Agape

Based on Wikipedia: Agape

The Word That Changed How the World Thinks About Love

In the second century, a Roman lawyer named Tertullian noticed something strange happening in his empire. Pagans were pointing at Christians and saying, with a mixture of confusion and admiration, "Only look—look how they love one another." The word for that love, the one that made outsiders stop and stare, was agape.

It's pronounced ah-GAH-pay, with the emphasis on that middle syllable—three beats that have echoed through two thousand years of philosophy, theology, and ordinary human longing.

The ancient Greeks had multiple words for love, each carving out its own territory. Eros was romantic and sexual desire, the kind of love that makes your heart race and your judgment questionable. Philia was the warm affection between friends, the comfortable love of people who choose each other. Storge was family love, the natural bond between parents and children. And philautia was self-love, which the Greeks recognized as both necessary and potentially dangerous.

But agape was different. It described something harder to pin down—a love that gives without calculating what it will receive in return.

Before Christianity: A Quieter History

The word existed long before the New Testament made it famous. Homer used it, though in simpler ways—to describe greeting someone with affection, or showing respect for the dead. Ancient Greek writers used various forms of agape to describe loving a spouse, caring for family, or being devoted to a particular activity. An archaeological discovery—a sepulchral inscription, essentially a gravestone—shows the word being used to honor a polytheistic army officer who was held in high esteem by his country.

So the word was there, waiting. It just hadn't yet been asked to carry the weight it would eventually bear.

The Transformation

Early Christians needed a word for something they believed was unprecedented: God's love for humanity, and the human response to it. They reached for agape and expanded its meaning dramatically.

In the New Testament, you find the bold claim that "God is love"—ho theos agape estin—appearing twice in the first letter of John. Not that God has love, or shows love, but that God is love. The identification is complete.

This understanding didn't emerge from nothing. It built on a foundational Hebrew concept called chesed, sometimes translated as "loving kindness" or "steadfast love." Throughout the Hebrew scriptures—what Christians call the Old Testament—chesed describes God's faithful, merciful commitment to his people. Agape became its Greek-language heir.

The Christian understanding of agape was inseparable from the concept of kenosis—self-emptying sacrifice. This love wasn't just generous; it was willing to pour itself out completely for the beloved.

Jesus and the Great Commandment

When someone asked Jesus which commandment was the greatest, he gave an answer that wove together two strands from the Hebrew scriptures.

First: "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind." This came from the Shema, the central declaration of Jewish faith found in Deuteronomy.

Second: "You shall love your neighbor as yourself." This came from Leviticus.

Jesus declared that everything else—all the laws, all the prophets, the entire ethical tradition—hung on these two commands. Love God completely. Love your neighbor as yourself. That's the whole architecture.

But then, in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus pushed further into territory that made people uncomfortable:

You have heard that it was said, 'You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.' But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust. For if you love those who love you, what reward have you?

Here was the radical edge of agape. It wasn't about loving people who were easy to love. It was about loving people who had given you every reason not to. The sun doesn't check your moral credentials before it warms you. The rain doesn't fall only on the deserving. Divine love, Jesus suggested, worked the same way.

What Makes Agape Different

The twentieth-century Swiss theologian Karl Barth spent considerable effort distinguishing agape from eros. His analysis reveals the heart of what makes agape unique.

Eros loves because of what it sees in the beloved—beauty, virtue, charm, something that attracts. It's responsive love. It answers to qualities in its object.

Agape loves regardless of what it sees. It doesn't depend on the beloved being attractive or worthy. Barth wrote that agape identifies with the interests of the neighbor "in utter independence of the question of his attractiveness" and with no expectation of being loved in return.

This is why agape is often described as unconditional. It doesn't set conditions. It doesn't negotiate terms. It simply loves.

The British writer C. S. Lewis, in his book The Four Loves, called agape the highest variety of love known to humanity. He described it as selfless love that is passionately committed to the well-being of others. Not tepid goodwill or distant benevolence—passionate commitment.

The Partial and Rudimentary

Anglican theologian O. C. Quick offered a sobering assessment of human capacity for agape. Within human experience, he wrote, it is "a very partial and rudimentary realization." In its pure form, it is "essentially divine."

Quick then painted a picture of what pure agape would look like:

If we could imagine the love of one who loves men purely for their own sake, and not because of any need or desire of his own, purely desires their good, and yet loves them wholly, not for what at this moment they are, but for what he knows he can make of them because he made them, then we should have in our minds some true image of the love of the Father and Creator of mankind.

