It's like those French have a different word for everything!
Steve Martin
Everyone whose Christian education goes beyond fourth-grade Sunday School classes understands that the word "love" in English translations of the New Testament is the translation of three different words in Greek - eros, philia, and agape. For years we have been subject to ruminations on the distinctions among these three words, usually ending with the insistence that agape, a selfless concern for others, is the true understanding of "love" when used in a Christian context.
I am going to go out on a limb today and offer a different take. Before getting to that conclusion, however, I want to take a couple steps backwards and talk about language. The starting point here, in case you're interested, is Richard Rorty's essay, "Texts and Lumps", which is included in his Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth: Collected Papers, Vol. 1 published by Cambridge University Press in 1991. In that essay, Rorty compares the way critics view a text and scientists view a lump of material they are analyzing. Rather than consider their methods as being wholly distinct and incompatible, Rorty notes that, in reality, scientists and textual critics go about their tasks in remarkably similar ways. They have something in front of them they are attempting to understand. They have tools they use for the job; for critics they are rhetoric and grammar, deconstruction and historical criticism. For the scientists they are the spectrometer and SEM, litmus paper and dissection, what have you depending upon what type of lump might sit in front of them. For Rorty, the issue is not that the humanities and the sciences have different methods, or that their subject matter is so distinct as to make their methods incompatible. Rather, we have been led to believe that science deals in something called reality which is objectively verifiable (or falsifiable, depending upon which philosophy of science to which one adheres) while the humanities deal with matters that are purely subjective, interpretation being at the service of whatever whim the critic happens to have. These distinctions, once one considers how these very different tasks are actually done, disappear like summer fog once one considers that most basic tool - language.
For Rorty, language is nothing more than the sounds we make or the marks we make on paper (and, of course, a computer screen). After Darwin, to consider language as anything more than a purely contingent tool humans use to help them survive their environment is to get all airy, "theo-ontological" to use a favorite term of derision of his. I am going to depart from Rorty at this juncture; unlike Rorty, I would like to emphasize that languages are not only tools of individuals and groups. Precisely because they are such, they have histories; the meanings of words exist within complex histories of communication, each new use adding an incremental bit of meaning and understanding (as well as obfuscation and lack of clarity). For that reason, it is important, if we are going to consider "love" from a Christian perspective, that we are clear that it is not some thing that exists, but is, rather a way some human beings insist we are to live once we are grasped by that reality we call God.
Those folks who lived in the eastern Mediterranean in the first century CE would not have understood us should we suddenly find ourselves there and insisted that the words eros, agape, and philia were actually referring to an emotive and existential state we English-speakers call "love". Precisely because koine Greek - a kind of pidgin-Greek that was the lingua franca after Alexander's conquests of most of the Mediterranean basin three centuries before - has these three different words means nothing more or less than they served the useful purpose of describing three very different human phenomena. "Eros" referred not just to sexual love, but to that complex relating that human beings feel and act out toward one another; "intimacy" might be a far better way of understanding it than reducing it to its sexual component. "Philia", very often considered similar to "friendship", runs far deeper than our rather shallow understanding that word. Those who were joined in bonds of "philia" were very often just as close as those for whom the term "eros" might apply. "Agape", an altruistic, self-abnegating posture toward the world, in which one considers those around oneself of greater worth than oneself, worthy of sacrifice appears more often in the New Testament than any other term translated as love. Yet, it is the most difficult with which to come to terms.
Having made the distinctions among these three words a little more clear, we need to ask the following question: Are we best served, either out of a sense of tradition or common usage, by continuing to translate these very different words in to the English word "love"? Would it not, perhaps, be better to find different English cognates and set aside "love" altogether?
Part of the problem here is that the word "love" is one of the most equivocal words in the English language. I can say that I love my dog, my daughters, my wife, my parents and siblings, my job, and my favorite music and there would be no loss of understanding when others heard me so use that one word in this way. Yet, how strange is it that this one word serves such a multiplicity of purposes? It seems to me that, rather than the specificity of the ancient Greek differences expressed by the use of different words, English-users actually have a grasp of the range and depth of human emotion and the subtleties of the ways human beings relate to their environment that is represented by using the single word "love".
That being said, as we move from the koine-Greek of the New Testament with its different words to the lively world of English, I believe that rather than stop our considerations of "love" as a Christian virtue with the understanding of the distinctions among the various Greek words in question, we should take the next, quite clear, choice and insist that the equivocal nature of the English word "love" is a far better word to capture the fullness of love as the Bible intended. That is to say, when we consider, for example, that most famous passage on Christian love, the thirteenth chapter of St. Paul's epistle to the Corinthians, rather than insist that St. Paul is speaking here of only one way Christians should relate to one another (as evidenced by a close textual reading of the chapter in question), we should take the next step and talk about how love, in all its varieties and permutations, its differences and similarities in the objects toward which we use the word "love" are encompassed by Christian love as expressed by St. Paul.
Rather than denigrate the erotic - not so much the sexual per se but that intimacy between human beings that might best be expressed by the phrase "romantic love" - we should celebrate it as a necessary part of Christian love precisely because it captures part of that reality we celebrate, for example, in marriage: that two human beings may form bonds of intimacy that are stronger than the mere whims of emotion. Rather than insist that Christian love, in its most pure form, sets aside considerations of oneself as understood by the use of the term "agape", we should insist that the fullness of Christian love includes not only self-sacrifice, but that consideration of others expressed by "romantic love", the deep bonds of mutuality expressed in the deepest of friendships, and even that intimacy that finds expression in private between those for whom love is expressed physically.
We human beings were created as beings who love. When the first epistle of St. John says that "God is love", we should understand that predicate in its fullness. Medieval interpreters of the Song of Songs grasped then when they understood it as an allegory for the love God has for the Church. In its earthiness and celebration of human sensuality, we have the definitive statement of the power of human intimacy and its holiness in the eyes of God.
Rather than settle for a truncated, attenuated understanding of "love", we should take it in all its fullness as the English language permits and shout a very loud "Amen!" when we speak of Christian love. We are created to love in all its varieties by a good God and should not settle for anything less.
