All I ultimately found was a somewhat greater than usual reliance on the sentimental obscurantism that so often attaches to the word “love” when it is employed by theologians. Admittedly, it is a useful obscurantism; exploited to its fullest, it turns love into so imposingly mystifying and pliant a cipher that one can safely insert it into almost any gap in one’s argument where an intelligible rationale or cogent motive has gone missing. In fact, used with sufficient suavity and dexterity, love can even serve, it turns out, as another name for what under normal circumstances would be called
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