Love Isn’t Just a Feeling — It’s the Glue of the Universe

A Poem of Loss: The Man Who Wrote About Love

Sometime after 1492, a Jewish doctor named Judah Abrabanel (c. 1460–1521) wrote a poem that cracks open his heart. He had been forced to flee Spain with his family. His young son, Isaac, was kidnapped and taken to Portugal, where the king had the boy seized and forced to convert to Christianity. Judah never saw him again. He wrote:

Time with his pointed shafts has hit my heart
and split my guts, laid open my entrails,
landed me a blow that will not heal

He scattered everyone I care for northward,
eastward, or to the west, so that
I have no rest from constant thinking, planning

A man who had lost almost everything sat down to write his greatest work — not a cry of despair, but a book about the power of love. That book, the Dialoghi d’amore (Dialogues of Love), would become a European bestseller, read by Christians and Jews alike. It argued something bold: love is not just a warm feeling between people. Love is the hidden force that holds the universe together, from the farthest star to the smallest flower, and even God loves.

Faith and Reason? That’s Not the Point

In the Middle Ages, Jewish philosophers often wrestled with a tense question: can you trust both your religious faith and your logical reason, or do they clash? Judah’s own father, Isaac Abrabanel (1437–1508), spent much of his energy trying to protect traditional belief from philosophical ideas. But Judah almost shrugs at that old fight. He was influenced by a Renaissance idea called sophia perennis — the belief that all true knowledge, no matter where it comes from, is really one. The truths of the Bible and the truths of Greek philosophy were, for him, different paths up the same mountain.

This let him do something unexpected. He freely mixed Bible verses with Greek myths, arguing that Plato had actually learned from the ancient Israelites. In his dialogues, he even says that Plato’s famous story about the androgyne — humans originally double-bodied — was a borrowed, polished-up version of the Adam and Eve story from Genesis. For Judah, showing the harmony between Jewish scripture and classical wisdom was more important than guarding boundaries. He believed that anyone, Jewish or not, could see the same beautiful truth if they looked.

Beauty: The Light That Puts the Universe in Motion

So, if love is the universe’s engine, what sparks it? For Judah, the answer is beauty (bellezza). He defines beauty as that which delights the mind and moves it to love. Think of a melody you can’t get out of your head, or the way sunlight catches a stained-glass window. That pull you feel isn’t random — it’s a sign that you’ve touched something real and powerful.

Judah divides our senses into two camps. Taste, smell, and touch are material — they deal with the physical stuff right here. But sight and hearing are spiritual senses. They can reach past the surface. A beautiful painting, a piece of stirring music, a clear night sky: these things don’t just tell you about matter. They point beyond themselves. The higher senses are like doors, and beauty is the hand that opens them. Even the imagination, a mental power many older thinkers distrusted, becomes vital. For Judah, the artist’s imagination isn’t a trickster — it’s a vessel through which divine beauty can flow into the world.

Why God Loves: A New Idea of Love

Here Judah made his biggest break with the past. From Plato onward, many philosophers argued that love comes from lack — you desire what you don’t have. A perfect being, therefore, would need nothing and love no one. God, being supremely perfect, would not love. Human love was a kind of needy reaching, and God was beyond all that.

Judah said no. Drawing on an earlier Jewish thinker, Hasdai Crescas (c. 1340–1410), he argued that God’s perfection doesn’t make God cold and self-contained. Instead, divine perfection flows out naturally as creative love. Just as the sun doesn’t shine because it’s missing light but because it’s its nature to radiate, God’s love brings the universe into being and keeps it going. Judah calls this divine love (amor divino), and it’s not a needy hunger — it’s an outpouring of beauty.

This sets up what Judah calls the circle of love (il circulo degli amari). From God, love flows down through the levels of reality: stars, planets, the natural world, all the way to chaotic matter. Each higher level “parents” the one below it, sharing its beauty. Then, at the bottom, the flow reverses. Lower things — including us — feel a longing to climb back up toward the source. A flower reaches for the sun; a human heart aches for the divine. The universe is a giant, living circle of giving and returning love.

The Mirror of the Soul: How We Reach the Divine

So how do we actually make the climb? Judah uses the image of a mirror (specchio). The human soul, especially its intellect and imagination, is like a polished mirror. It cannot capture God’s infinite essence directly — that would be like trying to pour the ocean into a cup. But it can reflect divine beauty according to its own capacity. When you see a breathtaking landscape or hear a piece of music that gives you chills, your soul is, for a moment, a cleaned mirror catching a ray of something higher.

This is why Judah refuses to dismiss physical beauty and bodily love. Unlike some thinkers who called the material world a trap, he sees it as the necessary starting point. You must begin with what your senses give you — the color of a fruit, the rhythm of a voice — and learn to love it in a way that pushes you upward. Step by step, you move from loving a single beautiful object to loving the sciences, the harmonies of the heavens, and finally the source of all beauty itself. The body, the senses, and even romantic attraction are not enemies; they are the first rungs on a ladder.

The highest goal is a state Judah describes with a startling phrase: felice coppulativa, a joyful union with God. When love for divine beauty becomes so strong that the soul casts off all attachment to the body, death itself becomes not an ending, but a final, blissful merging with the source of all love. It’s an intense idea — spiritual ascent fueled by desire.

What This Means for Us: Love as the Center

Judah Abrabanel was a refugee who lost his country, his security, and his son. Yet he spent his final years writing a book that places love at the very center of reality. His work reminds us that the things we find beautiful — a friend’s laughter, a starry sky, a piece of music that makes your chest ache — are not just decoration. They are clues. They tell us something about the deep structure of things.

Today we often reduce love to brain chemistry or a survival instinct. Judah’s vision is bolder. It says your amazement at a sunset or your desire to be near someone good is part of a cosmic current that flows from the divine all the way down to you, and wants to carry you back. The next time something strikes you as truly beautiful, you might ask: is this just my neurons firing, or am I feeling the pull of the universe’s great circle of love?

Think about it

1. If you felt a strong attraction to a piece of music, a person, or a landscape, could that feeling ever be a clue about something deeper than just your own emotions? What would that mean?
2. Judah thought God’s perfection means God must love, not that God lacks nothing. Which picture of perfection makes more sense to you: a being that needs nothing and therefore feels nothing, or a being whose power overflows as love? Why?
3. If the physical world really is a mirror of something spiritual, does that change how you treat it — or how you treat your own body?