Agape: Unconditional Love 

Amongst the oft quoted utterances of the Sufi mystic Rumi is the following little gem.

“Your heart knows the way. Run in that direction.”

As stressed in my last post, I have become convinced after many years on the trek that the heart above all is the center of spiritual action. The quest par excellence is the journey to become ever more heart-centered. 

The heart has much broader spiritual applications.

I have also written in a previous post, that we folks of the West are entirely culturally attuned to the age of reason, to all things of the mind. Thus, the heart in recent centuries has been relegated to effective irrelevance. 

The obvious exception to this, however, is that we continue to associate matters of the heart with love. Nonetheless, in popular culture, this association is all too frequently a kind of Hollywood or more recently Bollywood romance notion. Not that there is anything wrong with romantic love or its timeless artistic portrayal. But the heart itself, and its association with love, has much broader spiritual applications.

Love, for example, had at least four meanings, not one when it was considered by the ancient Greek philosophers. Some scholars claim another two, making a total of six distinct meanings for love, not one. You could say the Greeks were intensely interested in all things to do with love and consequently with all things to do with the heart.

C S Lewis in one of his classic books examines four of these Greek conceptions of love; ‘Storge-empathy bond,’ ‘Philia-friend bond,’ ‘Eros-romantic love,’ and ‘Agape-unconditional, selfless love.’¹ Lewis’s conclusion, like many before him and since, is that Agape, other-centered love, was seen by the ancient wise ones as love supreme, the ultimate in love practice. And it is not incidental that this highly prized ‘self-giving love’ takes its name from the Greek goddess of love, Agape. 

The heart is the seat of the soul, the source of reason.

That the Greeks associated love with the heart is easy enough to grasp. More difficult for modern western folk to fathom, is the fact that these lauded philosophers of old, believed that it was the ‘heart not the mind’ from which moral thought and consequent ethical practice emanates. Aristotle is a case in point; he was a fella fully immersed in matters of the heart. And we’re not talking here about mere physiology. Rather, Aristotle championed the belief that the heart is the seat of the soul, the source of reason, with intellect and imagination.²

The Greeks of course were really big on ethical ‘character building.’ Aristotle developed the idea that each person had a true purpose known as “telos.” Building character, to work towards one’s true purpose, was pretty much the central component of what he thought it meant to live a good life. Character had to be developed like the muscle of an athlete, and the muscle Aristotle was acutely interested in developing was the heart, specifically because it contained the aforementioned source of reason and seat of the soul. 

However, the heart in such a thesis is not the same at the end of the character building journey, of true purpose, as it was at the commencement. Sometimes it will be an entirely different vessel. Change must be embraced, and the primary method of this change is none other than the practice of Agape love. Moreover, in ways that perhaps only the heart itself can comprehend, Agape love is also the endpoint where true purpose is achieved. Yes, that’s right, Agape love, is both the propellant of the journey and the destination, it really is all about radically self-forgetting love comrades. 

But enough of the Greeks already! They’re certainly not the only culture that has championed the heart above the mind, especially regarding spirituality. So let me finish this post where I began, with a quote from the Islamic Sufi poet Rumi. “The mind says, there is nothing beyond the physical world; the heart says there is, and I have been there many times.” 

1. C S Lewis, The Four Loves (New York: Harper Collins, 1960). [↩]
2. Marjorie, O’Rourke Boyle, Cultural Anatomies of the Heart in Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Calvin, and Harvey (London: Palgrave Macmillan Publishers, 2018), preface. [↩]