ABSTRACT
Love is a force of destiny whose power reaches from heaven to hell. Love is an ethical, a social, a psychological, a philosophical, an aesthetic, a religious, a medical or a physiological problem, to name only a few aspects of this many-sided phenomenon. Beginning with the highest mystery of the Christian religion, people encounter, on the next-lower stages, the amor Dei of Origen, the amor intellectualis Dei of Spinoza, Plato's love of the Idea, and the Gottesminne of the mystics. Here people find the love of one's neighbour, in the Christian sense as well as in the Buddhist sense of compassion, and the love of mankind as expressed in social service. Next there is love of one's country, and the love for ideal institutions such as the Church. Conjugal love can be of the kind of which Goethe says at the end of Faust: Spirit by attraction draws Elemental matter, Forges bonds no man can force and no angel shatter.
