In plain words
Divine love is the idea that love is both the way to God and what God is. Mystics who teach it describe more than a feeling aimed upward. In their accounts it is a longing that draws a person toward the divine, a devotion that shapes a whole life, and at its height a love in which the lover's separate self gives way. Some speak of God as the Beloved, others as a parent, a king or a friend. Across very different traditions they agree on two points: love reaches what thought cannot, and it asks for the whole person rather than the mind alone.
Across the traditions
Sufism: ishq
Ishq is passionate, consuming love for God, the Beloved, in the mystical side of Islam.
Rumi, the thirteenth-century Persian poet, built his Masnavi around the ache of separation from the Beloved and the longing to return. In one passage he puts love above every creed: "The religion of love is apart from all religions. The lovers of God have no religion but God alone." (Masnavi, Book II, trans. Reynold A. Nicholson)
Hinduism: bhakti
Bhakti is loving devotion to a personal God, one of the paths the Bhagavad Gita describes.
Poet-saints carried it into the languages people spoke at home: Andal in Tamil, Mirabai in Rajasthani and Braj, Chaitanya Mahaprabhu through communal singing of the divine name in Bengal, and Tukaram in Marathi. One of Tukaram's hymns makes love the only way to know a God beyond words: "Thy nature is beyond the grasp of human speech or thought. So love I've made the measure-rod, by which I can be taught." (trans. Nicol Macnicol, 1919) Mirabai's songs to Krishna describe the same absorption, a devotion so complete that it colors every part of her life.
Christianity: caritas
Caritas is self-giving love; the Latin Bible renders "God is love" as Deus caritas est.
Bernard of Clairvaux, a twelfth-century Cistercian abbot, taught that love needs no reason outside itself: "I love, because I love; I love, that I may love." (Sermons on the Song of Songs, trans. A. L. Peck) The anonymous fourteenth-century English book The Cloud of Unknowing holds that love reaches where the intellect fails: "He may well be loved, but not thought. By love may He be gotten and holden; but by thought never." (ch. 6, ed. Evelyn Underhill, 1922) Julian of Norwich closed her Revelations of Divine Love with the answer that love was the meaning of everything she had been shown.
Judaism: ahavah
Ahavah means love; ahavat Hashem, love of God, is commanded in the Shema, which asks for it with all one's heart, soul and might.
The Baal Shem Tov, the eighteenth-century teacher from whom Hasidism grew, taught that God is served with joy. Teachings his followers compiled picture the bond between God and the soul as a father's delight in his child: "For even if the king is angry, seeing his beloved son enter effects joy and delight in the father." (Tzava'at HaRivash 132, trans. J. Immanuel Schochet)
