21 © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Sedgwick, F. Piraino (eds.), Esoteric Transfers and Constructions, Palgrave Studies in New Religions and Alternative Spiritualities, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-61788-2_2 CHAPTER 2 Seekers of Love: The Phenomenology of Emotion in Jewish, Christian, and Suf Mystical Sources Andrea Gondos Love is to give what one does not have. (Jacques Lacan, Seminar V) Over the past several decades, the study of emotion has become an impor- tant area of scholarly inquiry in the humanities, the social sciences, and the life sciences, spanning such diverse felds of research as anthropology, soci- ology, history, political science, religion, literature, psychology, brain sci- ences, and biology. As far back as the ancient Greek philosophers, we fnd that Aristotle (385–323 B.C.) devotes signifcant discussions in his A. Gondos (*) Free University of Berlin, Berlin, Germany I would like to thank the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft under the Emmy Noether funding program that made this work possible. I would also like to thank the Institute of Jewish Studies at Freie Universität for providing a scholarly home for me for 2019.