Letter #28: The Perfect Pancake

Love binds together and completes the whole.

Dad,

I have to say, you are no fun at all. I thought the whole point of philosophy was to make other people feel bad. And now you’re telling me we have to love people? In simple, actionable ways?! This is very distressing. 

Seriously though, I find your last two letters beautifully clarifying. Because “Agape” is one of those Christian Hashtags like “evangelical” or “sacrificial” that we like to repeat until no one knows what the heck it means, except that everyone seems certain it has something to do with pancake breakfasts. But as you point out, Agape isn’t some self-explanatory concept. Actually I’m fairly convinced it’s a concept that the New Testament authors had to invent to get their point across.

In the time before Jesus (let’s call it, oh, I don’t know, B.C.), agapē in Greek was actually a pretty generic word for love and affection. But Jesus obviously doesn’t mean that when he says to “love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, and strength.” He’s pointing back there to Deuteronomy and Leviticus, two central rulebooks of true religion. And he’s saying look, all those rules the guy next door is getting wrong? The sum total of them is to love God with your whole self, and your neighbor as if he were yourself. You can cite the sub-clause of the by-law that says he owes you a goat? Whoop-de-doo, knock yourself out. But if you have not love…

Love, moreover, that cuts across your whole being. How strange that Jewish teaching from hundreds of years before Plato should agree with him that humans are three in one. We have a mind that thinks and feels (the heart, levav), a spirit that lives and breathes (the soul, nefesh), and a body that acts in the world (the strength, me’od). These three can become mangled and turned against each other. But they can also be calibrated together, honed to intersect at one point like light rays focused by a magnifying glass. When united, they shoot upward together toward God, and outward toward your fellow man. And the thing which unites them is called Agape: love.

So you’re right that love isn’t reading books, or giving to charity, or even going to church. But there’s a flipside too: love does involve all those things. In fact, it seems somehow to make all those things worthwhile. 

I guess it’s a question of direction. If you make other people the point of everything you do, then you’ll be making God the point of everything you are. And then love, says Paul, “binds everything together in perfect unity.” That is, it takes the ragged tangle of the heart, and the fractured shards of the soul, and quietly—while we’re not looking, while our attention isn’t on ourselves at all—it puts everything back together. That must be how it makes us fully human. 

Love,
Spencer