Agapé as universal love in Erich Fromm’s teaching

 I was able to obtain an eBook edition of Erich Fromm’s The Art of Loving. In this book the famous psychologist explores ways that people can become more loving with one another. 

Although Dr. Fromm never uses the word ‘agapé,’ in those places where he uses ‘love’ in a universal, spiritual way that the meaning is ‘agapé,’ I found that I gained deeper awareness of his teaching when the word 'love' was changed to ‘agape’ in the following quotes.

“What matters in relation to agapé is the faith in one’s own agapé; in its ability to produce a reaction of agape in others, and in its reliability.

“The capacity to experience agape demands a state of intensity, awareness, enhanced vitality, which can only be the result of a productive and active orientation in many other spheres of life.

“There is only one proof for the presence of agapé: the depth of the relationship, and the aliveness and strength in each person concerned; this is the fruit by which agape is recognized.

“Agapé is an activity, a power of the soul.

“Agapé encompasses the sense of responsibility, care, respect, knowledge of any other human being, the wish to further another’s life. Agape is love for all human beings; it is characterized by its very lack of exclusiveness.

“Agapé is not primarily a relationship to a specific person; it involves an attitude, an orientation of character which determines the relatedness of a person to the world as a whole, not toward one “object” of love. Agapé is an active power in us; a power which breaks through the walls which separate one from another, which unites us with others; agapé makes us overcome the sense of isolation and separateness, yet it permits us to be ourselves, to retain our integrity.

“There is no ‘division of labor’ between agapé for one’s own and agapé for strangers.

“If I truly share agapé with one person, I’m open to agapé with all persons, I have agapé with the world, I’m open to agapé with life. If I can say to somebody else, “I share agapé with you,” I must be able to say, “I share agapé with you in everybody, I share agapé through you to the world, I share agapé in you also myself.” 

“Those who are seriously concerned with agapé as the only rational answer to the problem of human existence must arrive at the conclusion that important and radical changes in our social structure are necessary.  To have faith in the possibility of agapé as a social and not only exceptional-individual phenomenon, is a rational faith based on the insight into the very human nature.”

Dr. Fromm’s insights thus fit in with the other insights about agapé that I’ve explored throughout the postings of this blog. In this blog I’ve tried to show what Dr. Fromm meant about “the only rational answer to the problem of human existence.”

Agapé and the spiritual development of humanity

 In one of last summer’s postings here, I reflected on what had been slowly formulating for me from inspirations I’d been receiving for 30 years about the purpose of human life. I spelled out my conclusion in this simplest statement possible: THE PURPOSE OF HUMAN LIFE IS SPIRITUAL DEVELOPMENT. 

Now when I look back on that, those words seem too simple and almost too vague. Now I see that a 2nd purpose statement needs to be added: The purpose of spiritual development is to work with divine energy and guidance to build enlightened communities to become the self-awareness of evolution. And that’s where my understanding about agapé fits in: the primary of many purposes of agapé is the power to produce collective spiritual development.

So that gives us the organizing principle for humanity’s next stage in evolution. The main inspiration I’ve received over the years had to do with the crucial role of agapé in humanity’s growth. So I can summarize into 2 functions the spiritual power of agapé within every human: 

1. to bring humans into relation with divine Presence for guidance, and 
2. to facilitate creative relations with All that Is.    

During the last 40 years, I’ve concentrated my intellectual research about agapé on many studies of 1 Corinthians 13, and I’ve come to several conclusions about what was going on in those extremely important verses. The first conclusion came because of the King James Version translation: those verses were about agapé not about love, which was evidenced by the translation of ‘agape’ as ‘charity.’ Obviously, simple human love didn’t need to be explained, but spiritually powerful agapé did need to be explained.

Here is a summary of the strangeness of agapé as given in the 3-verse introduction: agapé is absolutely necessary for any spiritual meaning; for without living by the power of agapé, any attempt at spiritual understanding amounts to nothing — not spiritual experience, not ecstatic revelation, and not supernatural phenomena. Everything is meant to depend on agapé. It is simply that powerful. And so I add this interpretation: any attempt to weaken the power of agapé leads to nothing.

