Summary of Awakening from the Meaning Crisis by John Vervaeke, Chapter 16: Christianity and Agape
This lecture develops the idea that love (agape) was the psychotechnology that powered the Christian movement, leading to an extensive and lasting transformation of western civilization.
Note that agape is distinct from two other manifestations of love, based in pleasure/desire (eros) and cooperation (philia). Notably, agape is unconditional and self-sacrificing, akin to the love of parent for child, and thus is associated with a kind of divine power that makes a non-person into a person. Jesus was incarnated kairos (turning point), essentially a representation of God’s agape for humanity, setting the stage for redemptive metanoia, or salience transformation.
One way to think about it is that we are the product of agape imparted by others, as their attention and concern for us is what gives us self-awareness and rationality (the ego). While egocentric awareness dominates most of one’s life, at some point a transformation may occur where one’s awareness becomes radically recentered on something outside of oneself — for most people that would be the birth of a child or a mystical experience. At this point we have become givers of agape, and according to Christianity, “born again”.
Central to Christianity is the notion of forgiveness, which ultimately means to give before someone has earned it. Agape is a form of forgiveness, and importantly, God is the ultimate source of forgiveness for all humanity. According to this thinking, we obtain forgiveness from God by giving it ourselves. Jesus’s death symbolized God’s forgiveness in an archetypal way.
Saul was a key figure of early Christianity that exemplified the transformative potential of agape. Originally a persecutor of Christ’s followers, whom he saw as a threat to existing order, he has a religious experience on the road to Demascus that converts him to an advocate of Christianity. Thereafter he is known as Paul the Apostle.
Paul’s famous passage from the Bible describes this transformation:
And now I will show you the most excellent way. If I speak in the tongues of men and angels but have not love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, if I have faith that can move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give all I possess to the poor and surrender my body to the flames, but have not love, I gain nothing.
Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self seeking. It is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.
Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away. For we know in part, and we prophesy in part, but when perfection comes, the imperfect disappears. When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put childish things behind me. Now we see but a poor reflection, as in a mirror, then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part, then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.
And now these three remain: faith, hope and love, but the greatest of these is love.
A defining aspect of gnosis is that learning occurs via self-transformation through participatory knowing. However, one must be fully aware of the risk of projection in this context. In Paul’s writings, there is an apparent projection of inner conflict onto the world and to God: the inner conflict between the demand for perfection and the reality of human error is personified as a metaphysical confrontation between justice and forgiveness.
Ultimately, Christianity provided a much needed refuge for those who experience deep inner conflict as a result of awareness of personal failures, for in it is essentially the promise of redemption despite being flawed. Such expectations, Vervaeke argues, while still extant in our cognitive grammar, are no longer well met in our modern worldview, contributing to the present day meaning crisis.