
Love-unconditional selfless unchanging sincere & totally accepting-is worshipped today as the West's only universal religion To challenge it is one of our few remaining taboos In this pathbreaking & superbly written book philosopher Simon May does just that dissecting our resilient ruling ideas of love & showing how they are the product of a long & powerful cultural heritage Tracing over 2500 years of human thought & history May shows how our ideal of love developed from its Hebraic & Greek origins alongside Christianity until during the last two centuries God is love became love is God-so hubristic so escapist so untruthful to the real nature of love that it has booby-trapped relationships everywhere with deluded expectations Brilliantly May explores the very different philosophers & writers both skeptics & believers who dared to think differently from Aristotle's perfect friendship & Ovid's celebration of sex & the chase to Rousseau's personal authenticity Nietzsche's affirmation Freud's concepts of loss & mourning & boredom in Proust Against our belief that love is an all-powerful solution to finding meaning security & happiness in life May reveals with great clarity what love actually is the intense desire for someone whom we believe can ground & affirm our very existence The feeling that makes the world go round turns out to be a harbinger of home--and in that sense of the sacred