Is True Love Really Unconditional?
It is a commonplace of our time to speak of unconditional love as though this comprised a tautology wherein love, if it is to be love at all, simply must be unconditional. Philosophers by contrast, contrarian as we are apt to be, tend to find this less perspicuous. Steven D. Hales thus opens a discussion by observing crisply that “Unconditional love is impossible” even though he sees that this has “important consequences”. After all, “Social policies have been derided on the grounds that they undermine unconditional love” (Anderson) and “such love has been considered the best and noblest form of love”, while it has even been called by Nozick, ‘possibly the most valuable aspect of the Christian tradition’. *
The case for holding love to be conditional is simply that in any actual instance of love that we experience, it does in fact depend on some features of the beloved, such as appearance, shared interests, timing, character, or even what we may call relational facts like being “my child”. We know too that love can be lost when relevant properties are lost or replaced by contrary ones.
Consider the Hales’ hypothetical case of José and Juanita. Juanita loves José rather than Pepe or myriad other possible men because he has certain properties she discerns which these other men lack. ‘He shares interests with her, has similar political and religious views, has a physical appearance Juanita finds appealing, has a personality type” and “a certain financial where-withal”. It can be allowed there may also have been some relational aspects, such as that Juanita was not in a competing relationship at the time, but this merely means that José had, as it were, the further properties of ‘being in the right place at the right time’. Moreover, it is highly likely that if Juan should he lose some of his properties by becoming ‘destitute, drunken, abusive, philandering, and switching political allegiances’ then Juanita would cease to love Jose.
Oddly enough, it would seem that we can find it easier to understand clearly emotional attitudes towards non-human objects by reference to their properties. So, to take a rather different case, we would not regard it as irrational to “love a Seurat painting because it has the property having paint daubed upon canvas in a certain way” which is an essential property of the painting, just as “hating slugs because they are slimy, squishy plant-eaters” is unlikely to seem to us irrational or improperly grounded, even though these are properties over which slugs have no control.
With all this said , we might however seek to refine matters and allow that we can use the term “unconditional love” more loosely to mean “love that will not disappear despite changes in the beloved”, but what this surely means is that such love is ultimately grounded in essential properties, not the state of unconditionality itself. Hence, in the case of parental love, the relevant property is that of being the parent of the child, which relation the child cannot lose or alienate, so the love appears stable even if the child behaves badly. However, that stability comes from dependence on an essential relation (ontological), not from independence from all properties.
Then again, love based on essential properties may be strong, but is of itself not necessarily good in a moral or rational sense. This would seem to imply that loving someone for an inborn or unchosen essential property may be less rational than loving them for contingent traits, for example, positive qualities such as kindness, beauty, or shared commitments. So there is clearly much here to ponder for love that is “not dependent on contingent features,” may be psychologically understandable but is not obviously of itself necessarily the ideal to encourage in the world of our experience where conditional forms of love, may in fact be a better and more realistic good.
At this point it is time to engage St Augustine!
In a rather extreme summary Augustine would hold that the moral and spiritual health of a person (as indeed of a church or other community) depends on whether they love the right things in the right way and in the right order.
And we start from the ultimate objective and essential relation wherein God alone is to be loved as the ultimate of all other things—including self, neighbour, family, vocation, and material goods—which are to be loved “in God” and “for God”.
We can then from that perspective see that when that right order is distorted, the result is inner fragmentation and social conflict.
Later Christian reflection (including the ordo caritatis of Thomas Aquanas) makes this more explicit: but the fundamental insight to dwell upon is that there is an ordered hierarchy in Christian understanding of love.
* God is loved above all.
* Then the self, as called to salvation.
* Then those most closely joined to us (through such relations as those of family, local church, and those bound to us by covenant).
* Then wider still we have neighbors, strangers, and indeed even enemies.
