxical that, in a
philosophical work entitled Das Wesen der Liebe/The Nature of Love, the real Wesen (the real
Natur) is not explicitly dealt with philosophically. On the other hand, in this way the correct
hildebrandian objection of compatibility between eros and agape has no true foundations, and even
eros cannot be thought in its radicality of self-trascendence and interested self-donation.
3) Finally, the theory according to which christian love of neighbor is inseparable from morality
can only last if der ur-wesentliche Grund, the most principal Foundation of agape-caritas is still
precluded. From my point of view, which here doesn’t matter, the dimension of agape is more
original than the sphere of morality, because it is directly founded on the trinitarian team of the
divine Being; and because of its highly ontological value, the agape quite affects the being and the
freedom of man before involving any human act or behaviour. Therefore, in a rigorous
ontologization of Agape, whereby being and freedom of man as well as Being and Freedom of God
are thought in their intimate connection (and paradigmatic connection for every other link, both
agapic and erotic), the Christic commandment of love of neighbor reveals a distinct ultramoral
physiognomy – surely neither antimoral nor, however, confined within morality, even if
“supernatural”.

In the end, we can say that the hildebrandian work about the Nature of Love, deservedly
celebrated in this prestigious international conference, deals with phenomenological accuracy and
conceptual sistematicity the several forms (categories, identities, qualities) of human love, but it
didn’t deal, in a clearly philosophical way, with the very essence of this love.
But I will not conclude my speech with my criticism towards this work about love. On the
contrary, I will quote a beautiful passage I agree with in toto; it is in Ästhetik (c. 2), but it belongs to
the philosophical circuit of the 1971 work, and somehow completes it: «Supreme [human] love,
love for Christ, responds to the holy divine beauty of Jesus». Therefore I can state, inspired by von
Hildebrand’s meditations:
Beauty calls, eros responds trascending itself, agape oblatively transfigures the trascendence of
this response.

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REFERENCES

D. VON HILDEBRAND, Gesammelte Werke, ed. by the Dietrich-von-Hildebrand-Gesellschaft,

Habbel, Regensburg (= H) / Kohlhammer, Stuttgart (=  K) 1971-1984:
vol. II: Ethik, (K) 1973.
vol. III: Das Wesen der Liebe, (H) 1971; english trans. by J. F. Crosby and J. H. Crosby: The
Nature of Love [= NL], St. Augustine’s Press, South Bend (IN) 2010.
vol. V: Ästhetik, 2 vols. (K) 1977-1984; italian trans. by V. Cicero: Estetica, Bompiani, Milano
2006.
vol. IX: Moralia, (H) 1980.

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