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Book synopsis: Love—unconditional, selfless, unchanging, sincere, and totally accepting—is worshipped today as West's only universal religion. To challenge it is one of our few remaining taboos. In this pathbreaking and superbly written book, philosopher Simon May does just that, dissecting our resilient ruling ideas of and showing how they are product of a long and powerful cultural heritage. Tracing over 2,500 years of human thought and history, May shows how our ideal of developed from its Hebraic and Greek origins alongside Christianity until, during last two centuries, God is became love is God—so hubristic, so escapist, so untruthful to real nature of love, that it has booby-trapped relationships everywhere with deluded expectations. Brilliantly, May explores very different philosophers and writers, both skeptics and believers, who dared to think differently: from Aristotle's perfect friendship and Ovid's celebration of sex and the chase, to Rousseau's personal authenticity, Nietzsche's affirmation, Freud's concepts of loss and mourning, and boredom in Proust. Against our belief that is an all-powerful solution to finding meaning, security, and happiness in life, May reveals with great clarity what actually is: intense desire for someone whom we believe can ground and affirm our very existence. The feeling that makes world go round turns out to be a harbinger of home--and in that sense, of sacred.
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