Bet you didn't expect that title, did you? Isn't "love" always a good thing? Love is love, right? Love is, of course, at the heart of the Christian life, but Christian morality is in large part about learning to love the right things in the right way. Yes, our love is the root of all of our vices.

Several years ago, I decided to tackle Dante's Divine Comedy, the classic epic poem that tells the story of Dante traveling through Hell, Purgatory, and then Heaven. I especially enjoyed hearing about Dante's (fictional) journey up the seven terraces of the (again, fictional) Mountain of Purgatory, where each of the seven capital vices, better known as the "seven deadly sins," are cleansed from souls on the way to Heaven. As they approach the Terrace of the Slothful, Dante's tour guide Virgil gives a surprising lesson: LOVE is the source of not only every virtue, but also every vice:

Neither Creator nor his creatures ever,
my son, lacked love. There are, as you well know
two kinds: the natural love, the rational.

Natural love may never be at fault;
the other may: by choosing the wrong goal,
by insufficient or excessive zeal.

While it is fixed on the Eternal Good,
and observes temperance loving worldly goods,
it cannot be the cause of sinful joys;

but when it turns toward evil or pursues
some good with not enough or too much zeal —
the creature turns on his Creator then.

So, you can understand how love must be
the seed of every virtue growing in you,
and every deed that merits punishment.

I'll assume you don't want me to copy and paste the entire Divine Comedy and will instead unpack this small section, which contains some very important ideas. (Look for Canto XVII of Purgatory if you want to read more of the text.)

First, Virgil points out something that is fairly obvious, if you think about it: Every single one of us loves, but we don't love the same things. Our moral goodness, then, can't be determined by whether we love or don't love - since all of us love - but by what we love and how we love.

Second, Virgil reminds Dante that there is a difference between our natural loves - the things that we are naturally drawn to, perhaps without even thinking about it - and our rational loves - the things that we deliberately choose. I love mint Oreo ice cream, but you might find it disgusting, and that's okay. Some people naturally love jogging, but I would rather not submit my unfit body to such torture. Our natural preferences, as part of our passions, are themselves morally neutral. "In themselves passions are neither good nor evil. They are morally qualified only to the extent that they effectively engage reason and will." (CCC 1767)

Here we get to the heart of the moral matter: The will is meant to be turned toward the Eternal Good, God, the only thing that truly satisfies our hearts, and toward the good of our neighbor. We call this kind of love "charity." We were made to love the Lord wholeheartedly and our neighbor unconditionally, but we often fail to do so.

Dante's Virgil explains that our rational loves, the things that we willfully choose to pursue, can be wrong in three ways: 1) When we choose something evil. 2) When we don't pursue the good - particularly God - with enough zeal. 3) When we choose some created thing too zealously. In each of these ways, our love can be a vice. Let's take a look at each of these possibilities:

First, we can love things that are evil. People can, for example, take pleasure in things like revenge, lying, theft, adultery, or even murder. When we set our hearts on evils like these, our love has become "disordered," i.e., ordered toward something that it shouldn't be.

Second, we can simply fail to love God and his will with enough zeal. We call this lack of zeal "sloth" or "acedia." When we don't care enough about God, for example, to make time for Sunday Mass or for weekly prayer, we are neglecting the very thing for which we were created, which is communion with God. We are instead called to devoutly, even passionately love the Lord, whose love alone can make us happy.

Third, perhaps most surprisingly, we can love created things too much. Greed, for example, is loving material possessions too much, gluttony is loving food too much, and lust is loving sexual pleasure too much. Whenever love for the things of this world keeps us from properly loving both God and our neighbor, then such love is a vice. We cannot grow in holiness without detaching ourselves from those things that keep us from growing in charity. This is why the season of Lent challenges us to set some of the pleasures of life in order to focus on the Lord. 

The main point is this: The Christian life involves more than simply being "loving," but involves turning our hearts away from evil, tempering our attachment to creation, and directing our hearts with zeal toward the True Good. So much of the Christian life, in fact, consists in learning to freely and fully give ourselves to God and neighbor in charity. This properly ordered love, which the Church calls "perfect charity" is the goal of the entire Christian life. "[A]ll the faithful of Christ of whatever rank or status, are called to the fullness of the Christian life and to the perfection of charity" (Second Vatican Council, Lumen Gentium 40).