World of Love Ses11- Love in the Age of the Spirit

... the love with which we love should be so pure, so simple, so detached that it inclines neither to myself nor to my friend nor to anything else next to it. The teachers say that one can name no good work as a good work and no virtue as a virtue unless it has taken place in love. ... How has God loved us? He loved us when we did not yet exist and when we were his enemies. So great a need had God for our friendship that he could not wait until we asked him. ... It should be an equally serious matter with us to pray for those who do us harm. Why? So that we might fulfill God's will, that we should not wait until someone asks us. ... So unitary should our love be, for love will never be anywhere else than there where equality and unity are. Between a master and a servant there is no peace because there is no real equality. ... when God is in me and I am in God, then I am not less and God is not higher. -Meister Eckhardt ¹

Agape conquers the ambiguities of love, spiritual power conquers the ambiguities of power, grace conquers the ambiguities of justice. - Paul Tillich ²

I have been struggling with the meaning of love and loves since fifty years ago as a sophmore in college I was reading a sermon by the Unitarian preacher, Jefferson, on love. I arrived then at the dilemma of a lifetime: If I do not love others (and I didn't think I did) then how can I MAKE myself love?

When we struggle with the meaning of love we are pushed to the center of the most important issues facing humanity. Bound up in the question of the relation of the divine love (agape) to the various forms of needy human loves (eros) are the most important questions of life: How does God's love come to us and how does it relate to our flawed forms of love? What is worth loving ultimately? What is healthy love, wholistic love, and how does one become able to give and receive it?

In session 7, we looked at a picture of the highest. One psychological effect of such wholistic being, we saw, is the knitting up into oneness of the fragmenting polarities of life:

Meister Eckhardt

Read again the quotes above from a sermon of 14th century mystic, theologian and preacher, Meister Eckhardt. It would be hard to find a better definition within two pages of agape.

Agape is a love which originates with God's overflow of creativity and desire for companionship in creative play. It is a love poured out before we existed and which continues to be poured out in spite of our unworthiness. It is a love which demands of us the same unconditional giving, even to the extent of requiring that we seek out, forgive and love our enemies.

It is, moreover, a love which is based upon equality with all others and upon unity with them, an equality and unity, Eckhardt suggests, which anticipates and is necessary to our equality and unity with God. It is, moreover, an equality and unity symbolized by the relationship in the ideal marriage, within which two people become one and yet at the same time are enabled to preserve all the richness and uniqueness of their individuality: "A wife and a husband are not alike, but in love they are equal."

He goes on to say that while they are united to one another, their unique centeredness is the power that prevents the being of one becoming lost in the other. ⁴

It is unfortunate that the translator of Eckhardt used the word "need" to describe God's desire for us and our love. Need indicates a lack, while God's love is a desire arising out of the divine inner nature as overflowing, loving creativity. This is a far cry from need as we use the word.

What is necessary for us to become such a being that we can stand on some basis of equality with God? Eckhardt implies that God's own grace confers such power of being. Through it we come to possess a new and powerful inner being able to knit up all four dimensions of the polarities which split us into pieces and defeat all our good intentions.

As the polarities are transcended and united in a new and higher kind of being, we become so strong that we can stand alone, as God does. We are so strong that we can give ourselves over to other people in empathy and compassionate caring, as God does, and not lose be submerged in them. We are so strong that we can embrace all the world's people and the cosmos in a circle of concern, as God does, without flying apart. And finally, we are so strong that we are able to be centered and unified within, as God is, without losing either our capacity to embrace the universe or to enter into costly and delightful communion with individuals.

Again, to become like God does not mean that we have all knowledge and power. It means we become the wholistic pattern of the Divine One. We do not become God; we become like God in the power that symmetry brings to our inner being. It is like the strength of a geodesic dome, where every strut of the structure is supported in place by all the others.

This does not come about by our striving but by the gift of God through other people.

