In his provocative new book, Love: A History, Simon May argues that Nietzsche was only half right in pronouncing God’s death. God was not dead; he had simply reincarnated into something new. “That new god was love. Human love,” writes May, a philosophy professor at King’s College in London.
May’s argument is predictable. It goes like this: in an uncertain world that had been flirting with nihilism since the eighteenth-century, love swept in to give human beings purpose and meaning in the monotony of their lives. Where rationalism, Communism, and nationalism failed, love succeeded—so effectively, in fact, that love is the one ineluctable and universal truth that human beings now cling to. “All You Need is Love” is the theme song of our age.
Focusing on figures like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Sigmund Freud, May follows the idea of love through Western history to show how love “filled the vacuum left by the retreat of Christianity.” There is a sharp irony in this history. The Western idea of love is, to this day, indebted to the very religion that it came to replace: Christianity. In two hefty chapters on that religion, May explains that Christianity turned love into the supreme virtue, paving the way for it to replace God as the summum bonum. In the words of Saint John, “God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them.” Despite May’s patent antagonism toward Christianity, he argues
