IT'S AMORE

As an elderly lawyer once said, “All this Love is a sad mistake.” I’ve had occasion to write before about being ordered to love, and the other day I cited Fr Jean-Kamel on pondering “with what love we are loved”. In English, and in French, these days it’s all quite simple. “Love. Love. All you need is Love.. Love is all you need.” From a rank enseamèd bed to New Age fluff, it’s a panacea if not a pangaea.

But if I take Fr Jean-Kamel’s enthusiastic cry as a real, not a rhetorical, question, I ask not De quel amour nous sommes aimés but De quel amour sommes-nous aimés? And I go to look at original texts, because the New Testament and the Old are full of love and charity but seem remarkably free of sentimentality.

“Charity” is now out of fashion except as a legal definition for tax purposes. In modern translations, it’s all “love”. But what is? In Koinè Greek (the sort of Greek spoken, often badly, all over the Mediterranean in Jesus’ time, like English today) there are three nouns for “love”: Eros, Agapè, and Philia. The writers of the New Testament tried hard not to let Eros into anything they wrote – well, they would, wouldn’t they? (We in our time know, to our cost, how hard it is to keep the little pest out of anything.) So they were left with Philia, a good Classical word for affection, as between spouses, really good friends, and parents & children (one hopes).  And they adopted a slightly less usual word derived from the verb “Agapao”, to which I’ll come back in a minute.

But most of these blokes were Jews and thought in Hebrew or Aramaic. So when they wrote about Philia and Agapè, what were they translating, if only in their minds?

Hebrew, bless it, has lots of words for love and affection. The most common are Ahab (which I’ve seen described as a love you feel, and feel spontaneously), Hesed (the love/loyalty belonging to a bond, a relationship: the love felt by God for Israel, and presumably the love referred to by Cordelia), and Racham (a compassionate love, one assumes the love felt by the Samaritan for the poor bloody victim of a mugging).

The thing we have to remember is that the authors of the Gospels were making up translations as they went along. So they used Philia for the love Jesus had for Lazarus – which was strong enough not only to have him resurrect Lazarus but to weep over his grave first. Jesus doesn’t weep a lot in the Gospels. So don’t knock Philia: it’s what you have for your three very closest friends, as well as for your 9-year-old and for your ageing parents whose lives you would trust them (the friends) with.

So what about Agapè? Well, the verb (agapao) is used in both the Great Commandments, for “loving” the Lord your God and “loving” your neighbour as yourself. But it also the verb used for Jesus’s relation to John: he was “the disciple that Jesus loved”. In the Church’s nervousness about avoiding Eros, it has often described “charity” (from caritas, the Latin translation of agapè) in rather bloodless and dutiful ways. Even “loving-kindness” doesn’t really cut it for most of us.

So I’ll share my own candidate, which seems to work in almost all cases, though still not easy in some (the First Commandment, for example). I would translate “agapao” as “to cherish”. Etymologically and intelligibly, it refers to something or someone (can work for both) that you “hold dear”, something or someone that you hug to you because you hold it/him/her dear beyond price. (“Dear” after all is the old word for “expensive, pricey”.) But “cherish” also has a massive feeling-content to it. “I cherish you” is something deep, rare, and fine to say to someone.

So de quel amour sommes-nous aimés, with what love are we loved, especially this Holy Thursday, tomorrow at the dreadful foot of the Cross, and on Sunday after the unimaginable? We are loved with a love that cherishes us. We are the ones – not just as a collectivity, like the Nation of Israel, but individually, like the wounded traveller, like the sad woman saved from stoning, like Lazarus trying to get used to daylight – we are ones the Maker of the Universe, our very own Father, cherishes.

To die for.