What Is Love? A Jewish Philosopher’s Answer

Imagine you’re sitting in a beautiful garden, watching the sunlight filter through the leaves. Something about the scene feels right—the colors, the patterns, the way everything seems to fit together. And for a moment, you feel drawn toward it, like something inside you wants to reach out and be part of it.

That feeling—the pull you feel when you encounter something beautiful—is what one Renaissance philosopher spent his whole life trying to understand. His name was Judah Abrabanel, and he wrote a book called Dialogues on Love that became a surprise bestseller across Europe. What made his ideas so unusual is that he thought this feeling of being pulled toward beauty wasn’t just a human emotion. He thought it was the secret engine of the entire universe.

The Man Who Lost Everything

Judah Abrabanel was born around 1460 in Lisbon, Portugal, into a wealthy Jewish family. His father was a famous philosopher and a financial advisor to kings. Judah became a doctor and served the royal court of Spain.

But then everything fell apart. In 1492, the Spanish monarchy ordered all Jews to either convert to Christianity or leave the country. Judah’s family refused to convert. When they tried to escape, Judah’s young son was kidnapped and forcibly converted to Christianity. Judah never saw him again.

He spent the rest of his life wandering from city to city—Naples, Genoa, Venice—always one step ahead of invading armies. And somewhere in all that chaos, he wrote a strange, beautiful book. It’s written as a conversation between two characters: Philo (whose name means “lover”) and Sophia (whose name means “wisdom”). They talk about love, beauty, God, and how everything in the universe is connected.

The Problem with Old Ideas About Love

Before Judah came along, most philosophers thought about love in a pretty limited way. They believed that love was something imperfect people felt for perfect things. When you love something, they said, it’s because you don’t have it. You’re missing something, and you want it.

This made sense for a lot of situations. If you have a crush on someone, part of what you feel is a kind of lack—you want to be closer to them. If you love learning, it’s because you don’t already know everything.

But here’s where the old philosophers got stuck: they said this meant God couldn’t love anything. Why would God love? God is already perfect. God doesn’t lack anything. So in their view, God just sits there, perfect and unmoving, while everything else loves God from down below.

Judah thought this was completely wrong. And he had a personal reason for thinking so.

The Circle of Love

Imagine the universe as a giant circle. At the top is God, the source of everything. At the very bottom is raw, formless matter—the stuff that hasn’t become anything yet.

Now here’s Judah’s big idea: love flows in both directions around this circle.

The first half of the circle goes downward. God’s love creates the universe. God looks at God’s own infinite beauty and wants to share it, so the universe comes into being. Each level of reality—the stars, the planets, the animals, the plants, the rocks—receives a little bit of that beauty from the level above it. The more perfect something is, the more beauty it passes down.

The second half goes upward. Everything in the universe feels a pull toward the source of its beauty. The rock doesn’t know it, but it’s still participating: it exists, it has form, it has some kind of shape and order. The tree reaches toward the sun. The animal moves toward what it needs. And humans? We can see beauty and choose to follow it.

This means God isn’t a distant, unmoving statue. God is actively loving the universe into existence, and everything in the universe is loving God back. Love isn’t a sign of weakness or lack. It’s the fundamental force that holds everything together.

Why Beauty Matters

Here’s where Judah really breaks from the philosophers who came before him. Most earlier thinkers (especially the ones influenced by Aristotle) were suspicious of beauty. They thought beautiful things could trick you, distract you from what really matters. The physical world—bodies, colors, sounds, shapes—was seen as a kind of trap.

Judah said: no. The physical world is how we start.

Think about it. How do you learn what “graceful” means? You see a dancer. How do you learn what “harmonious” means? You hear music. How do you learn what “radiant” means? You watch sunlight move across a field. The physical world is full of beauty, and that beauty is like a ladder. You climb it.

When you see something beautiful—a face, a piece of music, a perfectly balanced equation—something in you recognizes it. And that recognition sparks desire. You want to be closer to it, to understand it, to somehow be part of it. That desire, Judah says, is already spiritual. It’s your soul reaching upward.

The higher senses—sight and hearing—are especially important for this. You can’t really taste or touch your way to understanding the universe. But you can see the patterns, the proportions, the relationships between things. You can hear the harmonies, the rhythms, the structure of sound.

How We See God

Judah had a fascinating theory about vision. He thought that when you look at something beautiful, your eye and your intellect are working together. Light comes from the sun and illuminates the object. That light enters your eye. But something in the object—its form, its structure, its beauty—also reaches your mind.

This is like a mirror. A perfect mirror doesn’t just reflect light; in a way, it makes the thing you’re looking at present to you. And Judah thought the human soul is like a mirror too. When the soul is clear and clean (not cluttered up with selfish desires), it can reflect the beauty of the universe. And since the universe reflects God’s beauty, looking at the world with clear eyes becomes a way of seeing God.

He even talked about “intellectual mirror”—the idea that when you really understand something, you’re holding up a kind of mirror in your mind that captures its essence. You don’t have to be a genius to do this. Every time you learn something new, you’re polishing that mirror a little more.

Now, he didn’t think most people could see God directly. That’s too intense. But some people—prophets, maybe, or people who’ve trained themselves really well—can get close. They see divine beauty “as in a crystal or a clear mirror,” not directly but still truly.

The Dangerous Idea About the Body

Here’s where Judah gets really interesting, and maybe a little controversial.

