Agape

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Agape is the Greek word for love that early Christian writers raised above the others to name something specific: love given freely, without being earned and without expecting return. Greek had several words for love, and agapē was not the most charged of them; it was ordinary, even pale, until the writers of the New Testament loaded it with a meaning it had not carried before. In their usage it became the word for the love God bears toward the world, and the love the faithful were commanded to bear toward one another and toward strangers and enemies alike.

Before that loading, the word was unremarkable. The Greek of the classical world kept a small cluster of terms apart by use rather than by sharp definition: storge, the unchosen affection of kin; philia, the love of friends bound by shared life or pursuit; and above all eros, the love that reaches — desire drawn upward toward the beautiful, the good, the lacked. Set beside these, agapē and its verb agapaō were the colorless members of the family, used for fondness, preference, the strong leaning of one thing toward another, with little of the heat that clung to eros. The Greek translators of the Hebrew scriptures, the Septuagint, reached for it readily and without ceremony: it renders the ordinary Hebrew word for love across every register, from the love of God for a people to the love sung in the Song of Songs, where the majority of its occurrences in fact fall. What recommended it to the first Christian writers was very nearly its blankness. The terms with weight already carried their freight of appetite and cult; a word with little prior charge could be filled.

The New Testament loading

The term saturates the earliest Christian texts. The hymn to love in Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians — patient, kind, bearing all things, believing all things, the gift greater than prophecy or knowledge or even faith and hope — is built on it, and made agapē the standard against which every other endowment of the spirit was measured and found lesser. The Johannine writings press the word to its sharpest point. There the love commanded among the faithful is grounded not in a rule but in a nature: the disciples are to love one another because love is what God is. The flat assertion that God is love — that love is not one of the divine attributes but the divine being stated directly — is the furthest the vocabulary travels, and it is reached in this word and no other. The same writings hold the two movements together: the love of the faithful for one another is a derivative, a love that comes from God and returns the divine motion downward into the human world.

The choice was deliberate, and the deliberateness shows in what the word was made to bear. The traits gathered under it — devotion without calculation, self-giving without a view to advantage, regard for the unworthy — were not prized in the classical scale of the virtues, where self-sufficiency stood high and the squandering of one’s good on the undeserving looked closer to weakness than to excellence. To name a love that ran against that grain, the writers needed a word not already committed to the older estimate. Agapē served because it was available.

Caritas and “charity”

Translated into Latin as caritas, the word reached the Western church through the Vulgate and the Latin fathers, and through them passed into English as “charity” — which is why the older English Bibles speak of charity where modern ones say love, and why the most quoted line of Paul’s hymn long read that the greatest of these is charity. The shift in the English word over the centuries, narrowing from self-giving love toward almsgiving and the relief of the poor, is itself a record of one strand of what agapē had come to carry; the love that pours toward the needy without measuring their merit is recognizably the same movement, contracted to a single channel. The Latin caritas would become the hinge of the medieval discussion, the term under which the whole question of divine and human love was argued — and, much later, the fault line along which the word would be cut in two.

The agape love-feast

The same word named a thing the early communities actually did. The agapē or love-feast was a shared meal of fellowship held by the gathered church, bound up at first with the rite that became the Eucharist and only gradually pulled apart from it. Its earliest trace is a passing rebuke in the letter of Jude, which speaks of those who feast without reverence at these gatherings; the Didache, from near the turn of the first century, gives prayers for a communal meal with no visible seam between the table-fellowship and the thanksgiving over bread and cup. The letters of Ignatius of Antioch, a little later, still hold the supper and the agapē together.

The Fractio panis (“breaking of bread”), a fresco in the Greek Chapel of the Catacomb of Priscilla, Rome, depicting figures at a communal meal (2nd–4th century) — via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

From outside the church, the governor Pliny, writing to the emperor Trajan from Bithynia around the same years, reports that the Christians he questioned met twice — once before dawn to bind themselves by oath, and again later to share food of an ordinary and harmless kind, a notice usually read as catching the common meal already standing somewhat apart from the morning rite.

