Anthropology of Love in Texts of the New Testament in the Light of the Modern Age

Introduction. The nature and essence of human cannot be fully revealed outside the phenomenon of love. The natural, mental and socio-cultural factors of a human’s being converge and refract in it, and in the personality itself, through love, the past, present and future, eternal and endless, the beginning and end of being. Therefore, the metaphysics of love is dialectical, it believes both the denial of love and that love itself denies a lot: hatred, death and finiteness. Behind its visible phenomenal row there is a deep metaphysical essence of meanings read by eras and civilizations in different ways. Therefore, there is a complete reason to consider the anthropology of love as a direct given of human existence. The topic is actualized in the modern world by the crisis of love, which is replaced by material in the boundless cult of consumption.

The purpose of the study is to draw attention to the deep meanings of love in the Gospel texts. The gospel texts are more than two thousand years old, but they have not been still read, at the beginning of the third millennium, have not been mastered yet. Nevertheless, one of the most important aspects of knowing the world is through reading the text. For a person who knows and is in the process of cognition, the text requiring reading appears the whole world around them in all its relatively independent parts. The entire living pre-human world in all its diversity was born from the “mastery” of the art of “genetic reading”. Mythological and religious texts as sources of knowledge are not adequately appreciated by everyone. It is no coincidence that the most common expression of doubt about the reliability of the source among publicists is the phrase: “And this is a myth!”. At the same time, one cannot but admit the truth of A.F. Losev about the role of myth in science. He wrote that science is not a myth, but it is mythological and not only “primitive”, but any... [1]. Appearing in the 1^st‒2^nd centuries Christian texts became a harbinger of the crisis of the Roman Empire, a powerful spiritual weapon “in the transition period from antiquity to the Middle Ages”, marked a sharp expansion of the “moral horizon” [2, p. 215‒216].

“All ye that labor and are heavy-laden” responded to the most severe forms of oppression and the ruthless suppression of the slightest attempt at resistance paradoxically: with a religious, humanistic project, the doctrine of love as the main quality of a person, as an attribute that can only preserve and save the person. The gospel is texts left to us by the first Christians. They set such a dimension of a person and such models of their behavior that pulling up to this dimension and trying on these models by people on themselves for more than two thousand years has not been completed. Reading, which is accompanied by knowledge not only of answers, but also of questions that encourage the reader to improve themselves, will be called by us dialogue reading. This, basically, is the real reading of a person.

Materials and Methods. As a method of studying love, the gospel texts use dialogue reading as reading the entire course of human life. From birth, a person learns the art of reading: to understand spoken language, written speech, to understand what certain subjects mean. There are two types of reading: primary, direct perception of the text in the source, and secondary, perception of the meanings of the content of the texts of the source through their reflection in the culture of society. The perception of the text, as a rule, is not carried out once and for all. From the standpoint of dialogue as a method of knowledge, human thinking, the sociocultural world, and its laws of contradiction are examined. General theoretical research methods such as analysis, synthesis, analogy, dialectical and historical approaches are also used.

Results. One can recall the words of the evangelist John the Theologian on the Christian understanding of love: God is love (1In.4, 8). In Christianity, love is meant not as an ordinary feeling, but as a manifestation of life itself. Love in this understanding consists in the manifestation of sincere feelings for every creation of God. A person with such understanding shows this benevolence with concrete deeds. In this sense, a person without God represents some emptiness that cannot get along with itself without Him.

At the time of writing the New Testament, the meanings of the word “love” were many-sided. The conceptual series of different meanings was built as follows: “storge”, “fileo”, “eros” and “agape”. In the Christian meaning, God’s love, the concept of “agape” was used. Its essence is in the essential understanding of the active side of love, sacrificial, realized not so much in the sphere of feelings as by the actions of people creating the fabric of being.

Many thinkers believed that initially erotic love, Christian and sexual were the faces of the same love. Then there was a need to divide the term so that to convict sin. Thus, all four types of love appeared. Until a person fell into sin, they were one with God, had the opportunity to fully contemplate the essence of love, but after the fall they lost it.

