Love is a word we use for widely different activities: sexual desire, friendship, turning to God; we even ‘love’ books or games. The differences can be marked by adjectives (love is ‘carnal’ or ‘spiritual’), but the recurrence of the same noun implies, one supposes, that something remains the same, or similar, in every case. But it is not easy to define this common factor or similarity, and we are more likely to be irritated by the ambiguity of ‘love’ than to try to see how it arises—to take, I mean, this ambiguity as a clue for exploring our own nature. On reflection, however, we might agree that the imprecision of the term comes from its meaning, if anything, too much, not too little; from its referring to something at the centre of existence and involved, inextricably, with all that we do. We might, of course, try to limit the meaning of the word to one particular context, to sexual relations; but although ‘love’ in modern English does chiefly refer to sex, such a limitation would he somewhat artificial. The idea behind the wider, inclusive use of thi term arises quite naturally, and it is an integral part of our culture, as a glance at any Latin dictionary will show. Already in classical Latin amor had a wide, trans-sexual sense; which Christian theology and meditation was quick to appropriate in its turn, and then enormously to extend—enough to recall a single great phrase from St Augustine, pondus meum, amor meus: ‘my weight is my love; thereby I am borne, whithersoever I am borne’.