Through the second century the two drew gradually distinct. Tertullian describes the agapē as a supper funded by the community’s contributions and turned toward the relief of the poor — the meal as an act of provision, the table as a form of almsgiving. By the time of Cyprian, in the middle of the third century, the Eucharist was kept in the morning and taken fasting, while the love-feast had become an evening charity supper, its old liturgical knot with the sacrament effectively undone. The separation hardened into discipline: the Council of Laodicea, in the latter fourth century, barred the holding of love-feasts inside the churches, and similar rulings elsewhere pressed the meal out of the sanctuary. As a regular institution it faded from the common life of the church over the following centuries, surviving in scattered and revived forms; but the word it had carried did not fade with it. The meal lapsed; the name kept the sense of a love expressed as shared bread and open-handed provision, and lent it back to the larger idea.

The doctrinal core

What the word was taken to mean, abstracted from meal and hymn alike, is a love that originates in the giver rather than in any worth found in the one loved — unmotivated, unconditional, descending. This is the sense the tradition came to hold: that divine love is not drawn out by the beauty or goodness of its object but pours toward the unworthy, and that human love at its height imitates that movement. The contrast is structural. A love that answers to value is governed by its object; it goes where the worth is, and ceases where the worth runs out. A love that originates in the giver is governed by the giver alone; it can fall on the worthless, the hostile, the unresponsive, because nothing in the object called it forth and nothing in the object can call it off.

It is a demanding claim, and the texts do not soften it. The command to love the enemy follows directly from it, and could follow from nothing else: only a love indifferent to the merit of its object can be commanded toward an object that has no merit to show. The same structure underwrites the claim that such love is unearned grace rather than wage — that it precedes any worth in the one who receives it and is, in the tradition’s reading, the very thing that confers worth where it lands. Here the concept stands apart from the worship-owed-to-God that the tradition tracks under latria, and from the question of what makes a being a god at all, the province of deity; agape is not the homage rendered upward but the regard that comes down. Where mammon names a rival object of devotion — wealth set up as a master to be served in God’s place — agape names the motion that no object can purchase, the love that precisely cannot be bought because it was never a response to what the object had.

The eros–agape antithesis

The contrast with eros — love as desire, as reaching upward toward what attracts it — is present in the sources but was sharpened into a system much later. In the philosophical inheritance the church absorbed, eros named the soul’s ascent: in Plato the desire kindled by beauty that draws the soul up the ladder toward the Good, and in Plotinus and the Neoplatonic schools the longing by which the many are turned back toward the One, a yearning woven into the very structure of emanation and return. (The reaching desire meant here is the philosophers’ eros, the acquisitive motion of the soul, not the winged daimon Eros of the older myth.) That is love as need answered by ascent — the lover rises toward what completes him.

Plato’s Symposium, the dialogue in which eros is praised as the soul’s ascent toward beauty, as painted by Anselm Feuerbach (1873) — Google Art Project, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The Swedish theologian Anders Nygren, writing in two volumes across the early 1930s, set the two as opposed motifs running through the whole history of Christian thought. His method, the motif-research of the school gathered at Lund, sought the single governing idea — the grundmotiv — beneath a body of thought, and the idea he found governing the Christian doctrine of love was agape: spontaneous, uncaused, indifferent to the value of its object, descending from God as sheer gift. Against it he set eros, the acquisitive ascent of Greek philosophy, the love that wants and climbs and is drawn by worth. The two, on his account, were not two species of one thing but two contrary movements, two answers to the question of where love begins and which way it runs — and the history of Christian love was the history of their collision. He read the medieval idea of caritas, fixed above all by Augustine of Hippo, as their uneasy fusion: a synthesis in which the Gospel’s descending gift had been alloyed with the soul’s Platonic climb, and so, in his judgment, compromised.