“Love-agape”, is the highest sense of acceptance of another in identity with oneself, their true guise, this is why people should live as couples. The family is an organism where those individuals who were originally alien to each other should eventually become one whole “And he will stick to his wife, and there will be two of one flesh, so that they are no longer two, but one flesh” (Matt. 19,5–6). Unity and complement, perfection are the essence of love at its foundation. “For God loved the world so much that he gave his only begotten Son, so that everyone who believes in him would not die, but had eternal life” (John 3: 16). Therefore, in Christianity, only through unity with God, love for one’s neighbor is realized: “God is Love, and that who abides in love abides in God, and God in them” (1In.4: 16).

From the point of view of the Savior and His disciples, love does not consist in experiences, but in keeping the commandments. “If you love Me, keep My commandments” (John 14: 15), He says, and the Apostle John repeats: “Whoever says”: I have known Him, “but does not keep His commandments, they are liars, and there is no truth in them” (1 John 2: 4); “Since this is the love of God, that we keep His commandments” (1 John 5: 3). True self-love consists in the fulfillment of Christ’s Commandments. The commandments were given to a person so that according to their fulfillment they would gain true and complete freedom. The commandments are a paved road that leads directly to God. Life outside these commandments is an overgrown path that leads only to desolation and the loss of oneself as the Creation of God.

Thus, we have analyzed the texts of the New Testament and their reception in philosophy, which gives reason to assert the existence of three eras of increasing interest in the studying the text of the New Testament in culture, in greater importance in philosophy in the texts of the New Testament: the era of the establishment of Christianity on the territory of the Roman Empire and the formation of medieval states (1^st — 11^th century); the era of the Reformation, religious wars and bourgeois revolutions (16^th — 19^th centuries); and, finally, the modern era (from the end of the 20^th century). All three eras are characterized by a transitional character, filled with dramatic events, but different in pace social time. In each of these eras, thinkers can be distinguished who managed to pay attention to the most essential for this era in the texts of the New Testament itself or in its reflections in culture. Through sophistry (wisdom), the philosophical meaning of love is revealed and a theological comprehension of its essence in Christianity as a single one takes place. In Christianity, Sophia is a world-creating force, there is also a cosmogonic image of the “artist” and the mother bosom of universal diversity in it. In the concept of Sophia, the philosophical understanding of love and the Christian revelation of its absolute timeless essence over the world substance, blocking the chaos and darkness of the universe, and closing the personal descent to decay and death as the highest virtue that unites a person with the God of power, converge and refract.

Discussion and Conclusion. The prerequisites for discussing the theme of love in philosophy must be sought in reflections on a number of close concepts: gender, sex, marriage and family, male and female, androgyny, etc. The theme of love enters ancient metaphysics with Plato’s dialogue “Feast” [3]. The philosophical understanding of love is developed in the works of M. Eliade “Mephistopheles and Androgynus” [4]. A powerful theoretical step in understanding the phenomenon of love was made by psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic psychology: S. Freud, O. Weininger, F. Adler, E. Fromm, K. Horney, E. Erickson, C. Jung [5‒11]. They subjected many ancient myths to analytics and actualization in modern spirituality, and on their basis created the concepts of sexual determination of identification and self-identification in the process of socio-cultural development of mankind. The phenomenon of love was peculiarly read on the basis of the mental codes of Russian culture by domestic thinkers: N. Berdyaev, B. Vysheslavtsev, Z. Gippius, Vl. Solovyov, etc. [12‒15]. The work “The Meaning of Love” by Vl. Solovyov, of course, had a huge impact on the train of thought of philosophers. It brought to life very popular and timely for that time discussion in philosophy and fiction. N. Berdyaev also turns to Plato, who read, felt and thought about the depth of Eros. Gogol himself turns to Eros when he writes the image of “the Old-World Landowners”. Certainly, Eros himself stands behind his shoulder, leads the pen, because the image of love, over which “almighty time” is powerless, could be inscribed only by him. Bulgakov wrote about the Master and Margarita that love “struck” them like a Finnish knife, but they actually loved a long time ago not knowing each other...

As an aspect of a person’s mental life, Eros initiates the internal deep contradictions of a person’s life, sometimes destructive worries, tension, internal conflicts of identification in psychoanalysis by S. Freud, C. Jung and further it is comprehended in the works of domestic philosophers such as Voronina O., Gubin V., Korostyleva N., Andreev I., etc. [16‒20]. In foreign philosophical and humanitarian literature, the theme of love is present and developed within the framework of gender concepts which are based on ideas about the social construction of love. The foundations of this direction were laid by feminism in the works of O. de Gouges, M. Wollstonecraft as well as the famous sociological works of J. Mill. In these works, the theme of love was deepened by the pressure of patriarchal culture in a specific context that determined a woman not equal to a man in matters of love, marriage and family.

