In 17 well-crafted chapters, Simon May takes the reader on a sweeping tour of conceptions of love from Hebrew scripture to Marcel Proust. May argues that we cherish a series of misconceptions about love, which burden real existing relationships with unrealistic expectations. (237) Our contemporary understanding of love in Western Civilization is based on a misreading of ancient texts. The claim that May advances throughout his book is that the true nature of love is the promise of ontological rootedness. (241) We love someone because we believe that the loved one has the ontological power to affirm and enhance our lives. Indeed, this is the "ultimate purpose of a well-lived life," May argues, the "lifelong search for a powerful relationship to the ground of our being." (256)

In the introductory chapter May points out that the Western conception of love underwent three major transformations, from value, to power, to object. In particular, from Deuteronomy to Augustine in the mid-fifth century love was made a supreme virtue. From the forth to the sixteenth centuries, from Augustine to Thomas Aquinas and Luther, human beings were given the power to love. (11-12) And from the eleventh to the eighteenth century the human being became the object of love taking over the place previously held by God.

In the following chapters May attempts to debunk several misconceptions about love that result from these transformations, such as that love is unconditional, love is eternal, and love is selfless, love requires beauty, love searches the missing half, and love is about valuing the whole person "for her own sake."

The second chapter states that the foundational text for Western love, if there is any, was Hebrew scripture, with its command to love God. (14) We shall love God with all our heart, soul, and might; and love our neighbor like ourselves. To the translation of the Hebrew scripture we owe the word "agape" that stood for all forms of love, erotic, neighborly, love for God and humans. (21) Mostly through St. Paul, who quoted Hebrew scripture in Greek, the word became most widely used, referring to "the unconditional, altruistic, obedient, humble selflessness, with which 'Christian love' has become [...] identified." (22)

Chapters three to five look at Greek and Roman texts on love. To Plato, we owe the myth that love has to transcend earthly desires and "overcome the very conditions of life itself." Love is a skill that "needs training and education." (49) True love is spiritual. However, the reader learns, Platonic love was not as "platonic" as we understand it today but erotic to boot albeit under certain conditions. (40) Furthermore, love does not require beauty, rather than that it bestows beauty to the loved one. (45) For Aristotle love was conditional upon the equality of two people and could die, when the person changed. (67-68) According to May, Platonic love, Aristotelian love as "perfect friendship," and Ovid and Lucretius's eulogies on love as erotic desire are all forms of love that contain the same kernel. He wants to use the terms Eros, agape, and philia not for distinct types of love but rather for "three modes of love's mature attentiveness." (248)

Chapters six and seven argue that Christianity turned love into "life's supreme virtue and moral principle." (81) It made love into a "divine power" that enabled human beings to overcome earthly pains and become "god-like." The texts of Paul, Augustine, Bonaventure, Aquinas, and Luther could not have grounded a "world-conquering morality," May holds, if they had not made the divine grace seem accessible for the ordinary men. (95) Luther opened the path on which love became the new religion. Luther clearly distinguished between human and divine love. (90) For him, all human desire seeks our own good. "Humility and will-to-power are two sides of the same coin." (91)

Chapter eight points out a parallel pagan development to the medieval Christian love, the love of the troubadours. Rather than loving another human being "for the sake of God," the troubadours exalted utterly earthly adulterous desire for a single women. (119) Chapters nine and ten then expand on the theme that "human nature became loveable" in the high middle Ages and the Renaissance. Spinoza fused God and nature, and the literature is full of famous, if ill-fated, lovers. (130)

Chapters eleven and twelve turn to Rousseau, the Enlightenment, and Romanticism and locate the roots of present tendencies to idealize the loved one and search for Mister Right. May sees here the culmination of the "third great transformation" of love, which began in the eleventh century and allowed a single human being "to be seen as embodying the greatest good" and be worthy of love, that is to take over the place that was formerly reserved for God. (164) German Romanticism finally, Schlegel and Novalis, turned romantic love into the new religion, "plus or minus the Christian God." (165)

The following chapters frame love as aphorisms. For Schopenhauer, chapter thirteen, love is "the urge to procreate." (187) For Nitzsche, love is "the affirmation of life." (190) For Freud, chapter fifteen, love is "a history of loss," and for Proust, chapter sixteen, love is "terror and tedium."

In the concluding chapter, May reiterates the three main misconceptions about love that he sees are based on Christian beliefs. First, the illusion that "love is unconditional," which is derived from Christianity in despite of insufficient support in Scripture. (236) Love, he holds, "as distinct from care, devotion and protection- cannot [...] be equal or universal or unconditional." (254) Second, rather than being "eternal," human love will only last as long as the lover sees a supreme good in his loved one. Both, Aristotle and Aquinas mentioned the possibility that love can die. (56, 95) Love requires the sustained attention to the loved one and the development of shared living in order to survive, May claims. (237)

Third, that "love is selfless" is an illusion based on Lutheran beliefs but also shared by non-religious contemporary philosophers such as Harry Frankfurt. In contrast, May holds that everything that human beings do "is thoroughly conditioned, interested, time bound, and dependent on our building a robust self amid the vagaries of fate and vulnerability." (238) Indeed, God "was 'invented' to fulfill" this unique need of human beings to ground our lives. (240) However, human love should not be modeled on divine love, May argues. Instead of modeling love on the idea of how "supposedly and questionably" God loves us, we should look at how we were supposed to love God.

May has written an exciting intellectual and cultural history of love that stretches over a very long period of time and strings together the canonical texts on love in the curriculum of Western Civilization, offering a fresh close-reading of these texts. A minor objection: The author's love of aphorisms shows in the style of the book, which makes it at times somewhat tedious to read, in despite of its wonderful topic. But that is a personal taste.

Claudia Wassmann