Agape: The Corinthian Hymn of Love

 

First Corinthians. the longest epistle reliably attributed to the Apostle Paul, is one of the most influential and controversial. It is a response to church politics in an ancient Greek city, with authoritarian posturing in a male-supremacist, slaveholding culture. Paul and the Corinthians took for granted values most Americans reject, social structures resembling today's conservative Islam. 

For long stretches, the epistle bogs down in its historical limitations. In a passages loved by antebellum planters, Paul tells slaves to accept "the life that the Lord has assigned" (7:17), to remain chattel and make the best of it (7:21). Chapter 11 obsesses over men's and women's haircuts and headgear, as if the scarfs and coiffures of 1st-century Greece were sacramental. Even the angels are fashionistas (11:10). Paul explicitly assumes, like Greek philosophers such as Plato, that women are misshapen men, inferior copies of men just as men are of God (11:11). Lacking penises, they must keep silent in church. If they have questions, let them ask their husbands at home (14:33), never mind that they might be married to pagans, an arrangement Paul sanctions (7:13). 

It's best, I think, to bracket off Paul's misogyny as an anachronism. If Victorian preacher told women to wear floor-length skirts because bare ankles distract men in church, his rule would be silly today.

In spite of these limitations, Chapter 13, shorter than any of the others, achieves provocative beauty matching the Sermon on the Mount and the best of the Psalms:

         If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, 

         but have not love,

        I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.

        If I have prophetic powers, 

        understand all mysteries and knowledge,

        and have faith to remove mountains

        but have not love, 

        I am nothing.

        If I give away all I have 

        and deliver up my body to be burned 

        but have not love, 

        I gain nothing.

        Love is patient and kind; 

        love does not envy or boast; 

        it is not arrogant or rude. 

        It does not insist on its own way; 

        it is not irritable or resentful; 

        it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, 

        but rejoices with the truth.

        Love bears all things, believes all things, 

        hopes all things, endures all things.

        Love never ends.

These verses are often read at weddings, but that obscures their meaning. The "love" they celebrate has little to do with honeymoons, beauty, or desire. Ancient Greek famously had several words translated love in English. The one here is agape, which refers to unconditional, unselfish love, the kind that God is said to have for his creation, that parents sometimes have for children, and that all of us should have (but seldom do) for our neighbors. When the eucharist is called a "love feast" and "God is love," agape is the word. Agape is love of even the unlovely for its mere existence, love of Being.

A more common meaning of love in English is the one implied by love song and falling in love. The Greeks called this eros. Eros is erotic. It is attraction to a "beautiful" person, even if beauty is in the eye of a lustful beholder. Of course, Plato added "platonic" love of beauty and beautiful things without needing to possess them. Eros, love of the lovely, is a good. Without it, life would be drab and probably die out. In most weddings where 1 Corinthians 13 is read, eros is in the foreground. With luck, agape will emerge if the marriage lasts, but the business at hand is eros. There is a time and place for everything, and to associate Corinthians 13 with romanic love is mistranslate.

The Hymn to Agape is not a descriptive definition of agape, but a stipulative one, telling not what the word means, but what it ought to mean. It's an argument in the form of a definition. A description would record how people really act in a state they call agape, but (assuming he wrote the hymn) Paul describes how they should act. He constructs true agape seldom found in the world, much as a professor might describe a true student as one who studied eight hours per day. Paul's agape is not a common destination but a distant goal.

The human impossibility of sustaining agape--never envying, never boasting, never losing losing patience, never resenting, and so forth--makes it a theological virtue along with faith and hope, which are realized only in God. But it is a useful goal. The world would all be better place if more of us came closer to it.

Perfect love is, of course, an excellent thing for newlyweds, like everyone else, to aspire to, and it may be almost realized in old married couples who take care of each other, but weddings aren't ideal occasions for Paul's hymn. Love that expects nothing in return is most desperately needed at political rallies. Any political decision should begin with an opening of hearts to agape, to love of neighbor.