Most philosophers before him (including Jewish ones) were pretty down on the body. The body was where bad stuff happened—desire, pain, confusion. The soul was what mattered. The goal was to escape the body and live in pure thought.

Judah didn’t buy this. He thought the body and the physical world were necessary. You can’t just skip them. The way up is through.

He uses a weird example: matter, the stuff of the physical world, is like a harlot. That sounds really negative, right? But then he says something surprising: it’s this “adulterous love” between spiritual forms and physical matter that produces all the beautiful things in the lower world. The physical world isn’t a mistake. It’s where heaven and earth meet. It’s the child of God’s love.

This is why his book was a hit with non-Jewish readers. In Christian Europe, people were used to hearing that the body was sinful and the physical world was fallen. Judah was saying: look around you. The world is gorgeous. That gorgeousness is God showing through. You don’t have to reject your senses to be spiritual. You have to use them.

The Weird Part: Where Did Plato Get His Ideas?

Judah was Jewish, and he was writing at a time when Jewish culture was under terrible pressure. His family had been driven out of Spain. His son had been stolen and forced to convert. And here he was writing a book in Italian (not Hebrew) that was full of Greek mythology and Plato.

Some of his fellow Jews criticized him for this. They said he was abandoning Jewish tradition, spending too much time on “foreign” ideas.

Judah’s answer was clever. He said: the Greeks got their ideas from us. Plato, he claimed, studied with Jewish teachers in Egypt. The famous myth of the “Androgyne” (the idea that humans were originally double beings who got split apart) from Plato’s Symposium? That’s just a Greek version of the story of Adam and Eve from the Bible. The Greeks took it, polished it up with fancy language, and then forgot they’d borrowed it.

This is a bit of a stretch historically. But it shows something important about what Judah was trying to do. He was saying: you don’t have to choose between being Jewish and being a philosopher. The truth is one. Beauty is one. Love is one. The same divine source shines through the Bible and through Plato. They’re just different reflections.

What’s the Point of All This?

The goal of human life, for Judah, is what he calls “the joyful death in union with the divine.”

That sounds dramatic—and it is. But he doesn’t mean you have to literally die. He means that the love of beauty can become so strong that it draws you out of yourself. You stop caring about your own little concerns. You get absorbed in something bigger. Your mirror-soul reflects the whole universe.

This happens through a kind of ladder. You start with physical beauty—a person, a landscape, a piece of music. That beauty teaches you to love something that isn’t you. Then you move up to intellectual beauty—the beauty of ideas, of mathematics, of understanding how things work. Then you move to moral beauty—the beauty of justice, of kindness, of courage. And finally, you arrive at the source of all beauty, which Judah (being Jewish) calls God.

The key point: you don’t skip the first rungs. You don’t reject the body or the physical world. You let them teach you. You let beauty pull you upward until you forget yourself and become part of the circle.

Appendix A: Key Terms

Term	What it does in this debate
Beauty	Not just “prettiness,” but the quality in things that pulls our souls toward understanding and love
Love	The fundamental force of the universe—what makes everything reach toward its source and create what’s below it
Physical senses	The starting point for all spiritual growth; sight and hearing are especially important because they can grasp forms, not just physical stuff
Intellectual mirror	The capacity of the human soul to reflect and understand the structure of reality
Circle of love	The idea that love flows both ways: from God down through creation (creating) and from creation up toward God (desiring)
Emanation	The process by which higher levels of reality pour their beauty into lower ones, like light flowing from a source

Appendix B: Key People

Judah Abrabanel (c. 1460–after 1521) : Jewish philosopher, doctor, and refugee who lost his son to forced conversion during the Spanish Inquisition. Wrote Dialogues on Love while wandering through Italy.
Plato (c. 428–347 BCE) : Ancient Greek philosopher whose ideas about love and beauty Judah both used and argued with. Judah thought Plato had borrowed from Jewish sources without giving credit.
Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499) : Italian philosopher who translated Plato into Latin and wrote his own theory of love. Judah agreed with some of his ideas but thought he missed the cosmic picture.
Hasdai Crescas (c. 1340–c. 1410) : Jewish philosopher who argued that God does love, which gave Judah a starting point for his own theory of divine love.

Appendix C: Things to Think About

Judah says physical beauty is a ladder to spiritual understanding. But what about ugly things? Or evil things? Can they also teach us something, or do they just block the way?
If love is the force that holds the universe together, what does that mean for people you don’t like? Or for people who do terrible things? Are they outside the circle of love?
Judah thought the Greeks borrowed from the Jews. What would it mean if he’s wrong—if the Greeks came up with similar ideas on their own? Does that make his argument stronger or weaker?
“The joyful death in union with the divine” sounds beautiful, but also a little scary. Can you want to lose yourself in something bigger? Is that a good thing, or does it mean giving up who you are?

Appendix D: Where This Shows Up

Art and music theory: The idea that beauty is not just decoration but a way of knowing reality shows up in how people talk about why art matters.
Environmental thinking: The idea that the physical world isn’t just dead stuff but reflects something divine influences how some people think about protecting nature.
Interfaith dialogue: Judah’s claim that truth is one even when different religions express it differently is still a live debate in how Jews, Christians, and Muslims talk to each other.
Love stories: The idea that love pulls you out of yourself and toward something bigger is everywhere in novels, movies, and songs—Judah just thought it was literally true about the whole universe.