Once again I found a book that gets caught in word confusion because of trying to stretch the weak English word ‘love’ to mean so much more than the usual understanding of love. As I’ve tried to make the point many times in this blog, such confusion could be straightened out by using a different word.
Of course, we have a helpful historical example of that being done in the Greek culture of 2,000 years ago. When there was a similar problem with the Greek word for love, ‘eros;’ back then the word that was found to be the best to use instead was the strange, ancient Greek word ‘agapé.’ That example of verbal usage is preserved for us in Christian writings.
This time, the modern book I found with the confusion is Silent Music: The Science of Meditation by William Johnston. The confusion comes when he tries to stretch ‘love’ to gain the meaning of some power that is highly spiritual. For example, when he writes:
“in mysticism the very highest form of human energy is brought into play, a human energy that is nothing other than love at the core of one’s being. It is precisely this that builds the earth.”
I claim that such statements cause confusion because most people would not understand what he’s referring to there. So when Greek writers in the First Century wanted to avoid such confusion, they didn’t use the common Greek word for ‘love’ but instead used the word ‘agapé.’ The best example that fits what Johnston was referring to is in Romans 5:5 — “God’s agapé has been poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit.”
William Johnston didn’t seem to realize that the original Greek of most of his New Testament quotes used ‘agapé’ instead of ‘eros.’ But Johnston’s efforts with new meanings of love did bring up the point that there is something very similar between the highest type of spiritual love and agapé. But when he tried to explain how love could be understood as the basis of the development toward enlightenment, most people would be confused by how he used ‘love’ to be such a basis. This is especially the case when he started talking about meditation as a “love affair.”
One example of his confused way of trying to express a very different meaning of love came when he wrote: “The love that builds the cosmos is universal love, the highest love that can fill the human heart. Though the working of mystical love and its power to heal are mysteries that no man understands.” Most people would have trouble trying to figure out what meaning is achieved in the many places where he tacked onto ‘love’ such additional words as ‘cosmic universal,’ ‘mystical,’ ‘highest type of spiritual’ and ‘healing power of.’
That confusion is especially seen in the passages where Johnston quotes Viktor Frankl and Teilhard de Chardin. Two such examples are Frankl’s quote: “Loving represents a coming to relationship with another as a spiritual being.” Then — Teilhard “sees friendship and spiritual love in their cosmic setting — woman leads man out of his cramping isolation, pointing the way to a universal love that encompasses mankind and the whole universe, leading on to God.” So substitute ‘agapé’ for ‘love’ and see the change that brings to your understanding.
That confusion could be cleared up by changing ‘love’ to ‘agapé,’ as we can see for example in the following changed quotes: “The enlightenment that comes from agapé is necessarily incarnational. It involves us in society and never cuts us off from reality. Agapé is the essence of the deepest meditation. The whole process should be undergirded by agapé if the enlightenment is to go the whole way.”
In other words, the process of understanding is advanced when such substitutions are used to explain to modern people what agapé means. And such attempts to explain are helped by keeping some of the psychic sense of the meaning of love and adding it to the meaning of agapé. And so when the substitution is made in the last paragraph of his book, we can hear him say: “It is agapé that builds the earth and carries forward the thrust of evolution.”
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