One word to love it all

Mildly against C.S. Lewis, I guess

Oct 27, 2025

Fellow Pilgrims,

How many times have we heard the complaint? What a shame that the English language has only the one word for love.

Love me, love my dog (1894), Charles Jay Taylor (American, 1855-1929), via Artvee.

What a shame that we are forced to use the same word to describe love of chocolate and love of a child, that we lack words to distinguish the love of friendship from charitable love from erotic love, that the same word is invoked for both love of a spouse and love of God.

There is truth in this tradition of critique, and there is no doubt that a variety of words can help us to know and to clarify the richness and variety of loves. For example, my thought has been shaped, even ordered, by Augustine’s deployment of the difference between a love of use and a love of enjoyment. The love of use, uti, loves for a purpose, for what the loved-thing is for in itself. I uti my car because it gets me to work. The love of enjoyment, frui, loves for the beloved’s own sake, because the beloved is truly lovely. I frui God because God is beautiful, true, and good, because God is lovely and lovable. All loves ought to be ordered through and toward the love of God. All loves were designed to be gathered into a channel that flows to the God who is love.

But loving has gone wrong. Where I ought to love my car for God’s sake and love God because God is God, my loves are disordered. They pour out in endless promiscuous directions, and I am trapped in the lie that my car might itself be loveable and lovely. I am tempted to the belief that my car might be the point of everything. As a sinner, I try to frui my car. Worse, in my delusion that my car, or perhaps a better car, is the goal of love, I love God wrongly, acting as though God should be the vehicle for getting me what really matters. I try to uti God to get me a better car. This is a tragic reversal of the proper ends of uti and frui, and I am caught in that reversal, desperately flinging my frui at all that is unlovely and so cannot bring me into the life of love for which I was made. I stand in need of healing, and God’s healing love can reorder my loves so that I may begin to frui God and to love all that is not God for God’s sake.

Augustine’s use of the word uti allows him to draw his reader’s imagination into a deeply ordered world. In that world, everything is purposeful, and the purpose of all created things is to glorify the one God. When he challenges us to uti all creation, Augustine asks us to love creation for God’s sake, because God is the one to whom all creation is ordered. God is the one who is the goal of all things and the right end of all our loving. The distinction between uti and frui love is such a dramatic one that it stands some chance of shaking our understanding and cracking us open to the kind of godly reordering of love Augustine believes we need.

But Augustine’s distinction between uti and frui is also hard hitting in a way that rightly upsets. It’s one thing to suggest that my car is not lovely in its own right, that its true purpose lies beyond itself and any love I bear that car ought to be wed to that purpose, but it’s another thing to claim that my husband is also not lovely in his own right. Can Augustine really mean that I should use my husband? If he is right that the purpose and point of my husband is God, then perhaps he can.

If he is right that the Love for whom my husband was created is God, then he can, but in his less rhetorically overstated moments, he also acknowledges that people are lovely and lovable, though never on their own. The fact of my husband’s loveliness comes from his creation by and participation in the love of God.

Were my husband and I to try to love one another as though we were the point, our love would devolve into a selfish and self-aggrandizing exercise in futility. We would be disappointed to learn, as all must learn, that no human being can be the meaning of love, and we would be tempted to cast about for another person to try to fill the role of being the point. But when human lovers frui one another such that their love is caught up and poured into the channel that flows to God, then they are set free from trying to be each other’s points and set free for love to flow outward to the world God loves.

I do not read Augustine as simply dismissing the loveliness of human loves. His initial rigid distinction between uti and frui is set free to become something more tender once we have been startled into openness to his point that God is the point, after all.

That original binary between uti and frui has to be opened up to some deep analogy between the two kinds of love. When I am able to uti my husband for God’s sake—never for my own self absorbed sake—then uti can participate in the frui that most properly belongs to God alone. The two kinds of love are different from each other, and they are prone to disorder, but the distinction itself eventually opens us to seeing the real relationship between the two.

While there is some truth in all the sighing over our lack of many English words for love, there is also a deep gift in the oneness of our word. Our lone word, love, habituates us to analogy. It trains us in making deep connections between things that are both unalike and alike. There is a real analogy between my love of chocolate and my love my children and the loves of friendship and eros and charity and the love of I bear for God and the love I bear for my spouse.

This analogy is mysterious, but it teaches us of the deep unity of human desire and the deep unity of love in the God who is love. It teaches us to understand the link between our longing for tiramisu and our longing for God. This could cheapen our talk of divine love, but it could also work such that our longings for created goods, including the embodied longing of eros, might be able to open us to the converting love of God.

If God is truly Love, then loving must be undivided. There is only one love, and all our loves, all our wantings, all our desires, are to flow as one towards the Loving Trinity who empowers all our loving.