"On the Nature of Love"

Love is probably the most overused and misunderstood word of our generation.

Most especially, agape love, the love of Christianity, is abused and misused over and over again. And not even by just Christians, but also by atheists.

And to make it worse, I feel horribly cliche even writing on the subject, but it is simply something that has to be addressed. Why? Because the constant mis-usage is confusing people, and leading them to think that agape cannot exist, or that they cannot experience it, or that they cannot have it.

This is all wrong though. It's all just horribly wrong.

Before beginning, first I will have to address the conjoined issue of "charity," or as Chesterton calls it, "the merely mystical and almost irrational virtue of charity," for the phrase is so conjoined in the Christian sense of agape as to be synonymous, and at the same time, it has come to exemplify something absolutely different, and in fact utterly contrary to agape in the secular world, and to the secularist in general. And that thing is philia.

A common mistake made by Christians nowadays is equating charitable contributions of members of society, churches, governments, whatever, with charity/agape and thus with Christianity. Any atheist with even a reasonable amount of intelligence will be quick to point out to you that the world's number one individual donors to charity are Bill Gates and Warren Buffet (unless the numbers have changed since the last time I debated this subject...), both of whom are avowed atheists. The charity of the modern secular world is not charity. Charity in the modern secular world is philanthropy. Agape has been upstaged and replaced by its cousin (in terms of gross amount), in what is essentially a battle between reasonableness and Christianity.

If we are to speak on philanthropy, we must admit that it is everywhere in this world. The world over flows with philia. And yet, comparatively, philia is nothing compared to agape. Does the philanthropist donate millions when he has billions? What of it? The person with agape gives hundreds when all he or she has are hundreds! Does the empath do good because he feels bad? There's nothing impressive in this! The man with agape does good no matter how he feels, he does it not to assuage his guilt, or to lessen the pain he receives from others, or even because he'll feel good as a result but because it is his love! Does the reciprocal altruist give when it harms him not? What of it? The lover in agape gives even when he knows it will harm himself, and even when he knows it will be his life in payment.

And now the question of reasonableness enters into it. Charity is a merely mystical and almost irrational virtue in Christianity, because charity demands a sacrifice of the self. Yet in our current world, it is not reasonable (I do not say it is not rational), to demand true self sacrifice of anyone, let along ourselves. Let me illustrate what I mean by this.

It is because the world is so abounding in love of brothers and sisters that it is lacking in love for a man's neighbor as himself. A reasonable man might give a dollar to a stranger in need, but how many reasonable men will abandon their lives for the stranger? Chesterton also once noted that only a Catholic Church could have produced a St. Francis of Assisi. Why? Because only Christianity has ever demanded of people not just philanthropy, but charity. Christ did not say to the young man with many possessions, here, give me a donation of 10 silver pieces and you're good to go. Christ said to the rich men and the poor men, sell all your positions, give everything you have to the poor, then come and follow me. Likewise, Christianity does not say, donate ten dollars a week at Mass out of your $50,000 salary, and we'll call it square. This may be what people do, but it is only because people are too reasonable. What Christianity teaches, has always taught, and will always teach, is that we too should give all our things away, and come and follow Christ. Christianity is the only system in the world that has ever espoused the rather controversial idea that a man should not only voluntarily give to the poor, but that a man should voluntarily make himself poor for the sake of keeping the poor alive, and in so doing make himself rich in all that actually matters. Did Marx seek to even the playing field? Catholicism did it earlier and did it better, through choice. Through love. The difference in loves is astronomical, it is the difference between loving everyone like family and maintaining your place in that family, and loving everyone so much that you do not care about yourself at all if by some means you might aid them. Philia demands that we make brothers of all men, and that we make ourselves a brother in return. Christianity demands that we make masters of all men, and that we make ourselves a servant instead. Now, this is not to suggest that philia and agape cannot mutually exist or support each other. Many are the families where agape and philia abound I am sure. The problem is that the world, both Christian and secular, itself has attempted to replace agape with philia. The secularist does this because it does not require him to be any less reasonable, and yet lets him feel moral, while the Christian does it because it lets him be so much more reasonable while still feeling like he has done good.

I mentioned choice before, and this is the next issue that must be addressed in terms of the misunderstandings of love.

Of the 5 easily identifiable loves (narcissism, agape, storge, philia and eros) at least three are immediately identifiable as emotions. Erotic, brotherly, and motherly love are all emotional loves (and narcissism may well be), and this cannot be denied. And as many atheists will eagerly note for you, there is little to no choice involved in them. A favorite equivocation of the modern era is that when a man claims to do something out of love, everyone else claims that he's done it because some chemicals in his brain brought about the onset of an emotion. Emotions are then written off as traits advantageous for our evolution, and ones that are specifically, and totally, biological. Worst is the challenge some atheists love to present that God, who is postulated as an immaterial being, cannot love. Ahhh! Checkmate! The atheist believes he's finally cornered the Christian, the Christian God cannot possibly be love. For love is merely a sequence of complex chemical reactions in our heads that brings us to feel something, and then act upon that feeling. Right?

