The author is Dutch. He began his career as a chemical analyst before becoming a professor of education. He is the author of three other books in the Dutch language and to my knowledge this is the only one with an English translation. I do not recall the Name of Jesus being mentioned in this book, there is scarcely a reference to God either. However, underlying all is a sense of the wisdom and understanding of God as the author writes to encourage and enable people to give and receive love. The style has elements of humor about it, the subject matter is vital, the way he handles it is full of twists and turns you do not expect. His language is fluent and rich and the book is practical. He writes against the backdrop of our time when individualization has robbed us of older forms of loving. The newer forms of love are not grounded, not firm and he encourages a new ‘art of loving’. We are dehumanized, he writes to show ways in which that is happening and to help us correct it. Love is being denigrated; it has lost its beauty and needs to be restored to its proper place of honor. It is impossible to read this book without being helped. The focus is on everyday life and the problems experienced in the living of it but the author writes from the perspective of the Kingdom of Love, the enduring kingdom. He tells us that he writes ‘with fear and trembling because writing on love sounds pretentious, evokes the wrong associations and because love actually is ineffable”. For him, he feels that the dream of perfect love, the kingdom of love is a place where all people and all things are handled with respect for their own nature and come thereby in to their own right.
The book probes and exposes the problems of our technological society, its effect upon our personhood and upon our life of love; we are led to consider Eros love in its improper and appropriate place in our experience and narcissus love too. These chapters are enlightening indeed and then we come to what he calls Shulamite love, the love written of in the book of the Bible the Song of Solomon. This is the love, in the context of which proper Eros and proper Narcissus love can be present. There are a number of chapters dealing with the basics forms of love; all is sensitively handled with a mix of playful wit that prevents the book from simply becoming a treatise on love written in an academic style. In short, this is a memorable two hundred or so pages and worth obtaining for those desiring to look into true personhood and the relationships of love and be better lovers towards all.
