You can’t judge a book by its cover. Judging by its cover, Love: Christian Romance, Marriage, and Friendship, by Princeton Christian philosopher Diogenes Allen, looks like it falls in the same general area as The 5 Love Languages or some other self-help book. Looks, as they say, are deceiving.
Allen actually traverses some of the terrain as other important works, most notably The Four Loves, by C. S. Lewis. In Allen’s case, he taps into the Western tradition to help explain in a deeper way what usually gets flattened or trivialized for mass consumption in most books on this topic. Allen takes the humanities seriously, and in the first few chapters of the book, he refers to the following writers:
Denis de Rougemont on courtly love
Plato (Phaedrus)
St. John of the Cross
Coleridge (“Rime of the Ancient Mariner”)
Genesis
Kierkegaard
Arthur Miller (Death of a Salesman)
Dante
Bonaventure
Martin Luther
Allen does not write as the Princetonian scholar, though. He wants to make accessible to a more general audience some of the fundamental Christian insights into the nature of love in its multiple dimensions. A work like this shows that “The Western Tradition” is much more than a dull section of humanities credits required to knock out an undergraduate degree. Allen shows that ancient Greeks, Medieval Catholics, modern Protestants, and literary works of all kinds have the power to illuminate the most fundamental reality of all human beings (“Love the Lord your God and your neighbor as yourself”).
The Western Tradition was generated for a reason. It is not a unified, monolithic voice, and it still communicates profoundly about our own day to day concerns for loving and being loveable. Why study good literature, philosophy, and theology? So you can love your wife better. So you can love your kids better. So you can love God better.