Love and Power

Note that all four of the characteristics of the healthy self described above are forms of power. The ability to love rests on the possession of what is often called power of being. This is power simultaneously in all the four dimensions of our basic polarities.

The corollary is also true. All of the evil in us, characterized by envy, hate, lust, anxiety, and the like, arises from a lack of such power of being.

Agape is a Kind of Being

Agape is not a feeling, though feeling is involved. It is not a response to the command to love, an act of will, though we are commanded to do our best to act toward others and ourselves in terms of agape. Agape is a kind of being; it is someone we become; it is an ontological reality. It can spring only from the divine root. Jesus asks if figs can come from thistles, and at another point whether good fruit can come from an evil tree. In the Gospel of John, he suggests that only if we abide in him, in God through him, do we bear fruit. Only then are we attached to the root containing the healthy sap. Only then are we suckling at the divine breast. These are passages which underline the ontological nature of the divine love; it appears where it becomes incarnate in a self or self-system, or it does not appear at all.

In short, this kind of love is incarnate purely in our god-self; it does not appear in any of the other self-systems. When it appears in our immature lives it is by a momentary breakthrough out of the god-self.

So many of our good deeds are done from motives other than agape: to fend off punishment, as a child does at Kohlberg's stage 1; to get praise, as child does at stages 2 and 3; to gain approval or praise from people in authority, as stage 4 people do all the time; or as stage 4 or 5 people do we may perform a good deed because we think we ought to.

All of these fall under Paul's starkly realistic critique: Even if we should give our bodies to be burned and have not agape we are nothing. ⁶

The motive force for all of these good deeds performed at the lower stages is need in some form. Agape, on the other hand, is an overflow out of abundant power, adequacy. Acts arising from need, to fill some emptiness, to assuage our anxiety, are not from agape; they do not arise from "that of God in us."
These needy acts arise from a form of love called eros.

Agape and Eros

In session 7 we've already looked once at this distinction between eros and agape, noting that Paul Tillich listed four kinds of love, from the highest to the lowest:

-agape (God's kind of love)
-philia (love of friends)
-eros (upward striving for the reunification of what is separated)
-epithymia (lust)⁷

Tillich taught that these loves are more or less on a continuum from lowest to highest. Others, notably Anders Nyren and Karl Barth, insisted that there is a huge gulf between God's love and all human forms of love.

Eros received its classic definition in Plato, where it described the ascent of the soul, drawn like a magnet toward reunification with Absolute Being. For the Neoplatonists, who influenced much subsequent theology, this means an inner drive for reunification with God.

There is another use of eros, different from this, which must be mentioned. Eros is seen as a rich, creative, sensuous and interpersonal affective power. In contrast, agape is portrayed as a rather austere, objective and inhuman kind of feeling and action. This is not the distinction I am making.

Other writers. like Matthew Fox, celebrate eros and the erotic in opposition to a kind of Christian faith which depreciates the body, the sensuous, sexual and the aesthetic. I am in agreement with Fox on this. But I am making a different distinction, that of need love verses overflow love. Within the wholeness of agape nothing sensuous or erotic is lost. If anything, there is more of the sensuous, sexual and aesthetic in people controlled by agape, and certainly such experiences are enjoyed more to the extent such personality implies freedom from guilt, shame and anxiety.

Nygren and Barth believed that the kind of human striving implied in eros is futile because it cannot reach God. Only God's down-reaching agape can liberate humanity from selfish self-seeking to a true new being in Christ. The fountain of inner longing for wholeness, purity and power of being rises up nobly but can't come close to heaven, they thought.

Nygren's classic definition of God's love was summed up this way by Daniel Day Williams:

Agape is the love of God coming down to sinful man. It is spontaneous, unmotivated, poured out upon man without regard to merit. Man has no worth which gives him a claim upon the love of God, either before it is given or afterward. Man is brought into fellowship with God, but this is not the fellowship as in the eros way of holy men with a God to whom their holiness makes them acceptable, but it is fellowship of a forgiving God with forgiven sinners. Agape is completely self-giving love. God has given himself in Christ and thus makes possible salvation which man cannot in any way attain for himself. ⁸

If God does it all, and there is nothing of God in humanity, then the gap can only be bridged in some arbitrary fashion which undercuts human free choice. There has to be more of a connection between God and humanity to begin with.

