Saint Augustine – The Apologist of Love

The concept of love crosses the history of mankind as a red thread, being a topic of reflection for philosophers and theologians, Christian or not, as well as a source of inspiration for virtually any kind of creation: literary, poetical, visual, etc. Thence, the various meanings attributed to the term – from the significations that emerge in such expressions as love of wisdom, love of knowledge, love of country to the acceptations of words such as Eros, philia, or agape. In these circumstances, we see why the universality of love, its various shapes, the final purpose of love, the ways in which it can be misled from its true goals, or its psychological or sociological aspects are just as many landmarks in the exegesis of this concept. One of the scholars who made very insightful and nuanced analyses of love, which was both the essence and the dominant of his entire life, was Saint Augustine, a theologian, a philosopher, and a well-known writer. Starting from sexual desire, passing through friendship and love for one's neighbour, and culminating in the love by God and the love for God, the successor of the Apostles Paul and John, while leaning relentlessly on faith, on the one hand, opened his heart and confessed the stages of his own conversion, and, on the other, sought to transform those he addressed into better Christians. As a result, this study aims to exemplify all these forms of love in Saint Augustine's works, to show the path walked from the egocentrism of his passion to unconditional selfless love through self-knowledge, to highlight the relationship established between moral and God's love, to facilitate the accurate understanding of Divine transcendence, and, overall, to show why this theologian was also called the “doctor of love”.