The Liberating Power of Agapé

During these last 150 years of reviving the use of ‘agapé’ as a spiritual term, most people had a hard time accepting it as a word to use because it was considered to be arcane and unusual. But as I looked back into the use of the word by the first Christians, I discovered that it was not a commonly used word at that time either.

So for most Greeks in the 1st Century, when agapé was introduced into spiritual practices, it would have seemed arcane and unusual then. There is no evidence of it being used among average Greeks until St. Paul started using it. His use of it in the 1st Century began in a similar way as it did in the 19th Century: as a spiritual term. It was not used in common Greek language as a word for “love,” but appeared exclusively in religious writings. And that’s how it was used in translating the Gospels.

When I first started studying the way ‘agapé’ was used by St. Paul, I began to see how he used it to express the liberating aspect of spiritual energy. He claimed that agapé was a spiritual power to liberate people from the pressures of their era -- to prepare them for the New Age that was dawning.

He pointed out how the spiritual energy of agapé can keep us from being conformed to the selfish, egotistical, violent pattern of the era he believed was ending. I think his ideas can be useful today because of the overwhelming evidence of what the last 200 years have shown about the selfish, egotistical, violent pattern of our era of history.  

Of course, the liberation of our minds is not easy, because the tremendous pressures from the human world are very difficult to overcome. The forces of this long era of history have been building up for the hundreds of years of the process that has been named ‘civilization.’ (Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, “The end of the human race will be that we will eventually die of civilization.” That slow death is what we have to overcome.)

St. Paul considered this spiritual energy to have a transformative quality that should work in a person’s life to help her or him not be conceited or proud, but live kindly in harmony and peace with everyone, even to the point of blessing those who persecute you.

To drive home the difficulty of letting the spiritual energy of agapé be transformative in our living, he ended by talking about not repaying evil for evil, and not taking revenge. But if people resist and are not willing to make the huge effort involved with living by agapé, then their minds stay enslaved to the old pattern of the selfish, egotistical, violent present era of history. 

In the same way as in the 1st Century, we today have to decide to let our minds be liberated from the old, destructive pattern of this era in order to take part in the new way of living. Only spiritual energy is powerful enough to bring about such liberation.