Ultimately, we are in this perspective called to will the good of all universally, but the fact remains that we cannot help everyone equally; and our finite capacities require some ordering of concrete responsibilities (which is to say “prioritizing” of those “most closely bound to us by place, time, or opportunity”).
All of this has considerable pastoral implications and merits thus further consideration as we shall see, but in the first place there is more clarification to be done both in terms of philosophy and theology.
*See, Steven D. Hales, “The Impossibility of Unconditional Love” in Public Affairs Quarterly, Oct., 1995, Vol. 9, No. 4 (Oct., 1995), pp. 317-320 and then respectively for the later quotations Elizabeth S. Anderson, “Is Women’s Labor a Commodity?” in Contemporary Issues in Bioethics, T. L. Beauchamp and L. Walters, eds. (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing Co., 1994, 4th ed.) pp. 233-43; Richard Taylor, Good and Evil (New York: Macmillan Publishing, 1970; and Stephen G. Post, “Conditional and Unconditional Love,” Modern Theology, vol. 7 (1991), pp. 435-46 with the quotation on p. 444. The Robert Nozick quotation is from, The Examined Life, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989 p. 75.)
True love, I would argue –and as we have seen above–if understood as the highest form of willing the good of the other, cannot be entirely unconditional in every respect; yet from both philosophical and theological perspectives, the perfection of love can be seen to tend toward a radical, asymmetrical “unconditioned quality” at its core as we may hold is necessarily to be found in God which we know to be that than which nothing greater can be conceived (to recall the famous Boethian phrase).
But granted this, the question is not simply whether love has no conditions, but which conditions belong to love’s integrity and which betray it.
“Unconditional love” can mean at least three different things:
–Love without merit conditions: the beloved need not deserve love or meet qualifying criteria.
–Love without behavioral limits: love persists regardless of the beloved’s actions.
–Love without normative conditions: love is detached from truth, goodness, or justice.
Philosophically and theologically, these must be distinguished.
A very great deal of confusion is apt to arise when the critique of one kind of “conditionality” (say, merit-based) is reduced to the claim that all norms and boundaries are incompatible with true love.
Love as Value-Response or Willing-the-Good
In much modern philosophy, love is seen as a response to the perceived value of the beloved or as an act of willing the other’s good, not merely a feeling. Thinkers such as Iris Murdoch, Harry Frankfurt, and Robert Adams treat love as what might be characterized as “a stable orientation of attention and will toward another’s flourishing, grounded in the recognition of their dignity rather than their usefulness or attractiveness”.
On such an account, “true” love is not merely affection but a constant of concern, in which the beloved’s changing features do not exhaust the reasons for loving them.
One problem here however is that this already relativizes “conditions”: the love is not simply conditional on transient traits (beauty, success, compliance), but on the more fundamental fact that the beloved is a person of irreducible worth. Yet that very worth is a normative condition: we ought not love evil as such, nor ought we to will a good that contradicts justice. Thus, philosophical considerations will tend to lead us to reject a notion of unconditional love that is normless or indifferent to the moral character of what is loved.
Unconditional Love and Rationality
Some analytic accounts explicitly challenge the coherence of “unconditional love”, such as that of Michael Hales, for example, argues that one strong interpretation of unconditional love—loving someone irrespective of any facts about them—is as seen above — impossible, because rational love requires some basis or reasons at least initially. While another interpretation —loving someone whatever they do—is likely irrational, since it would require continuing to love in ways that could be self-destructive or complicit in wrongdoing. On this
view, there is an ineliminable conditional structure to rational love:
Accordingly it would seem clear that there must be some features of the beloved that ground love (personhood, character, shared life, etc.). Moreover, some actions by the beloved would seem rightly to entail alteration in the expression or form of love (for instance, love may require distance or rebuke in cases of abuse).
Such philosophical reflection then suggests that “true love” cannot be unconditional in the sense of being blind to reasons or immune to moral evaluation; otherwise, love collapses into sheer stubborn attachment or sentimentality or the driest and remote kind of ontology.
