The Ontology of a Heart Sparkle: The Myth of Love at First Sight
by Zach Lacy
The idea of a “heart sparkle” has spread through various cultural platforms and social media sites, but taps at
a much earlier tradition and concept, that of love at first sight. Dante famously fell for Beatrice at the age of
nine from a chance encounter at the Portinari house—whether they even spoke is unknown—devoting lines
of poetry and prose to a woman he once crossed years after she married another and passed. Romeo falls the
same way for the beautiful Juliet. Love at first sight may be the grandest motif in literature and art, but is it a
reality or just a great coincidence?
A heart sparkle is characterized as the vibration of the soul when one first sees a lover and falls for them at
that instant, making their heart beat and swell. Di rigori armato il seno, a Strauss aria, cries out,
With one stroke I was slain
on seeing two lovely eyes.
Ah, how feebly an icy heart
resists such fiery arrows.
Like a blazing arrow, the heart is pierced and the soul is entrapped in a trance of love, at least how the
romantics describe it. This love is a mere feeling that can be found in the blink of an eye, it is uncontrollable
and unwilling, but is found with the perfect alignment of factors and glances, and once it is won it cannot be
let go or forgotten. I believe that this is the love we all wish to experience, this devouring love that is decided
in a moment and met with reciprocal feeling and whimsy, but a Christian idea of marriage and romance tells a
far different story.
Love like that of Romeo may be what many yearn for, but whether it is true love or a mere object of idolatry
is an important question that must be considered. C.S. Lewis says “Our loves do not make their claim to
divinity [or to the possibility of idolatry] until the claim becomes plausible;” love does not threaten to become
an idol until it has some sense of plausibility or possibility. Romeo got lucky that Juliet fell in that same
encounter, but he never would have loved to the degree he did if that possibility of being worshipped wasn’t
there, at least not with Lewis’s definition. Sure, Dante writes stanzas and stanzas for a married and dead
woman, but the plausibility of reciprocity is still present in some sense because it allows him to deify his love.
Unlike the love of one’s supper, romantic love is ontologically different, its very being is composed of
something deeper and grander: some shared attribute of God. “[This love] does not become plausible until
there is in them a real resemblance to God, to Love Himself,” continues Lewis, asserting that the character of
this love is distinctly divine, at least in a sense.1 Thus plausibility is only present when a love can be
characterized like the love of Christ toward us or be given attributes like God’s love, explaining Dante and
Romeo’s obsession; however, as Lewis worries, both of these cases are idolatry. This claims that human love
is unique, it is reliant on the imago dei, and thus it models the relationship of Christ to us even among the
staunchest atheists and deniers. Love may be the only thing humans idolize as an end in itself for this very
reason, this very similarity to God. This love also serves as a great warning against idolatry and the false
presentation of divine love in human love.
To avoid appearing as a fatalist or pessimist, I cannot deny some metaphysical reality that occurs when one
feels such a movement of the soul, but it certainly does not implicate love—though perhaps a social and
appetitive attraction, infatuation, or feeling of goodwill. Love is the central commandment given to Moses,
and must not be taken lightly. The Second Vatican Council writes that “Sacred Scripture…teaches us that the
love of God cannot be separated from love of neighbor” and quotes Paul in his claim that “love is the
fulfillment of the law.”2 The Council writes that “the Lord Jesus, when He prayed to the Father, "that all may
be one. . . as we are one" opened up vistas closed to human reason, for He implied a certain likeness between
the union of the divine Persons, and the unity of God's sons in truth and charity.”3 Love for a neighbor is
thus modeling the relationship between the Father and His Son, or the Son and His Church. When we are
commanded to love our neighbor, we are thus loving God through the immediate ends of a neighbor. When
we are in matrimony to another, we become one flesh, much like how the church becomes one flesh in
marriage to Christ; to love is to model that relationship. It is well established then that love is characteristically
divine and that by loving a neighbor we are fulfilling the Law and serving God, but it is not all that clear what
this love looks like.
According to Aristotle, “to love is to wish good to someone.”4 Thomas Aquinas, probably the greatest
student of Aristotle, furthers that this love has a “twofold tendency: towards the good which a man wishes to
someone…and to that which he wishes some good.”5 Thus for St. Thomas, a movement of love is directed
toward the good of an individual, and by that good, to the individual himself. He states that where goodwill is
a simple act of the will toward wishing another well, to love “denotes a certain union of affections between
the lover and the beloved, in as much as the lover deems the beloved as somewhat united to him, or
belonging to him, and so tends towards him.”6 This definition seems to model the Christian charity, for while
we have goodwill toward all made in the image of God, we love those to whom we wish the good and have
some union to. This true love is not intermediate, but loves as an end in itself; Romeo must love Juliet not for
her beauty, but for the mere fact that she is Juliet, or that she is. Aquinas asserts this simply by stating that
“the love with which a thing is loved, that it may have some good, is love simply.”7 Love is to will the good of
the other, and to love the potentiality for good. Lewis’s potentiality is helpful here, for we love by willing
toward the image of God and behaving in the likeness of God incarnate: Christ.
Perhaps one may argue that this definition is still compatible with love at first sight; perhaps the heart sparkle
allows one to perceive the perfected nature of an individual and thus will that nature, but this is a dangerous
assertion and seems impossible, for it is far more likely that one perceives an illusion of the good as given
from their own imagination and not from the Image of God. Boethius posits the aphorism, “Therefore it is
not your nature which makes you appear beautiful, but the weakened eyes of those who look upon you.”8
Beauty, according to Boethius, or at least according to his character Philosophy, is nothing but the weakened
perception of he who looks at you. Love at first sight is a flawed perception, according to this, for true love is
from the will and reason as given by the Creator. Beauty comes from the image of God, and thus any
distinction of beauty purely by sight in an individual is from the flesh, not the reason or will. If this is true,
then perhaps love can only be found through knowledge of the good and likeness to God; it is distinctly
rational and willful, rejecting any idea of love at first sight or the validity of a heart sparkle.
A heart sparkle may reveal a desire for charity or giving affection, but it cannot be characterized in terms of
true love. Romeo certainly felt this desire, but the object of his love was a mere chimera, without that
knowledge. The way that one perceives beauty in an individual is certainly the way that one perceives God, so
the heart sparkle may certainly be a perception of general good and, by the grace of God, albeit rarely, of
God; however, it is not a feeling of love but rather of general goodwill and recognition of the image of God
in all. Love, true love, requires a knowledge of the perfected nature of one’s being and their good, Christ, and
a likeness to Christ which comes from a cultivation of virtue and righteousness.
Endnotes
1. Lewis, C. S. The Four Loves. San Francisco: HarperOne, 2017, 9.
2. Romans 13:10, ESV.
4. Second Vatican Council, Gaudium et spes [Pastoral constitution on the church in the modern world]
(GS), sec. 30-2, in Vatican Council II: The Conciliar and Post Conciliar Documents, new rev. ed., vol. 1, ed.
by Austin Flannery (Northport, NY: Costello, 1996), 24.
5. Aristotle, Rhetoric, ii, 4.
6. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I-II, Q. 26, Art. 4.
7. Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I-II, Q. 27, Art. 2.
8. Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I-II, Q. 26, Art. 4.
9. Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, III.VII.