Spiritual Romantic Love

This chapter substantiates romantic love as not only a moral phenomenon but also a spiritual one. Demonstrating how the healing from despair, which amounts to the highest relationship with God, is dependent upon loving correctly, and given (as was demonstrated in previous chapters) that romantic love can be correct and hence moral, it becomes clear that moral romantic love is a sufficient condition for spiritual existence. Further, the chapter explicates the correspondence between lovers in terms of helping each other to become the selves they are intended to be, and clarifies the specific nature of romantic love as involving erotic joy. Finally, it uses one of the most paradigmatic tales of romantic love—Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre—as a test case by which to tie all the threads presented throughout the book together. Reading this story, the thesis of romantic love as a meeting of essences is vividly portrayed.