Relation to others· Bonds
Agape as gift
Axis: Nature of love — What lies at the heart of love: a lack, a gift, or something else?
True love does not seek to fill a lack: it gives itself without condition or calculation. It is directed at the other person for their own sake, regardless of their qualities or what they can offer us.
Philosophers 1
Thomas Aquinasexplicit
The supreme love is for Thomas charity (caritas), the Latin rendering of : a love of benevolence that wills the other's good and descends from God toward the creature rather than rising from lack toward the good, as Platonic does. But Thomas gives it a precise and decisive definition: charity is a (amicitia) of the human being with God, 's very category taken up and transposed: founded on the sharing of beatitude, it supposes, like every friendship, mutual benevolence and a communion. The gift remains primary, since it is God who loves first and makes this friendship possible by grace, yet it takes the reciprocal form of philia, not that of a one-way gift; the old upward thrust of desire toward the good nonetheless persists as a residual share.
Summa Theologiae, IIa-IIae, q. 23 (charity as friendship)