Agape.

Published on Fri 10 March 2023 at 4:37am.

The anarchist principle of mutual aid does not demand this, but I live my life trying my absolute hardest to serve others. The principle is ex-catholic, I suppose, and I still have some hangups about self-sacrifice.

I say this with complete dispassion:

Part 1 - Agape

I was, until I read Camus and Sartre, a devout catholic.

I went to mass very frequently, and very enthusiastically announced to people that I was a catholic.

Then, being a very precocious child, I began being a very militant 1920's type humanist atheist.

It's not a very long leap between catholicism and secular humanism, but I find it to have been a beautiful one. I replaced my passionate belief in a transcendental, all-present entity with something else. That is to say, I did not form a covenant with some other metaphysical person, but that my worldview was transformed entirely.

I passionately hold to the moral goodness of a 'secular' kind of 'agape'. The meaning of 'agape' is this: 'love without an other'.

It is a completely different perspective to the current definition of love as 'eros', which, I think, we have capitalism to thank for.

'Eros' doesn't mean just mean ‘erotic’, it encompasses a much deeper and broader concept. It more broadly means 'the gratification of your your senses and your emotions', or, ‘gratification of the personal, individual self’.

Agape focuses on the will, and not on belief, or even any of your senses. Agape is, for me at least, the meaning of easter.

An example of agape would be the spontaneous desire to do the right thing, against all the costs. Say you would "take a bullet for someone" without thinking—that would be an example of agape. Rushing out into the street to help someone in a car accident? Again, I would classify that as agape.

The acts of agape could also extend to other, less radical and energetic examples: looking after someone sick for a long time, or studying hard because you absolutely love the work you are doing.

Part 2 - Agape and Jesus's Death

So, in my dim memory of the easter fable—that's how I regard it anyway—Jesus died on Friday, and then on the third day he rose again, and was walking around as if he was a spirit.

As a kid I used to think:

Fuck yeah, he can do anything! Like turn water into wine, fucken heal sick people, walk on water, and he gets to live again!1

But now I'm not interested in that sort of Dragonball Z attitude to Jesus.

Jesus's death separated the wheat from the chaff. It challenged people's choice to live the way of agape. It corrupted some, and it tested all the apostles differently.

For me, as always, fables are about collectives, and not about super-humans and magic. They tell a story about a group of people.

So for me easter is about who remained true to the collective's aims, and who didn't.