Wrong. This is the worst of misunderstandings of Agape, worse even than the madness of replacing charity with philanthropy within Christianity itself. Because it reduces agape to some mere, petty emotion. To a feeling! Agape is not a feeling! And it is this myth, this fallacy peddled by the secular and popular Christian worlds both that is hurting honest Christians everywhere, and hurting us far more that atheism alone ever could. A world teeming with philia is not a bad thing, for at least some good is being done. But a world where agape is reduced, butchered, and humanized, is an evil thing. It is the most evil thing to have been done since the worst manifestation of sin in human history. The Crucifixion.

"But Evan!" I can hear the objections, "The Crucifixion was a good thing! It was the means by which Christ saved us from our sins, the supreme gift of Grace from God!"

And to all this I agree. The Crucifixion was a good thing. But not in and of itself. The act of crucifying someone is not a good act. Scourging someone before hand is not a good thing. And in Christ's case, the mental and spiritual anguish associated with the Crucifixion are not good things. They are horrible things. We call the Crucifixion the supreme gift of Grace from God, and we are right to do so. But what we so often forget is the how and why. The Crucifixion is not good because it is good to be crucified, the Crucifixion is good because it demonstrates once and for all that God can take even our worst sin, and bring about Good from it. It is this very power that makes Grace so amazing for the Christian, for Grace takes all evil and turns it to God. Did we sin? Yes. Was it sinful to crucify Christ? To whip Him bloody, smash two inch thorns into His head, beat Him, spit on Him, nail Him to the boards? Yes, yes, yes, yes, and YES! Even worse was the abandonment, the mental trials, the rejections of His closest friends and companions. Let us never forget that, oh no. And in that ultimate manifestation of sin, of despair, hatred, rage, fear, greed, and most of all MADNESS, God's Grace turned it all against us. In our greatest act of sin, we wrought the means of salvation.

But how? How does Grace work? How does it transform evil? The answer, of course, is simple, and it is precisely how I can make the accusation that humanizing agape is the worst evil in history since the Crucifixion. Agape is the source of the Crucifixion. Agape is the source of Grace. God was able to take our sins, our hate, and lust, envy, greed, pride, our very fear, and even our despair, and in one act of perfect self-sacrifice, turn it all to love. Forgive it, forget it, bear the price of it Himself, and bring us back. Agape is divine. Plain and simple. To humanize it, to treat it as the mere by-product of a chemical process in our brains is an insult.

And what is worse, it attacks 2000 years of Christian Grace. It seeks, in one fell swoop, to reverse the choice of God. To reject God as incapable of the very thing that was first and best expressed by God. In short, it negates the Crucifixion. A more powerful blow could not hope to be struck against Christianity than to make Christians believe that agape love is a mere emotion, a paltry biological pleasantry designed to aid in the reproduction and survival of our species. The humanization of agape doesn't just seek to diminish it to philia, it even goes so far as to make it into that which is no more than utilitarian and no less than hedonistic. That of eros. That of lust. And what's worse, it is degrading further into narcissism. Into a love of ourselves, a love of us because of what we did for others. Do you fear atheism, Christians? You should fear yourselves even more. For you are the ones who have allowed your ideal love to be turned into an emotional high for the manipulation of your conscience and your will.

And now we have reached the heart of the matter. I didn't write this piece to deal with atheist claims, nor even to make note of the fact that we have confused all our loves, and turned the highest into the lowest. I do not write this even to combat the growing trend in Fundamentalist Christianity in the States to seek an emotional high and call that the love of God. I write, because we are falling into despair.

I cannot be the only one to have noticed that many people are suffering in their spiritual lives from a lack of the realization, or perhaps even a purposeful misguided belief away from the fact that agape is not an emotion, agape is a choice.

There are people who are trapped within the cynical confines of the modern world. They believe that no matter their actions, and no matter their choices, they cannot give agape love to others. They believe themselves to be purely incapable of it. And because they believe themselves incapable of it, they make themselves capable of it. They have fallen into despair, the despair of not being able to believe, and thus not being able to recognize that all one has to do is choose to love to be able to love. They are unable to, not because they can't "feel" it, but because they cannot choose it. And they themselves are the reason why they cannot choose it. Unless they can will to love, and will to break the cycle of their broken reasoning, they are lost. Lost for despair is the one, the only unforgivable sin. We were made for love. We exist to love. To despair of our very purpose in existence is to despair so utterly that there is little we can do against it. Let us remember, for the sake of our Christian family, that Faith, Hope and Love are all intertwined, but greatest of all is Love. Let Love die, and Faith will die. Let Love die, and Hope will die. Let them all die, and Grace itself will avail us nothing. We are truly confronted by the greatest possible evil here. This is the defining evil of our generation. This is the great heresy of the 21st Century, and this is a greater threat to Christianity that Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Mohammed combined.