My research into the meaning of the Greek words used to describe agapé has led me to see the creative power of agapé as a way to overcome the negative fear-based process of trying to develop an ego-identity. Trying to build a defensive, fear-based personal identity leads to nothing.

But unfortunately, humanity’s spiritual development has been held back for thousands of years by societies built upon ego-identifying instead of agapé-identifying. Such societies have caused vast numbers of people to ignore their agapé power when building an identity. So the melancholy of human existence comes from not realizing agapé power as the basis of each person’s identity, but instead trying to build an identity from an ego.

Agapé is crucial for creatively and spiritually connecting each person with all of the human race. That importance comes from realizing that we are all in this together, and so we can help each other’s spiritual development; in fact, we need each other for spiritual development. That’s why I claim that the way agapé works, it not only draws each person into direct connection with spiritual Reality, but also develops throughout the human race the capacity to expand the awareness of Divine Presence.

And that’s why agapé is the key. It is the spiritual power that is creative in the process of spiritual development. It is the spiritual power that draws people together to help in all that needs helping. It is the motivational power that creates the ‘loving’ in loving community. It is the inspirational power that creates in people the awareness that we need loving, sustaining, supportive community. So such is not only the basis of the most profound, creative relationships while also the basis of individual spiritual growth and the spiritual development of the human race. 

Agapé power is a mystery for most people

In looking back over the 9 years of this blog’s development, I ask: why did I name it “The Mystery of Agapé Power”; and then, what have I uncovered about agapé being a mystery to too many in the modern world?

Even before I started this blog I spent many years trying to come to terms with the mystery of why agapé had been so important to the first Christians, and yet almost unknown today. What caused modern Christians to think that agapé had diminished in importance? Finally, to get beyond mere intellectualizing, I took my exploration of agapé into my morning meditation. 

For a couple of years, I started morning prayer time by focusing on my developing awareness of the spiritual meaning of Romans 5:5 (using my own translation -- “God’s agapé has been poured into the center of our being through the Holy Spirit.”) I opened myself up to receive a sense of the spiritual flowing of the agapé of God. In that way I grew to realize agapé as spiritual power, and I became convinced that it was in every person’s heart-center (and not confined to people of any particular religion).

Then one winter morning while meditating out in a park, during such a practice with the power of agapé, I had an intense Spirit-filled experience. Although it’s a little difficult putting into words, the best I can do is say that I “sensed” agapé as “access.” For 2 days after that original experience, I explored in deep meditation what it meant to have “agapé as access.” On that 2nd day I “sensed” that agapé had brought me access to spiritual “manifestation” of God’s Presence. The word “manifest” actually appeared in my awareness.

Then the next day, I sensed that I was being led to my book shelf, to a book that I hadn’t read in 4 years. That book was Love, Power, and Justice by the existentialist theologian Paul Tillich; I opened the book and on pg. 33 found this: 

“… agapé enters from another dimension into the whole of life and into all qualities of love. One could call agapé the depth of love or love in relation to the ground of life. One could say that in agapé ultimate reality manifests itself and transforms life and love.”

Reading the word “manifests” had a powerful impact on me! When I saw the way he connected agape and divine manifestation -- used in the same way that it had come to me in prayer -- I was convinced that a breakthrough had come to me. In the weeks that followed, I became increasingly aware of the importance of this — not only to my morning prayers but to the relationships of my life. Finally as Jan. began, I decided to start this blog dedicated to exploring agapé as a spiritual power that God has given to all people as our access to the manifested divine Presence.

That last sentence has become for me a verbal ‘touchstone.’ Because I believe that the Divine Reality is so far beyond the awareness of humans (no matter how much of a spiritual genius a particular human could be), we need a way of access that can only come divinely. That is, unless divine manifestation develops in some way to us, we have no spiritual awareness. But even at that, we still have to become open to that awareness in order to receive that experience. So then we need some way to access that spiritual manifestation. That’s how I came to understand how Paul’s message to the Romans had meaning for my life. I came to the awareness that agapé is God’s action. 