Notice what's happening in that description. This kind of love doesn't love you because you're lovable right now. It loves you because of what you could become. It sees potential that you yourself may not see. And it loves without needing anything from you in return—not validation, not gratitude, not even acknowledgment.

Most human love struggles to clear those bars. We love with strings attached, even when we don't notice the strings. We love hoping to be loved back. We love people more when they're pleasant to us and less when they're difficult. Pure agape would love without any of that calculus.

The Dark Side of the Word

Here's something that surprises many people: the New Testament doesn't always use agape and its related verb forms positively. Sometimes the word appears in accusations.

The apostle Paul, writing to his young colleague Timothy, complained that "Demas has forsaken me, having loved this present world." The word for "loved" there is a form of agapao, the verb from which agape derives.

In John's Gospel: "Men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil." Again, the verb is from the agape family.

And: "They loved the praise of men more than the praise of God."

What's going on here? The word family of agape doesn't guarantee that the object of love is good. You can direct that kind of total, committed, unconditional devotion toward things that don't deserve it. You can love money with agape-level intensity. You can love approval, comfort, or power the same way.

The capacity for self-sacrificing love is morally neutral until you ask: self-sacrificing love for what?

The Love Feast

Early Christians didn't just talk about agape; they ate it.

The word appears in plural form—agapai—in the New Testament to describe communal meals that early Christian communities shared. These weren't ordinary dinners. They were expressions of fellowship, unity, and mutual care. Everyone ate together, regardless of social status. The wealthy didn't get better food than the poor.

This practice, called the agape feast or love feast, survives in some Christian traditions today. Among the Old Order River Brethren and Old Brethren—plain Anabaptist communities with roots in eighteenth-century Pennsylvania—a weekend is still set aside twice a year for special meetings, self-examination, and a communal Love Feast as part of their three-part Communion observance.

There's something almost stubborn about this survival. In a world that moved on to individual communion wafers and quick Sunday services, these communities kept gathering around actual tables, sharing actual food, making agape something you could taste.

Beyond Christianity

The concept of agape—even when the specific Greek word isn't used—resonates across religious traditions.

In Buddhism, metta or loving-kindness describes a similar unconditional benevolence toward all beings. Buddhist meditation practices often begin by cultivating metta toward oneself, then expanding it outward in widening circles until it encompasses all living things, including enemies. The structure mirrors Jesus's teaching about loving those who persecute you.

Bodhicitta, another Buddhist concept, refers to the awakened mind that aspires to enlightenment for the benefit of all sentient beings. It's love that aims beyond personal liberation toward universal flourishing.

In Judaism, dveikut describes closeness to God, a loving attachment that shapes one's entire being. The word comes from a root meaning "to cling" or "to cleave"—love as total adherence.

Confucianism offers ren, often translated as benevolence or humaneness. It describes the ideal relationship between people, characterized by care, respect, and moral concern for others' well-being.

These concepts aren't identical to agape, but they orbit similar territory. Across cultures and centuries, humans have reached for words to describe love that transcends self-interest.

A Twentieth-Century Twist

In the early twentieth century, an English occultist named Aleister Crowley founded a new religious movement called Thelema. Crowley was a controversial figure—deliberately provocative, often scandalous, endlessly self-mythologizing. But his movement adopted agape as a central concept.

Thelema's core teaching is "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law. Love is the law, love under will." That love is agape. For Thelemites, it represents the harmony of individual purpose with universal love, the expression of one's divine will.

It's a strange journey for a word—from ancient Greek affection, through Christian theology, to early twentieth-century occultism. But perhaps it makes sense. Agape has always been a word that people reach for when they want to describe love at its highest pitch, whatever they understand that to mean.

The Weight of Three Syllables

Why does this particular Greek word continue to matter?

Part of the answer is simply that it fills a gap. English uses "love" for everything—romantic passion, family bonds, friendship, enthusiasm for pizza. We love our spouses and we love our smartphones. The word stretches so thin that it sometimes says nothing at all.

Agape says something specific. It says: this love is not based on what you can do for me. It is not conditional on your behavior. It does not waver when you become difficult or disappointing. It sees you as you could be, not only as you are. It gives without expecting return.

Whether or not you accept the theological claims surrounding agape, the concept itself challenges ordinary human loving. Most of us love instrumentally, even when we don't mean to. We love people who make us feel good about ourselves. We withdraw love as punishment and extend it as reward. Our love has fine print.

Agape asks: what would it look like to love without fine print?

That's a question worth sitting with, whether you're a Christian theologian, a Buddhist practitioner, a secular philosopher, or just someone trying to love better than you did yesterday. The Greeks gave us the word. Two thousand years later, we're still learning what it means.