IT was, I assure you, with no light heart that I undertook
the task of opening your discussion concerning the love-
problem of the student with only a general reference to
guide me. Such a discussion is an unusual and important
occasion if it is taken up in a spirit of seriousness and with
a conscious sense of responsibility.

Love is always a problem, whatever the age of life we are
concerned with. For the phase of childhood the love of
the parents is the problem; for the aged man the problem
is, what has he made of his love. Love is one of the great
forces of fate that reaches from heaven to hell. We must,
I think, understand love in this way, if we are to do any sort
of justice to the actual problems it involves. This problem
is one of immense scope and intricacy; it is not confined
to this or to that special province, but involves every aspect
of human life. (It is an ethical, a social, a psychological
question, to name only a few of the aspects of this many-
sided phenomenon.) The invasion of love into all the aspects
of life that are general--that is, collective--is, however, a
relatively small difficulty in comparison with the fact that
love is also an intensely individual problem. For, regarded
from this point of view, it means that every general criterion
and rule loses its validity, just as in the matter of religious
conviction which, though perpetually recodified through
the course of history, yet, as an original phenomenon, is always
an individual experience, bending to no traditional ruling.

Moreover, the very word 'love' is itself no small handicap
to a clear discussion. What indeed has not been called
'love'! If we begin with the highest mystery of the
Christian religion, there is the amor Dei of Origen, the amorintellectualis Dei

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