The Case for Agape

An early Christian love-feast. They call it "communion."

My leftist friend Xerxes has come out, resolutely, in his latest column, against agape, caritas, charity: the prime Christian virtue.

This seems shocking to me. Especially since he is nominally a Christian. But perhaps here we have the key to much of our current political and social turmoil. For lack of charity seems to have a lot to do with it. Charity requires, and in civil terms is, tolerance. People at large, at least on the left, seem no longer to understand the need for tolerance.

Xerxes prefers philios, friendship:

“Friendships are … more than the dispassionate, almost cerebral, association often lauded as ‘agape.’”

And he knows what he is saying. He defines philios accurately enough:

“we value and respect each other. We could and would trust each other with our possessions, our children, our loves and our losses.”

Moreover, his scorn for agape reveals an accurate understanding of what it means:

“’Agape’ implies that somehow I care about nameless refugees fleeing Somalia. Or flood victims in Iran. Or opioid junkies in downtown alleys.”

He does not care for Somalis, or Iranians, or junkies, and sees no reason why he should.

If all this sounds wrong to you, if you do care, it is because you are a Christian.

Having lived for long in non-Christian cultures, it is starkly evident to me that this caring for the stranger or even the supposed adversary is exactly what distinguishes Christian morality from any other. Take away Christian ethics, and it is far from instinctive.

In Confucianism, moral obligations are based on five defined human relationships: wife and husband; parent and child; friend and friend; ruler and ruled; and older sibling and younger sibling. If someone you encounter does not fit into one of those five relationships, you simply have no moral obligations to them whatsoever.

This is what makes China what is sometimes called a “low-trust” society. Put simply, you cannot trust anyone outside your family. This is why. A China-based YouTube vlogger whom I follow recently lamented that there are no “Good Samaritans” in China—get in trouble on your own, and there is no one who will help. And there is an obvious reason why this is so: they have not heard the parable of the Good Samaritan.

This leads to strikingly different moral judgements in practice. There is one example in a standard Confucian text, I recall, of a ruler who saw an ox being led to the slaughter for a blood sacrifice. Moved, he demanded the ox be spared. Instead, another ox was selected, out of his sight.

The Confucian text praised him for his tender feelings.

To a Christian, this distinction is nonsensical. How is it better to kill the ox you do not know?

So too with Aristotle. There is no obligation of caritas. Aristotle argues for morality in strictly practical terms: if you want to be treated well by someone later, do them a favour. If you expect to be honoured by the state, do things for the state. Everything is quid pro quo. If someone cannot plausibly do something for you, it follows that there is no point in treating them well or decently.

Even Islam: one has defined responsibilities to fellow Muslims, who are your “brothers.” One has some responsibility to deal decently with fellow monotheists, although they are not to be accorded equality. But as for an “unbeliever,” or an “evildoer,” God hates them, and so should you. This explains not just the current problem with Muslim terrorism, but, for example, why slavery was a basic part of Islam until recently.

Even Judaism: it is based on the fundamental tribal premise that one ethnicity is set apart from all others, and one does not bear the same moral obligations to “the nations” that one does to a fellow Jew. In the Old Testament, the distinction can get pretty harsh.

My grandmother told me, as a teenager interested in Eastern religions, that the core of the Christian message, that distinguished it from other religions, was Love.

I quietly scoffed at the time.

She was right. She meant agape, and it really is uniquely Christian.

The three Theological Virtues, according to Raphael. Caritas, Agape, is in the centre.

The New Testament itself states “God is agape.” 1 John 4: 8, 16. And Jesus calls us expressly to “agape” as the first and essential commandment.

“But the Pharisees, when they heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, gathered themselves together. One of them, a lawyer, asked him a question, testing him. ‘Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the law?’ Jesus said to him, ‘”You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.” This is the first and great commandment. A second likewise is this, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” The whole law and the prophets depend on these two commandments.’”

The word translated into English here as “love” is, in the Greek, “agape.” In Greek, it is distinct from philios, eros, or storge, each of which might also be translated as “love.”

That’s about as unequivocal and authoritative as a statement can be in Christian terms.

In wanting to throw out agape in favour of philios, “brotherly love,” Xerxes implies that philios is a stronger sort of love, and so morally superior. And this sounds like something I have heard before: leftists today seem to scoff at the idea of tolerance. It is not enough to tolerate gay marriage, for example, or transgenderism. It is not enough to let Indians (First Nations) choose to remain Indians, or immigrant Muslims to remain Muslim. Instead, you must actively endorse and celebrate each position, assert its moral goodness.

But this is not a higher form of love at all. To see philios as the ideal form of love, to be extended to all, is about as sensible as seeing eros as the ideal form of love, to be extended for all. Universal love then means having sex with all comers. After all, don’t we love anyone we have sex with?

Actually, doesn’t that sound familiar? That was more or less the universal position of the left until quite recently. Leading directly to so many of our current social problems. It still is the creed of large portions of the left, even though it often conflicts with the new doctrine of philios.

The underlying problem is perhaps that the left has rejected Christian charity, and now thrashes about for mad alternatives.

As Xerxes rightly says, philios describes someone you “value and respect.” Someone you “could and would trust with your possessions, your children, your loves and your losses.”

And Xerxes generously wants to extend this love even to all animals.

But, as Xerxes is intellectually honest enough to admit, philios automatically implies contempt for some other party: for opioid junkies in East Vancouver, for Somalis in Somalia, or for some other group. You cannot distinguish friends without designating someone else an enemy.

Now, obviously, you cannot in fact trust “your possessions, your children, your loves and your losses” to any random person or animal. You cannot in fact trust them to Nazis, embezzlers, pedophiles, abusers, let alone grizzly bears, tigers, wolves, sharks, and cancer viruses.

So what actually happens when you drop agape and see only philios?

That means no love for enemies, or those you consider your inferiors, or of no value to you, or those you do not know.

In a word, intolerance. It is now okay to punch anyone you think is a Nazi, or castrate suspected pedophiles, or blacklist anyone with whom you politically disagree, and so forth. Which is just what we are now seeing on the left.

Jesus spoke directly against such limits to love:

“For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Don’t even the tax collectors do the same? If you only greet your friends, what more do you do than others? Don’t even the tax collectors do the same?“ (Matthew 5: 46.7).

Agape always desires the best for the other, whereas philios, like eros, ultimately desires the best for oneself, and for another only as a means to an end. As Kant would point out, it is not really moral at all. Agape requires treating the other as an end in themselves. And philios, unlike agape, is conditional and transitory. Friends fall out.

This is where we are headed, as we reject traditional Christian values. The fact that this virtue of agape is absent in any other moral system you might mention demonstrates that it is not self-evident, not spontaneous, and so will be easily lost if Christianity is dispensed with. As it is already gone for Xerxes. As it seems it is already gone for much or most of the modern left.

And this is bad news not just for junkies and for starving Somalis. In political and social terms, agape translates as tolerance. Agape is the foundation of our belief in human equality, and in human rights. Liberal democracy and our rule of law, or experience of peace, order, and good government, exists and endures because agape requires this assumption of us: that everyone else, even people we do not know personally, even our current enemies, has basic rights, is loved by God, and deserves fair play. And it is not just me who thinks so. John Locke thought so too, and John Locke is the philosophical founder of that system.

Kick out the foundation, and more likely sooner than later, the edifice cannot stand.

Welcome to the postmodern 21st century.