Virtue Ethics: Constancy and Moral Conditions
An alternative approach would be aretaic and would start from a virtue-ethical standpoint (e.g. Aristotle, and later virtue theorists). Here love is seen as closely allied with friendship and the virtues that sustain it: justice, generosity, fidelity, truthfulness.
A good friend loves “for the sake of the friend”—which is not meritocratic in a crude sense, but is still structurally conditional upon some shared orientation toward the good. If a friend becomes persistently unjust or destructive, virtue may require loving them differently: for instance, refusing to enable their vice, or allowing a relationship to change or end.
Thus virtue-ethics affirms:
— Love ideally is constant through change, suffering, failure. Yet love is conditioned by the demands of the good; it cannot be truly loving to will or encourage what is bad for the beloved.
— And to speak of “unconditional love” here can then only mean: love is not withdrawn merely because the beloved fails to meet our preferences or perform well; but this does not mean that love has no shape given by ontology and objective goods.
Existential Freedom and Respect
Existentialist accounts cause potentially some confusion here,(e.g. Sartre, de Beauvoir) They seek to introduce another “condition” namely respect for the other’s freedom. If love becomes possession or absorption—seeking to eliminate the beloved’s autonomy—it ceases to be authentic love. But this can feed into (as a practical matter) granting and supporting actions by the beloved that are in the end harmful to the beloved, for within this account, true love must condition itself upon the preservation of the other as free subject and not object, no matter that the cost is potentially most costly to the beloved (lest the lover makes love absolutely unconditional in the sense of overriding the beloved’s projects); nonetheless it is plausible to suppose that love surely must respect the risk inherent in freedom, including those of rejection and change.
But if this is true then again, love is actually structurally conditioned by the recognition at base of the other’s transcendence and the ethical demand to let them be (with all the dangers that can bring to the beloved).
All of which is to say, that we have reason to suppose that “true” love –that is worthy of that name– will tend toward steadfastness and non-meritocratic concern for the person. But there is more to be said.
Love necessarily has conditions tied to rationality, virtue, and respect for freedom and “unconditional love” can only be held as a defensible concept if understood as: a commitment not to abandon one’s basic concern for the beloved’s good, merely because they fail, change, or no longer benefit us—within the limits set by justice and practical wisdom etc and undergirded I suggest by the ontological essentialism hinted at before.
In other words, love may be unconditional in respect to egoistic benefit and performance, but conditional with respect to ontological relation, truth, goodness, and the integrity of persons.
But what of theology: Divine Love as the ultimate paradigm
Theologically, the question “must true love be unconditional?” is immediately reframed by our understanding of the doctrine of God’s love as the ultimate form of love.
In Christian thought, divine love is often described as both unmerited and steadfast—“while we were yet sinners,” God loves and acts to save. This suggests a radically non-meritocratic structure: God’s love does not wait for prior righteousness or deserving; it creates the conditions of reconciliation rather than responding to them.
Classically, however, God’s love is neither sentimentally unconditional nor morally indifferent, rather it is unconditional with respect to prior merit (grace). It is in fact understood as fully conditioned by God’s own holiness, truth, and justice.
This means that it is “without condition” in the sense that it is grounded in God’s own being rather than in creaturely worthiness, (a radically important reframing of the unconditionality involved).
Divine love is unconditioned at the level of source (God’s free, gracious will), but normatively conditioned in its acts (God loves in ways consistent with divine holiness, sometimes including judgment, discipline, and the permitting of consequences).
The New Testament’s language of agape has often been used to underwrite the modern phrase of “unconditional love” by virtue of understanding God’s self-giving love to the undeserving, and the command to love enemies, the unlovely, the stranger. Yet it is vital to understand that agape is not indifferent to repentance, transformation, or obedience:
Again, it is true that God’s love reaches out to sinners prior to any response on our part, but the full enjoyment of communion with God is conditioned upon turning from sin, trusting, and walking in new life.