Saint Augustine of Hippo, whose doctrine of caritas Nygren read as the fusion of agape and eros, holding the burning heart of love — Philippe de Champaigne, c. 1645, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The opposition is illuminating and has been much criticized. The standing objection is that it draws too clean a line through writers who felt no such division. Augustine is the case in point: in Amor Dei, his study of Augustine’s religion, John Burnaby argued that the desire that reaches for God and the gift that God pours out were, for Augustine, not two loves to be pried apart but one motion in two directions — the soul’s longing for God itself awakened and carried by God’s prior love for the soul, so that to set them against each other is to impose a later split on a thought that did not contain it. The same fault is charged more broadly: that the antithesis presupposes a divide between natural and supernatural love that the figures it judges did not draw, and that few were ever willing to make agape and eros eternal enemies. The dispute outlived Nygren. In the encyclical Deus Caritas Est, issued at the end of 2005, Benedict XVI took up the antithesis by name and refused its extreme form — holding that ascending and descending love can never be wholly severed, that the love which seeks and the love which gives belong finally to one reality, and that the church’s work with eros is to purify it rather than to cast it out.

In the schoolroom of love

Between the fathers and the modern dispute lies the medieval working-out, where the question was not whether to oppose the two loves but how to order the one. Bernard of Clairvaux, in his treatise on loving God, laid out an ascent in degrees: a soul that begins by loving itself for its own sake, learns to love God for the help God gives, comes to love God for God’s own sake, and arrives — if it arrives — at loving even itself only for God’s sake, the self at last folded into the love it had been reaching for. The motion here is unmistakably an ascent, a climb the desiring soul makes; yet its summit is sheer gift, the love of God for God’s sake that no lower step could earn — the descending and the ascending braided into a single stair. The schoolmen of the high middle ages drew the threads into doctrine. Scholastic theology fixed caritas as the highest of the theological virtues, the form and mother of the rest, the virtue that orders all the others to their end; and Thomas Aquinas defined it, in his treatment of charity, as a friendship — the amicitia of the human creature with God, founded on God’s sharing of his own blessedness with the soul. That agape should be named friendship is itself a measure of the distance traveled from the pale Greek word: a love begun in one party’s free gift had become a mutual belonging, the descending regard having made of its object a fit companion for itself.

Thomas Aquinas, who defined caritas as a friendship between the human creature and God — Sandro Botticelli, 15th century, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Scholarship and sources

The modern study of agape turns on the long argument Nygren began. His two-volume Den kristna kärlekstanken genom tiderna — its parts published in 1930 and 1936, and rendered into English by Philip Watson in 1953 as Agape and Eros — remains the work every later treatment answers, whether to extend its motif-research or to break its central opposition. The principal counter-statement is John Burnaby’s Amor Dei: A Study of the Religion of St. Augustine (1938), which set out to show that Augustine’s love of God does not split along Nygren’s seam; the line of criticism it opened has been carried forward through the twentieth century and into recent work reassessing whether Augustine’s amor is best read as agape, eros, or philia at all. On the side of the tradition’s own self-understanding, two texts mark the medieval consolidation: Bernard’s On Loving God, with its four degrees of ascent, and Aquinas’s question on charity in the Summa Theologiae, where caritas is defined as friendship with God. The dispute’s most recent magisterial entry is Benedict XVI’s Deus Caritas Est (2005), which reopens the eros–agape question precisely to deny that the two can be finally pulled apart. For the love-feast, the documentary spine runs from the letter of Jude and the Didache through Ignatius, Pliny’s report to Trajan, and Tertullian to the disciplinary canons of Laodicea — the textual record of a meal that bore the name before the name outgrew it.

What the centuries of argument keep circling is the strangeness of a love that does not look first at what it loves. The classical scale read love as a verdict on its object: one loves the lovable, and the measure of a love is the worth it answers to. Agape reverses the order. It does not find its object worthy and then love; it loves, and in loving makes worthy — which is why it can be turned, without contradiction, on the enemy, who by every prior reckoning has earned nothing. A love drawn out by goodness will always stop where the goodness stops. A love that begins in the one who loves has no such border to reach, and it is that borderless, undeserved, downward motion — not the soul’s climb toward the beautiful, but the gift that descends before the soul has done anything to merit it — that the early writers were reaching for when they took up the plainest of their words and made it carry the most.

→ Related: Logos · Gnosis · Immanence · The Shepherd Of Hermas · New Testament · Eros · Augustine Of Hippo · Bernard Of Clairvaux · Scholasticism · Neoplatonism · Soul