This, I suggest, is in that innermost temple of the spirit, the god-self. There is a healthy center in us which is capable of altruism, of genuinely unselfish caring.

Williams added:

(Nygren) assumes that love must be either purely egocentric or completely spontaneous and unmotivated, when actually all love does combine the desire of the self with the good of the other. ... I can feel my neighbor's feelings, identify with his good. Nygren overlooks the fact that the relationship between man and his neighbor and between man and God is fundamentally a social relationship in which the good of one actually does become the good of the other. ⁹

This understanding renders a great deal of the debate about agape and eros irrelevant. There is no masochistic self-sacrifice by the god-self, but a celebration and rejoicing in giving and receiving. One cannot distinguish between self-affirmation and self-giving when speaking of God's action or the emotional responses of the god-self. They are one and the same. An enlightened view, Williams suggests, sees that my good is also your good and that seeking the one I also seek the other. Giving and receiving are the breathing out and breathing in of the god-self. It is only in the fragmented life of the demonic self-systems that self-giving becomes self-destructive and self-affirmation is expressed in the form of selfishness.

Barth and Nygren were right that agape is qualitatively different, just as Maslow saw that D-love based on need is qualitatively different from B-love which arises out of fullness of inner power. But Barth and Nygren were wrong in thinking that agape only appears in God. By God's grace it flows also from the inner god-self when we are able to live in that wholistic self-system or draw upon it.

It is the wholistic power of agape which enables it to transcend, purify, and reunite all the lower, needful forms of love. It is agape which unifies the four dimensions of our two basic polarities of life. It is agape which draws up the lower forms of love into itself, harvests all their value and spits out their evil, just as each higher stage, when entered smoothly and fully, harvests all the value from the lower stages, taking it into itself and uniting it to the new in a higher synthesis.

I Corinthians 13

The word agape should always be loaded with its full ontological weight, as Paul did in I Corinthians 13. There he separated agape from all needy forms of love, and equated it with the inner reality and wholeness of the new being in Christ. When agape is defined only as self-giving and self-surrender (as Father D'Arcy tended to do in The Mind and Heart of Love) then it is again made half of a wholistic love. Self-giving is only one movement of agape. Without the other three forms of power indicated in the diagram above -- inner integrity, cosmic content and perspective, and assurance of individual uniqueness -- giving oneself to others becomes throwing oneself away, a nihilistic act of self-abandonment.

Agape and Stage Development

We can resolve the dilemma posed by Nygren and Tillich, if we draw upon the analysis of stage development and the qualities of love possible to the person at each stage. The child at stage 1 has a sheer need for power of being, which can be accurately described as lust. It is a desperate need, and deprivation of care and attention at this stage leads to alienation from self and other, and to inner fragmentation from which evil of all sorts springs.

At stage 3, the kind of relationship Tillich calls philia begins to enter the picture more strongly. Friendships in which there is some genuine give and take become the source of a new kind of empathy. This is the beginning of compassion, which is, in turn, the seed of agape.

At stages 4 and 5 more of the level of love Tillich called eros in its classic meaning arrives. The personality, with its now broader boundaries and more diverse interests and concerns, finds itself pulled upward by the attraction of the Platonic trilogy of truth, good and beauty.

Knowledge, achievement, aesthetic creation and enjoyment, service to others -- all of these express more than just narrow self-seeking. They begin to reflect the creative drive of God. Insofar as they arise from needy eros they reveal a still strangulated form of creativity and enjoyment. But this is an important and necessary stage on the way.