And we see this when we recognize that the love which forgives also commands: “go, and sin no more.” Hence we must distinguish: The persistence of God’s loving will toward the creature (unmerited, “unconditioned” grace) and the form of that love in relation to human freedom and sin (sometimes mercy, sometimes severe mercy, sometimes judgment).
To call God’s love “unconditional” without qualification risks therefore flattening the biblical tension between mercy and holiness—whereas to make it entirely conditional upon human response undermines grace. Many theological accounts therefore speak of unconditional grace but conditional fellowship or conditional participation in the benefits of that love.
The importance of placing human love within the Image of God
If human love is to be shaped by divine love, the question becomes: must our love be “unconditional” in an analogous way?
Here several theological points can be drawn out: Human love is called to be non-meritocratic as we are commanded to love enemies, the poor, the weak, those who cannot repay.
Human love is called to be steadfast as we see in marital and familial love and ecclesial charity which are to endure through suffering, failure, and limitation. Yet human love, unlike God’s, is finite, vulnerable, and morally fallible, and must be ordered by justice and prudence. In light of this we can see that as God demonstrates to us a parent’s love should not be withdrawn because a child fails, sins, or disappoints; love persists, though its expression may change (rebuke, boundaries, consequences).
A spouse’s love is called also to persist through sickness, poverty, and failures. Ecclesial love should not cease for those who wrong the community, even though church discipline may alter the form of that love, it cannot forsake it.
Thus, even modern Christian theology tends to treat “unconditional love” as a moral aspiration and as the refusal to let self-interest, resentment, or merit arithmetic dictate whether one wills the other’s good—while simultaneously insisting that love must be conditioned by truth, justice, and the reality of sin.
Grace, Judgment, and the Purification of Love
There is also the further theological issue that love directed indiscriminately, without discernment, can become complicity with evil. To love someone truly is not necessarily to endorse all their choices; to love them unconditionally in a theological sense is to hold fast to their ultimate good and as a practical matter this may require opposing their present desires and practices – as parents can see from time to time all too clearly with their children!
Then there is the interplay of grace and judgment as crucial.
Grace signifies God’s unconditional initiative and continued desire for reconciliation and the ready conferral of the power to achieve this when our wills unite to that of God.
Judgment signifies that love does not abandon God’s own holiness or the reality of moral order. Hence human love, too, participates in this tension: forgiving seventy times seven, yet sometimes withdrawing specific forms of relationship or imposing boundaries for the sake of the good.
Once again we see that “unconditionality” belongs to the intentional core (I do not cease to will your good) rather than to every relational arrangement (where one may always strive to remain close if we think about practical pastoral relations but this cannot properly entail that we never confront; or never set limits).
True love then in its divine paradigm, is “unconditioned” by merit and prior worth, rooted in God’s free, gracious being but is rigorously conditioned by holiness, truth, and the aim of the beloved’s genuine good, which may involve painful discipline as well as respect for freedom and the consequent freedom to err, (though that of itself cannot include freedom from consequence of error).
Human love, reflecting this pattern, should then rightly aspire to be unconditional in its refusal to treat the beloved as a means or to cancel concern for their good, but must in fact remain conditional with respect to the ways it is expressed and the moral goods that it seeks.
To insist that true love be utterly unconditional—with no boundaries, no judgments, no criteria at all—is to detach love from truth, justice and the rightful claims of the good.
Yet with this all acknowledged it is also true that to insist that love be strictly conditional—withdrawn whenever expectations are not met—can be to deny grace and the possibility of forgiveness: as we see all too often now when “all is permitted and nothing is
forgiven”.
Philosophically and theologically, “true love” seems to require then an unconditioned core (gracious, steadfast concern) within a conditioned practice (ordered by moral truth, justice, and the integrity of persons).
The difficulty of achieving the golden mean to which this points means that we have however much cause to dwell further upon them!