The Parable of Jonah: Why Erich Fromm Said Love Is Work, Not a Feeling

For Erich Fromm, loving isn’t feeling something for someone: it’s actively and consistently tending to that person, that idea, or that cause so it can grow.

The German psychoanalyst spent much of The Art of Loving (1956) dismantling the idea that love is something that simply “happens.” To explain one of the four elements he believed sustain any form of love, care, he chose a biblical story rarely seen in psychological theory: the story of Jonah.

Jonah, the man who fled from loving

God asks Jonah to go to Nineveh to warn its people that they’ll be punished if they don’t change their ways. Jonah flees in the opposite direction. Not out of fear of failure, but the opposite: he’s afraid the mission will succeed, that the people of Nineveh will repent and God will forgive them.

He ends up in the belly of a whale, a symbol, in Fromm’s reading, of the isolation his own lack of love condemns him to. When he finally reaches Nineveh and preaches, exactly what he feared happens: the city repents and God forgives it. Jonah gets angry. He wanted justice, not mercy.

He sits in the shade of a plant God made grow to shelter him from the sun (the gourd). When the plant withers, Jonah sinks into complaint. And that’s where the response comes that Fromm cites as the key to the whole story: God tells him that if he cares about a plant he neither planted nor tended, he should care even more about a city of more than a hundred and twenty thousand people.

Fromm’s reading: Jonah didn’t lack faith, he lacked love

Fromm describes Jonah as a man with a strong sense of order and law, but without love. He knows what’s right and what’s wrong. What he doesn’t know how to do is tend to something or someone growing, even when that growth doesn’t benefit him or prove him right.

From that reading he draws one of his most quoted lines on love:

We love that for which we labor, and we labor for that which we love.

It isn’t a decorative sentence. For Fromm, it’s a definition of labor: love and sustained effort aren’t two separate things that sometimes coincide, they’re the same thing seen from two angles.

Care, love’s first ingredient, according to Fromm

Fromm illustrates the idea with a domestic example, almost provocative in its simplicity:

• If a woman says she loves flowers, but forgets to water them, we don’t believe in her love for flowers, no matter how often she repeats it.
• If someone says they love animals, but doesn’t tend to their wellbeing, exactly the same applies.
• No mother’s declaration of love would be believable if, at the same time, she systematically neglected her child.
• Care, Fromm writes, is “the active concern for the life and the growth of that which we love.” When that active concern is missing, there’s no love, however intense the emotion felt might be.

The key word is active. Fromm distinguishes between love as passive affect (something that happens to you, like feeling cold) and love as activity (something you do, like learning a language). Jonah feels many things throughout the story (fear, rage, self-pity), but at no point does he act from care.

Responsibility: the other side of care

Closely tied to care is what Fromm calls responsibility, understood in its most literal sense: the capacity to “respond” to another’s needs, whether expressed or not.

Fromm compares Jonah to another biblical figure, Cain, who asks: “Am I my brother’s keeper?” That question, Fromm points out, already contains the answer: whoever loves doesn’t need to ask it, because they feel the other’s life as their own concern, not as an external, imposed burden.

Why this distinction is still useful today

Fromm’s idea helps distinguish two things that often get confused in a relationship, whether romantic, friendship, or family:

• Feeling intense affection for someone at a given moment.
• Sustaining that care consistently, even when there’s no immediate emotional reward in return.

Research on friendship and emotional support, also mentioned in the profile of the confidant friend, arrives at a similar point: what’s remembered from a close bond usually isn’t the intensity of a single moment, but the consistency of sustained attention over time. Fromm reached a similar conclusion by another route, that of a story more than two thousand years old, long before that research existed.

An idea, not a recipe

Fromm is explicit that his book doesn’t offer recipes for “how to love better” in five steps. What he proposes is a shift in perspective: stop asking whom do I love enough and start asking what am I actively tending to right now. It’s an uncomfortable distinction, because it moves the focus from emotion (something not always under your control) to action (something that does, at least in part, depend on you).

The story of Jonah doesn’t appear in The Art of Loving as a religious curiosity. It appears because, according to Fromm, it sums up better than any technical definition the difference between feeling something for someone and committing to that something, or that someone, growing.