ABSTRACT
Aristotle speculated on the apparent paradox that benefactors love their beneficiaries more than the beneficiaries love their benefactors. Concerning love in a person no more than a stone can throw itself into the air can one act in love as from an intrinsic principle; and if a stone were to have such a projective power in itself, it would have to have another nature given to it. Much was affirmed for the monastic community as the mode of God-centred corporate life. For the moment we can observe that there was little in theory to distinguish the individual experience of love from the corporate. A distinctive feature of medieval theology, taught and applied in schools and monasteries, was analysis of love for God according to stages or degrees of development toward perfection. It was so from the beginning of Christianity.
