Yeshua's Primary Question - Part 4

Honing in on this koan of "What love is this?", the presupposition of definition raises its head. How, exactly, do we define love? And therein lies the rub. As many writers have noted, English is a very impoverished language when it comes to love. I can just as easily say "I love coffee" as I can say "I love my family". While the surrounding context gives a nuanced meaning, our vague and over-exercised usage of the phrase reflects our equally clumsy handling of the full spectrum of this word's definitions. Moreover, all Wisdom traditions have recognized various levels of maturity and degrees of love's ripening. The Greek language of the Christian canonical texts renders four levels of love (agape, philia, storge, and eros) with agape being the highest and most sublime. This issue over the hierarchical use of love was even a struggle for the early disciples. In John 21:15ff, Jesus asks Peter the primary question "...do you love me more than these?". Jesus' question uses the Greek agapas, while Peter responds in the form philo. Jesus puts forth the same question a second time, using the same form agapas, and Peter once again responds with philo. On the third round of this exchange, Jesus uses the same form phileis, as if to concede to the limited capacity of Peter.

This cataloguing of love can be quite ornate and complex, with more than the four forms described above. However, a long standing trend in the West has been to separate love into two main camps: the saintly (if not sterile) agape and the "taint-ly" lesser forms of self directed/self absorbed love. Yet, I wonder if this reductionist division has been more hurtful than helpful. Certainly, most of humanity's passions and desires are self-directed, mercenary, and operate more from our reptilian brainstem than not. Even under the guise of religious pursuits, the modus operandi still remains what Richard Smoley in his recent book Conscious Love calls transactional love, a form of love that is really just actuarial bookkeeping that ensures my accounts receivable are in good stead be they here on Earth or in some mythical bank vault called Heaven.

Yet to decry all worldly endeavors as vain and evil not only smacks of Gnosticism but undermines the Semitic traditions at their foundation. The immanence of spirit is as equal a component as it the transcendent. To opt out of the incarnation, leaves our spirituality thread bare and less human rather than more. Embodied love without the body is no love at all. Moreover, this isolated transcendent stance of agape-alone creates a performative contradiction. If God/Agape alone is real, does not my shouting down of these "lesser loves" in fact reify my belief in them? My resistance to the false self perpetuates its existence (at least in my own mind) no matter how loudly I proclaim its illusory nature. Both Jacob Needleman in his The Wisdom of Love and Smoley argue that this conscious, intentional, sustained Love (i.e. agape) "is most emphatically not a wholesale rejection of the love of the world". In fact, it is quite the opposite (For God did so love the world...). This higher love is really only made manifest in the midst of our quid pro quo paradigms, as it infuses and permeates the messy multiplicity of our ordinary existences, just as Jesus described the Kingdom of God being like leaven hidden in the measures of meal (Luke 13:21). In short, the "give me agape or give me death" stance only worsens the divide between spirit and body and does not bring forth the Good News.