Preface
Can I write that I truly want the best for everyone? Forming this question is the readiness stage for the emergence into understanding agápē love. I have heard many different Christians quote the following biblical passage: “But now faith, hope, love, abide these three; but the greatest of these is love.” * In the secular world, the Beatles celebrated and filled the sound waves of the world with the hit song, All You Need Is Love. It has been my experience that most individuals have an intuitive sense, more than a full cognitive sense, of love. We love our mothers and fathers. Our mothers and fathers love us.
But what about child abuse? Love appears to be missing when child abuse reigns in the family. What about the old rule of thumb, “Spare the rod and spoil the child”? Love is the motivation behind the whipping of a child with a belt to teach the young child to behave better? There is the saying, “Love hurts.” Is that the premise behind, “Spare the rod and spoil the child”? It is easy to explain that child abuse is the absence of love, that the use of corporal punishment is also the absence of love; but, some individuals still believe that proper amounts of corporal punishment is a loving necessity to help the child be the better person. I have heard individuals say that they love ice cream. I have said that I love chocolate donuts. Using love in this sense is more of a laziness on my part because I am looking for a way to state that I like chocolate donuts more than I like other types of comfort food. So intuition aside, and before I answer what love is not, I want to know precisely: what is love?
* (1 Corinthians 13:13; NEW AMERICAN STANDARD BIBLE®. Copyright © 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977, 1995 by THE LOCKMAN FOUNDATION.)
During my college years I took several classes in Greek literature and civilization. It was transformative to learn that the Greeks had more than one concept toward understanding love. English-speaking individuals have one word, only, to label the concept, love, as an emotion distinguishable from friendship. The Greek culture is more clear. We, English-speaking individuals, have only one concept for the morpheme, ‘love’, as in “I love you.” However, we English-speaking individuals, also “love chocolate” or “I just love it when you fix me breakfast in bed, honey!”
I learned in my studies that the Greeks had three concepts to label the range of emotions that flow into what we casually call love. The three Greek levels of what we have termed love are érōs, philía and agápē. I did not learn the Greek understanding captured by these words in the way that Wikipedia explains them. My recollection, or, more accurately, my internalization of what I learned, is that érōs is physical love or what might be loosely understood as lust. Philía is more about the ‘love’ between family members or very good friends while agápē transcends both érōs and philía. My understanding of agápē is that it is a ‘love’ that seeks no compensation. This is the point upon which I question Wikipedia’s definition of agápē. Wikipedia equates agápē to “the love of God for man and of man for a good God” (Wikipedia, 2020). ** All of my studies of Greek literature and the Greek gods is that the Greek gods were not purveyors of agápē. Agápē, as a Greek term, defined as “the love of God for man,” is a tremendous misinterpretation of the Greek gods’ relationship to Greek men, women and children. So, to equate agápē to the love of the Christian God to man is to impose Christianity upon Greek mythology to find meaning in the Greek concept, agápē.
** Wikipedia 2020, “An Intermediate Greek-English Lexicon: Founded upon the seventh edition of Liddell and Scott’s Greek- English Lexicon. Benediction Classics.” p. 4. ISBN 978-1-84902-626-0.)
This is not the path I will take. More emphatically, this is not the path I would recommend especially given the horrendous, decades old, worldwide scandal of the Roman Catholic Church, the Pope and the vast array of priest-predators that are “God’s presence on earth.” While being a quick and easy shortcut to come to terms with agápē, it is an incongruous overlay of Christianity upon Greek mythology which makes misleading assumptions about both. We must look to our own lives and experience in the context of an intact and untainted ancient Greek culture to gain a clear understanding that might predispose our ability to feel as well as understand agápē.
Is agápē about the love between married partners? Is it, really? I believe that marriages which end in divorce were not founded upon agápē. However, to add clarity about agápē, I offer an observation about my own parents. There were troubles in the family. My mother beat her sons as discipline required. These beatings at times were administered by a leather belt, sometimes on a bare bottom. When my wife and I cared for my parents in our home during the last three years of their lives, I would speak often with my father in the late night or early morning hours. On one occasion these maternal beatings came up and my father related a story about his parents in which my grandfather concluded that he would have to discipline the children because of my grandmother’s severe temper. My father lamented to me that he was sorry to hear that his wife beat his children, but he offered a remarkable insight to the truth of his situation. His statement to me has compelled lengthy, private reflections to come to terms with its profound meaning. “I suspected that she might be beating you, but what could I do? I couldn’t leave her.” My parents went to their graves still married. Both were cremated and their ashes were mixed together so that they would be eternally merged.
If divorce is a sign of the lack of agápē, then a marriage bond that lasts forever is not the ultimate test for agápē either. There is no brutality in agápē. Brutality and agápē are antithetical. So what is agápē? How can a nonGreek truly understand agápē?
This last question is the motivation of this reflection. The posing of this question stimulated another question. What does agápē have to do with world peace? In the early, early hours of the morning before the sun rose and I awoke unable to sleep, I mused upon my wife, her worries, her coping with her aging body and the youthful joy she and I enjoyed and in which we once revelled. Now, on my deathbed, I thought about my feelings of ‘love’. What is agápē, really?