Perhaps the stage 4 kind of eros, should be called "objectifying eros." This is the stage at life where the call of achievement in job and the effort to gain acceptance in the larger society modify and counterpoint the stage 3 intensity of those all-absorbing interpersonal relationships with the other sex. It creates in us a necessary greater objectivity in relationships.

This is good and necessary but also bad. We are driven still by needy love, so further fragmentation takes place. We are lonely and frightened at this transition point, so we are tempted to withdraw from close human relationships and/or to use people for our needy objectives rather than to love them maturely.

If we could move to each higher Kohlberg stage smoothly, enter them fully and bring up with us and integrate all the positive elements of the lower stages, then the demonic self-systems would not be formed. All the power would go directly to the inner wholistic core. We would see all the four dimensions of our polarities simultaneously strengthened.

Is Altruism Possible?

I will anticipate an outcry of protest. Is it never possible for a child to act selflessly, to give something or engage in an act of helpfulness without its being merely from the motive force of epythemia (lust for power of being), eros or philia?

Robert Coles, the Yale psychologist, wrote of Ruby Bridges, the six year old black girl who desegregated the Little Rock schools back in the mid-fifties. She bravely faced the obscenities and threats of violence of white adults. She said publicly, on several occasions, that she forgave her tormentors, and expressed love for them. How, asks Coles, can Kohlberg be right, that such mature morality is possible only to highly developed adults, when we see it quite clearly here? ¹⁰

There are three points to the answer to this; the second is the more important to our argument here:

1. Kohlberg made clear that, at various levels of development, we may steal or not steal, profess love of enemies or hatred toward them. The indication of stage level comes with the uncovering and analysis of the reason why we spoke or acted in one way or the other.

One of the commonest phenomena at the girl's age is what I call the China doll syndrome. A little girl was told that the children of China need toys and she gave her dearest dolls in what appeared a burst of sincere generosity and love. But we note that the out-pouring of attention, praise and affection from her parents and others are a payment of enormously greater value to her than the dolls she sacrificed.

Similarly, the little girl in Little Rock saw the example of her parents who forgave their persecutors and interpreted it in terms of Jesus' command to love one's enemies. She was told this is the way one should behave. She conformed to her parents' expectations and received their praise, along with the recognition and admiration of many others. It does not take a stage 6 orientation to do what she did. This does not at all suggest that she was not an unusually spunky kid who acted with enormous courage.

2. The second answer is the one important at this point to the argument of this session: Agape is present with some power in all of us from the earliest days.

Every decision of our will and every act we perform has a complex cord of motivation. In any such act, several of our demonic self-systems may rally to support out of quite different motivations. If it is a decision or act compatible with agape, then the god-self also supports the cause with its own kind of motivation. Motivation is like a cord woven of separate strands. One of the strands, to use poetic license, is agape red. It may be thin, but it is there. And it is often the extra small effect of the god-self which pulls us beyond our limits to transcend our ordinary behavior in selfless out-pourings as did the girl in Little Rock.

3. There is a third point mentioned several times elsewhere which I hope does not get lost. All of us are a community of people inside and also in relationships where our self-systems overlap with others in real time. When the little girl acted so courageously she was drawing directly on the courage and love of the adults around her, like a light bulb plugged into a socket.

There is a gap between all the forms of eros and agape, the gap between need and overflow. Poetically speaking, it is the unbridgeable gulf between heaven and hell.

The Push of Eros and the Pull of Agape

Maslow does not draw a clear line between immaturity which is Deprivational-love and the maturity which is Being-love, but there is a crossing point.

The actual occupation of this promised land begins to occur at the passage into stage 6, when love becomes universal, and into stage 7, as death is overcome.

But, also, the god-gestalt of inner unity, expansion, others concern, and power to stand alone, is with us in embryonic form from the beginning, begotten in us by the graceful words and caresses of those around us, as well as by the awesome starry heavens above and the laughter and play of children.