The next step in the development of the concept was the combination of philosophical and theological aspects, philosophy and mysticism, in understanding the divine nature of love, the sacralization of the theme of love. This concept, although not an officially recognized doctrine of the Orthodox Church, occupies an important place in religious and philosophical reflections and writings of a number of Orthodox thinkers such as Vladimir Solovyov, Sergiy Bulgakov. The word “Sophia” comes from Greek and is translated as “wisdom”. In the Christian context, Sophia is often identified with the Divine Wisdom which is spoken in the Old Testament, especially in the books of Proverbs, Wisdom of Solomon, and Sirach.

In the New Testament, the Apostle Paul speaks of Christ as the Wisdom of God “God’s power and God’s wisdom” (1 Cor. 1: 24), which allows some theologians to interpret Sophia as one aspect of Christ. Sergei Nikolaevich Bulgakov (1871‒1944) developed a paradigm of unity in Russian thought continuing and developing the sophiological theme begun by V. S. Solovyov. His teachings on Sophia include the following semantic aspects: firstly, Sophia as the hypostasis of the Deity; secondly, Sophia as a creature-uncreated mediator between God and the world; thirdly, Sophia as “eternal femininity” [20]. The sophiological system of S. N. Bulgakov had been developed over the course of thirty years and had never finally reduced to a result.

According to Bulgakov’s teachings, Sophia does not have hypostasis, but hypostatic nature, which “is equally different from both hypostasis and the absence of hypostatic nature” and is defined by Bulgakov as “the ability to hypostasize, belong to the hypostasis, be its disclosure, be given to it. This is a special hypostasis state not through one’s own, but through a different hypostasis, to hypostasize through self-dedication”. At the beginning, S. Bulgakov interpreted Sophia as “a transcendental subject of knowledge, economy, and history”, but later came close to realizing that Sophia has the nature of God’s Unity. In this form, it is able to withstand the chaos of the modern world, immersed in technological progress. However, if Bulgakov considered Sophia as the fourth hypostasis of God, then later, he adjusted his teaching, asserting its combination with the trinity of God.

V.S. Solovyov argued that a person is eternal to God, otherwise they cannot be considered a free and immortal being. “Only with the recognition that every real person is rooted in their deepest essence in the eternal divine world... two great truths can reasonably be admitted: human freedom and human immortality” [15, p. 170].

The theme of love was, one might say, cross-cutting for both poetic and philosophical creativity of V.S. Solovyov. Citing words from N.A. Berdyaev’s book “Philosophy of Freedom” that “how terrible it is that philosophy has ceased to be declaration of love, lost Eros, turned into a dispute about words”, A.F. Losev states the following: “Solovyov is that almost the only philosopher of the second half of the 19^th century, in any case, the most significant and great, whose philosophy is an explicit or hidden, but constant «declaration of love»”.

Vladimir Solovyov and Sergey Bulgakov are outstanding Russian thinkers who made a significant contribution to the understanding and development of the theme of love and Sophia in philosophy and theology. Both thinkers saw in love and Sophia not only metaphysical abstractions, but also real forces that could transform the world. They emphasized the importance of inner spiritual experience and service to others as pathways to true understanding and realization of these higher ideals. In the works of Solovyov and Bulgakov, love acts as a powerful tool for overcoming temporal and spatial constraints, and Sophia as the embodiment of wisdom and spiritual completeness.

There is every reason to conclude that V. Solovyov and S. Bulgakov provide a deep and multifaceted understanding of love and Sophia, combining philosophical reflections with theological revelations, and remain important sources for understanding the spiritual and cultural mission of mankind. The connection between love in Christianity and the sophic concept lies in a common goal, that is to lead a person to a deep comprehension of Divine nature and unity with God. Love as the highest manifestation of Christian life and Sophia as the embodiment of Divine Wisdom complement each other opening up new horizons of spiritual knowledge and perfection. When a person made a choice in favor of love, they committed the act of choosing and understanding the absoluteness of love. Through love, a person can comprehend the Wisdom of God, and through Sophia find inspiration for the manifestation of love in their life. However, the absolute understanding of love brings a person into the plane of position: “God is Truth, God is Beauty, God is Love”.