And so I write.

I recently had a conversation with a good Catholic friend who is suffering from this very problem. It was he who brought me to the realization that this problem was getting so widespread. Moreover, while I had always had misgivings about the emotional highs and the love "feeling" I saw peddled in fundamentalist Christianity, only after this conversation did I realize that these things were all inter-related to our perception of love.

I want to address some key points that my friend brought up with me. I will not name names, but I will use quotations of what he said at various points to illustrate important factors.

Upon reminding my friend that agape is a choice, his reply to me came as follows, "Yesterday, I went to the chapel for adoration and as I left, I put some money in the "donations for the poor" box. And then I reflected on the act and realized that I put that money in the box mechanically. I can verbally say I feel compassion for the poor, but the word compassion literally means a sharing of pain. And when I see a box as abstract as "donations for the poor," I don't share any feelings with the object of my gift. And even when I do see a real homeless person, as you say, I have to choose to feel compassion for him. That seems so unnatural to me. Why should I have to choose to feel compassion for another human being who is suffering? Why can't that be my natural reactions instead?"

I want us all to note the very important and near omnipresence of the concept of compassion in these statements and questions. Compassion is a feeling, as my friend so beautifully noted. It is a sharing of pain. And there is absolutely nothing wrong with compassion (we are Catholics, after all, offering up our suffering is all about compassion). But compassion is not agape, and compassion does not lead to agape. In fact, it's quite the opposite. Agape leads to compassion. I said before, and I meant it, "Does the empath do good because he feels bad? There's nothing impressive in this! The man with agape does good no matter how he feels, he does it not to assuage his guilt, or to lessen the pain he receives from others, or even because he'll feel good as a result but because it is his love!" And now I would note for you an incredibly beautiful thing that this despairing friend of mine accomplished.

He chose to share pain. He is increasingly woeful and distracted that compassion is not his natural state, and yet when presented with the opportunity to, he not only feels compassion, but he chooses to feel compassion. He chooses! If I could somehow make this seventy-two size font with little firecrackers around it, I would, because it is so absurdly important, and so marvelously beautiful. I told him to his face (virtually) that he was missing the very fact that what he was describing was agape, the same love he believed himself utterly incapable of doing. My friend's heart was not motivated by excess, altruism or empathy. He did what he did, almost mechanically, he even admitted, but he still did it with choice, and not for a reward, or because he had plenty to spare, or because he had to assuage his feelings of pain, or to feel good, or from some petty altruism.

And now for something even more beautiful. Did he say, and I note, that there was something mechanical in his actions? Certainly one can argue that this is not a good thing. But I would rather argue that it is not only a good thing, but it is well nigh on the best thing. While he could probably improve his self-sacrifice, and his motivations, we all could. What is important is the nature of his action. It operated within him, this amazing love, and only afterwards did he stop, and think, and go, "Why?! Why did I do that? I don't feel sorry for them! I don't feel their pain!" My friend is not rich, and he's not an empath, pretty clearly. While agape can be beautifully expressed by choosing to feel compassion, as I noted above, that isn't the point. An even more beautiful expression of agape is that we can and do choose to sacrifice even without compassion. That without sharing the suffering of any person, by choice or by nature, we can still give of ourselves, and give where it hurts.

As one final point I would like to give a visualization of how agape works within our souls for us to meditate upon.

Agape is like a tiny fiery light in our heart and soul. It is God striking a match in the darkness of our sins and selfishness. In doing so, God first exposes to us more than we can possibly take in, and the light is more bright than we can possibly believe. Even a little light will shine brightly and overwhelmingly after the darkness we find within ourselves alone. But as the initial shock of that brilliance wears off...we find that the darkness hasn't receded as much as we thought it had. And we find that it's very easy for that little light to go out again. One breath of foul, fetid air and it winks out.

To maintain, and better yet grow, to go from a match, to a candle, to a torch, to a bonfire, and to a very star, we have to add to the fire. We have to bring fuel, and get more heat. We need to open up the doors of our hearts to let in fresh air as well. And we have to protect the fire from sin, from the winds and waters that would snuff it away from us. (This, by the way, is embodied in Catholic penance and Confession, we get rid of the sin, light our match, and then work to remedy the negative effects of sin upon us and rebuild our flames of true charity.)

We've struck our match, and now we need kindling, and logs and anything else that will burn! We can throw away everything in our lives for the sake of our little flame, and it will get bigger, and warmer and brighter, and not just for us but for everyone around us. Do we remember the letter of St. James? Faith without works is dead. When we let our Love die, we let our Faith die.

And that's the end of us...