But then this thought came to me: what if …

... Agapé is God’s primary action for each person’s life?

What could that mean? What would the implications then be for all those other theories about God’s action?

That question sent my memory to 1 John 4:6-8 -- “This is how we recognize the Spirit of truth and the spirit of error. Dear friends, let’s agapao each other, because agapé is from God, and everyone who shares in agapé is born from God and knows God. The person who doesn’t agapao does not know God, because God is agapé.”

And people have been struggling ever since that amazing revelation — to come to terms with what that means for our very survival. I think it means everything! The very survival of the human race depends on coming to terms with agapé as God’s primary action in persons’ lives. 

Agapé in the process of spiritual development

In the 4 months since I posted comments while reading Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens, I’ve been reading his follow-up book, Homo Deus. Again I’ll only comment here about his reflections on the 7,000-year religious development of homo sapiens. 

Harari had an intriguing idea about the strange religious development called polytheism. He speculated that it began as an attempt to deal with the massive cultural shock caused by the Agricultural Revolution. He claimed that polytheist religions were an “agricultural enterprise.” What he couldn’t explain, however, was why it happened the way it did. He merely pointed out that the various practices of polytheism seemed to help large numbers of humans deal with the vast disruptions when agriculture and animal domestication changed everything. 

There seemed to have been a profound reluctance to face what they were doing during the growing change from hunter/gatherers to agriculturalists/domesticators. During that vast disruption in the explosively expanding populations, people were reluctant to admit that there was something terribly wrong with those vast disruptions caused by the development of agriculture and animal domestication. One of the profound disruptions caused most humans to start believing they were separate from the rest of the natural world. So they needed to justify that strange change in basic belief. That justification process produced the many forms of polytheist religions. 

BUT… WHY did it happen? What was there about polytheist beliefs that made them change from animistic beliefs? Why did the belief in being separate seem so satisfying to those rapidly expanding populations?

Even though I agree with his speculation, in my attempt to fill in the gaps of Harari’s theory, I have come up with the idea that there was another form of theology that was developing at the same time and was extremely different than polytheism. Harari and most other historians seem incapable of even admitting the existence of that alternative theology. 

For lack of a better name, let’s call the alternative “mysticism.” That name seems to fit because the people who formulated that alternative are called “mystics,” or as Albert Einstein called them, “spiritual geniuses.” During the centuries of the last 7,000 years there have been many mystics who were trying to warn people of the dangers of polytheism, but there was so much resistance against them that very few ever became named in historical records. And the warnings of those who have been named were so threatening to the dominant polytheists that the warnings were not only ignored but were actually warped into the polytheistic religions. But I would record in the list of those named mystics such names as Abraham, Moses, Buddha, Loa-Tzu, the Hebrew prophets (especially Elijah, Jeremiah, and Isaiah), Jesus, Muhammad, Harith al-Muhasihi and other Sufi leaders. Just to name a few.

So my conclusion from all that history is the warning that the spiritual development of the human race was hindered by the production of polytheistic religions. I think human history would have turned out to be very less destructive if the general spiritual development would have been from animism to mysticism; instead of from animism to polytheism. The evidence of that conclusion is shown by the many small pockets of mysticism that were able to escape the warping and destruction of polytheistic forces. And so I join with the many people today who are trying to show that the way out of the massive problems of the modern world is through turning to mysticism.

Agape as the foundation of the creative process

 I found a copy of the old Unity Church book Life is for Loving by Eric Butterworth. In it Butterworth reflected on the problem of various English uses of ‘love.’ For example, he wrote: “There is no word in the language that is used with more meanings than love, and most of them are unconsciously insincere in that they hide the true underlying motives and feelings. Perhaps no other word in the Western world has been so abused as ‘love.’” And “we have so many erroneous thoughts about love.” 

So once again I considered that spiritual understandings would be helped by replacing ‘love’ with ‘agape.’ For example, “Love is the action of a totally transcendent power and process within you” is changed to “Agape is the action of a totally transcendent power and process within you.” Then I did that with the following quotes from his book.