When Jesus offered the woman at the well what she thought was freedom from drawing water, she jumped at the idea. There can be, Jesus was rather suggesting, a spring of water of life welling up within. This is the difference between God's love and the truncated forms of human love. The one is like an artesian well, springing up within in abundance, inexhaustible. The other is like a broken cistern which has to be filled continually, from which we draw, laboriously, subtly poisoned water.

With the help of developmental stage theory, and with a stop along the way at Abraham Maslow, we now see more clearly the answer to our two basic questions: what it means to be like God and what it means to integrate at stages 6-7.

It means the knitting up of the basic polarities of life into a healthy wholeness which overcomes evil and death. It delivers us into loving communion with our own selves, with God and with others through the unifying power of the four-walled god-self.

Needy eros pushes us from behind and over-flowing agape draws from within and beyond us. Thus we are pushed and pulled godward.

The hungers of need love within us fuel our booster rockets, lifting us away from a stage of development to seek another. With full integration at stage 7, we drop our last booster rocket and float free of need drives. We then are drawn only by the pull of the gravity of God's love within us.

As Echkardt so well intuited, the pull of gravity exercised by agape is not up or down but inward. It draws us constantly toward our wholistic center which is also toward God. Agape never makes us feel like we are falling into darkness. Rather we sense we are falling into light, warmth and loving acceptance.

One final but important footnote: Needs cannot be met; hungers of the lesser loves cannot be filled. Deficiencies in caresses, security, trust, caring, affirmation missed in the past are forever lost and cannot be replaced. The demonic self-systems cannot be healed and made whole; they can only be put to death. When new caring and love come into our lives what happens is rather that the god-self at the center is progressively strengthened and its wholistic gestalt filled in, so that the demonic self-systems crouching elsewhere in the brain are enfeebled and cast gradually into the outer darkness.

Questions for Thought

1. Consider or discuss: How do the four levels of love according to Tillich correspond to the six stages of Kohlberg.? You might want to refer again to the table in session 4.

2. We use the word love of: a mate, God, pizza, a dog and our home town? Can the word be salvaged?

Contact the author at: vjross22@swbell.net

1. From the sermon, "Our Divinity and God's Divinity: To Be God is to Give Birth," Breakthrough: Meister Eckhardt's Creation Spirituality in New Translation, Introduction and Commentaries by Matthew Fox, Doubleday & Company, Inc., Garden City, NY, 1980, pages 314, 315
2. Love, Power and Justice, Oxford University Press, NY, London, 1952, page 121
3. There are many ways of describing these polarities and this pattern is not exhaustive or exclusively correct. Paul Tillich, for instance in the Volume I of his Systematic Theology builds his analysis of the human situation around three polarities:
-Individuation and Participation
-Dynamics and Form
-Freedom and Destiny
This first dichotomy is essentially the same as my own Freedom vs. Relatedness.
The dichotomy of Dynamics vs. Form is the question of what remains the same and what changes and how we preserve our inner unity through change over our whole lives. This is dealt with in my contrast of Expansion (inclusiveness) vs. Integrity (inner unity). Expansion, in the context of Kohlberg's stages, involves the taking in, repeatedly, of threatening non-being both from within and outside the self. Dynamics and Form are considered throughout at every point in which we talk about dying to one stage and being reborn at another.
The question of Freedom vs. Destiny is the issue of the extent to which we are free to act as opposed to the ways in which our lives are determined by internal and external powers over which we do not have direct, effective control. This, again, appears in my system in the dichotomy between the demonic self-systems, which are driven and determined by need, and the god-self, which is uniquely free to create and to act de novo and ex nihilo.
4. Op. cit., page 315
5. Op. cit., page 315
6. I Corinthian 13
7. Love, Power and Justice., op. cit., pages 30ff.
8. God's Grace and Man's Hope, Harper and Brothers Publishers, NY, 1949
9. Ibid, pages 71-72
10. Robert Coles, The Moral Life of Children, Atlantic Monthly Press, 1986, pages 26,27

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