The origin of the word “Agape”

My reflection after reading Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens follows this post. His chapter on the long millennia of religious development caused me to give a summary of my research into the spiritual meaning of agape.

I gave a quick summary of my decades long query about why St. Paul chose to use such a weird, archaic term as ‘agape.’ Of course, we can only guess because there is no indication. So my research was developed to help me make an educated guess. After all that I concluded he was only using the word to point to a spiritual experience.

What had finally come thru to me happened when I considered it to be not a word that described anything. To his listeners and readers the choice of a word they’d never heard of would have made no sense — and that might have been all he wanted. So at the time, when someone first read 1 Cor. 13, a reader’s question might have been, “What??” after reading that without agape, nothing people do means anything. So Paul could only give a list of adjectives and descriptive phrases. And he concluded that the spiritual experience of agape was more important than experiencing faith and hope. 

So of course, it would destroy his whole effort when modern translators try using a word that was descriptive of something — like, oh I don’t know, maybe like ‘love’ or ‘friendliness.’ The point seems to be for all time, there is no word that should be used to translate ‘agape.’ Paul’s point is made by continuing to do what he did, so we should just use a weird, archaic word.

But where did he get the word? Well, after years of searching, I turned to the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures (made by seventy scholars who gathered in Egypt about a century before Paul). And again I have to guess, this time I guess he would have read the Septuagint. In the most famous passage in Deuteronomy, that Jewish tradition calls the “Great Shema” (because that is the beginning word, which is — as usual — weakly translated in English as ‘hear’ or ‘listen,’ even though that is far too calm a word for its full meaning). 

You see ‘Shema’ is a Call word: commanding a spiritual experience. It is used like blowing the shofar horn: calling the whole people into a worshipping community. When those 70 scholars got to the Great Shema they would have known that it was very important what word they chose to express the way of answering the call to bring each worshiper’s whole being (“all your heart, all your mind, and all your strength”) into a profound experience of divine Presence. 

But they probably realized that no commonly used Greek word carried that full meaning of spiritual power. And that spiritual-experience word they chose was ‘agape.’ That then becomes the key to the meaning of agape. Then the 70 scholars must have realized that the authors of Leviticus made the huge, radical, profound leap to have that spiritual experience be the basis for what forms the community of the faithful people: the call is extended to “your neighbor as yourself;” thus making spiritual experience the basis for forming a community. So in the Septuagint the translation continued to use ‘agape’ in  Leviticus. Then in the Gospels we have Jesus make the final huge, radical, profound leap to call for that spiritual experience extended to enemies. The practical action that flows from that spiritual experience of relationship is then called for in the form of the Golden Rule. And so the Greek version of the Gospels used ‘agape.’All of that is why I think St. Paul was using the word ‘agape’ to point to the power of that spiritual experience when he claimed [Romans 5:5] the hope for humanity was found in the way the Holy Spirit had poured into human hearts the power to have that spiritual experience. So that’s my guess as to why he chose ‘agape’ to point to that spiritual experience.

“Agape” the spiritual power, and “Sapiens”

For my birthday, my son, Noah, gave me Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens, the book that studies the entire millions of years development of our species. I’ve been slowing working my way through this amazing 416-page work. Of course, in order for him to cover that much in one book, he had to over-generalize many times, which was frustrating to read but still thought provoking.

My attention was focused, of course, on the chapter about the history of religion,

and so I was very frustrated by his over-generalizing. A complaint I have with his analysis deals with the way he focuses on the development of religions but ignores their origins. That’s unfortunate because most of religious development did not stay faithful to the profound spiritual insights of their founders, those insights that Einstein called “spiritual genius.” Some of the later people, we could call them ‘religionists,’ did a major disservice to the original spiritual geniuses by distorting their words and lives in order to construct a religion.

Harari did have a point, though, about how human is the development of religion. That brought him to the modern development of humanism, and how it showed the 7,000 years of human theories about life, were just that: human theories about life. Now, that might seem obvious, but of course, there have always been some people who built a religion on the claim that their theories about life were somehow more than merely human theories. And in the process of such development over all those years, those people claimed that their ‘more than merely human theories’ were more inspired and thus “more true” than other people’s such theories. 

Of course all that Homo Sapiens can do is run thoughts thru their brain’s filters. Even if a person were to experience ‘beyond human’ revelation, whatever would come out would have to be expressed in human language. And such inevitable process would necessarily make any theory a human-produced theory. And so, looking back over 7,000 years, all religion becomes in that way a form of humanism. 

AlthoughYuval Harari tried to separate out modern humanism by claiming that the definition required “the worship of Homo Sapiens.” But I think there is a type of humanism that merely takes into account that all theories are expressed in human language. So we can still appreciate spiritual geniuses while acknowledging they had to speak in human language. 

That’s what I’ve had to do when researching language about 'agape' and the spiritual genius of Jesus and Paul. Well, my stumbling around trying to figure out why Paul chose to express his revelation with such a strange word, had led me to speculate that he wasn’t trying to come up with a descriptive word but instead wasn’t trying to describe at all but was ‘pointing’ (as Martin Buber would have said). 

In Paul’s time, they didn’t have a way to say ‘spiritual power,’ so in trying to point to a spiritual power in the heart, he said, “God’s agape.” In trying to talk that way, he would have made no sense, and to me that was exactly it. So of course, when religionists translated it with a meaningful word, like ‘love,’ that just messed up the whole point. That particular ‘beyond human’ cannot be made sensible with language, so Paul just gave it an ancient sound that would have made no sense. No one would have known what “God’s agape” meant, and that would have been the point. It was a spiritual experience without knowing what a spiritual experience was, and anyone who didn’t have the spiritual experience wouldn’t have known what he was talking about, and no amount of language would have made any difference.