The word ‘charity’ comes from the Latin word ‘caritas,’ [which was a translation of the Greek word ‘agape’]. But as the word is used in our times, it has come to be almost completely divorced from the [spiritual] idea of agape. The emphasis is upon materiality.

Agape begins in a Cosmic Source, flows out through you, and goes on without end.

Agape is an attribute of Divine Mind, the idea and force of universal unity. It is the power that unites and binds in divine harmony the universe and everything in it — including you and me. Thus by principle we are bound in oneness with the Allness of Agape. 

Agape is the foundation of the creative process, the root of the reality of the universe, and the very nature of the Infinite Power and Presence we call God. All things begin with agape.

Intuitively we know that agape is an inner power and not an object, and that our need is to share agape and not just to find someone to love us. Within every person is a hunger and thirst to be agape, to express agape, to let the Infinite Power of Agape flow through us.

God is agape in us. Each of us is the very activity of agape. We have all the agape we need to share agape with everyone and everything, for everyone and everything are also created in and of agape.

Agape is not a commodity to give, but a process through which you touch and express your own deeper nature. Agape, then, is not the plaything of the emotions or senses, but the action of divine law.

Agape is the reality of our total self which we can frustrate or express.

We experience the ISness of God’s agape only to the degree that we let this agape process move through us in our attitudes, our manners, and our actions.

The principle of agape is dynamic. Certainly agape can change the world and it can change you. But it can only do so if you take the principle into the laboratory and roll up your sleeves.

Let us meditate long on the realization that we are created in and of agape, that agape is the one reality of our life, and that there is always enough agape to go around — if we are willing to turn it on by being loving.

I affirm as my own celebration of life: I am a channel for the expression of the Infinite Agape of God.

We have grown up thinking that agape is something that comes to us and from us, rather than that which flows through us from an inward source that is inexhaustible.

The good news of all the great mystic teachers of the ages is that there is a unity of life in which all persons are created in and of agape, all are immersed in the same dynamic flow of infinite agape.

When you stop dealing with things at the level of the human and begin letting the divine of you express through the transcendence of agape which has always been the reality of you, suddenly you will have the whole universe on your side.

Turn your thoughts within and feel the warmth and support of this eternal fountain of agape in which you live and have being. You are in agape; no matter what the conditions of your environment.

If you prepare yourself through deep and intensive meditation upon the reality of your own oneness in the Allness of agape, this will be a guiding and protecting presence to you in all your ways.

When we realize our unity with God, we feel a flow of agape, and a sense of oneness with all persons. It is like going down into a well within ourselves and coming to a deep underground stream, immersing ourselves in that stream and then discovering that the same stream is within every person and at the heart of him he too is immersed in ti with us. This is what is meant by being in agape with all persons. This oneness is agape in action.

Take time to practice the presence of God, the activity of agape. Know that you are in agape wherever you are, and the agape is in you as an attracting, healing, harmonizing, and totally fulfilling power.

Agape is an energy force with fantastic possibilities for your life; but it is only in the depth of your inmost self. When you find and experience it at the depth of you, your whole consciousness will be centered in agape. You will easily become a channel for unrestricted agape to flow through, and an instrument for the creative processor the infinite to do its wonderful work under the warming, healing, and prospering influence of that agape.

There is a radiance of this agape that is a very real harmonizing factor in the atmosphere.

Agape is or can be a creative force at the root of all things. We need to determine that, no matter what the day brings, we will identify with agape.

Agape is the action of divine law, an energy force that flows through us, but which begins in the Infinite Creative Source and has no end. 

Meditation is not a mental practice, but an awareness that takes place in the heart. It is essentially an experience in and of agape. It is an awakening and unfolding of our true nature — by agape.

Keep in mind that this agape is not something that comes from you, something that is generated in you and by you. It is an energy force flowing through you from the Cosmic Center within you, and touching and igniting that same energy force within the object or person.

Agape is the nature of the Presence of God and of you in whom it is present.

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.