with the tradition from Augustine to Aquinas
2) with the tradition from Francis to Luther
3) with the tradition from Descartes to Kierkegaard
Agape is the gift and the task of a love for all persons
who as the brothers and sisters of Jesus, the Son of God,
are believed to have unique singularity and equal worth.
Agape is a universal love that is not based on equality
at the level the lowest common denominator, for even though
particularity does imply an exclusivity that destroys universalism,
the singularity of the incarnation is able to have a logic that
unlike particularity is able to go out affirming all differences.
When the Son of God became flesh we received the gift:
“That all flesh shall see the salvation of the Lord.” (Luke 3:6)
The task of this gift is that we spend our lives promoting
the highest and the best in all persons and even all flesh.
Agape can affirm all other attempts at reconciliation
and all other ways of love and models of subjectivity.
The point of studying the history of love and personhood
is to see how the model of agape goes out to all others
and learns from them the worth of their different ways and
in loving service of them promotes individualizing differences.
Western culture with its own special religion, law, politics
and economics has developed out of the theory and practice
of agape and personhood which today is being everywhere considered.
Even if Chinese, Indian, Islamic and Eastern Orthodox cultures
do not embrace the agape of the West with its view that all persons
are equal under the law and even if they do not embrace
the implied democracy from the election of the Pope on down
they all want to get in on the technological and economic success.
Once they begin pursuing the economic fruit they do slowly
come to see the implied political blossoms and then the
legal branches and then the trunk of personhood and then finally
the roots of agape or the three persons in the one true God.
In this first set of meditations we shall examine the history
of the notion of personhood in the West as it grew out of
the new reality and concept of agape which Jesus introduced.
We shall not yet focus on the legal theory and practice
that developed with it but we might notice two systems
of the theory and practice of law which developed in the West.
There was the code law of the Continent with Justinian
and with Canon Law which gave rise to rational science
and there was the Case Law of England and its empirical method.
Already with Jesus and with Paul the new universal agape
for all persons was bringing forth a new approach to the law.
Of course, the Ten Commandments were still of utmost importance
but the practice of Jesus towards foreigners and sinners
and his Sermon on the Mount and many of his parables
extended the love of Jesus to all with the Good Samaritan.
Paul saw immediately that in Christ Jesus there is
no longer Greek nor Jew, master nor slave, male nor
female for they are now all persons equal under the law.
In these meditations we shall ponder together how agape
and person developed during their first two thousand years.
Each loving creature’s four noble truths
I Each person and each loving creature suffers and will die
II and will weep and wonder why for that is a mystery
which none of us can understand unless we believe
III in that Divine love that so loves us that it became flesh
and died and rose again from the dead that there
can be hope for all loving creatures who belong
to the Mystical Body of Jesus.
IV And the Holy Spirit of the Risen Lord Jesus has
revealed to us a nine-fold path toward the salvation
for all flesh, both for persons and loving creatures
(1) for hunter-gatherer shamans across the face of the earth
knew of persons and creatures in relation in spirit form
(2) for the five Greek and Roman schools debated the plight
of all souls and spirit: vegetative, animal, human, Divine
(3) for Hebrew Hesed which became Christian Agape promised
an everlasting Kingdom, for love is stronger than death
(4) for God is the love between the three Divine persons
which was revealed for all persons in the incarnation
(5) for Jesus is one person equal to the other two
and unique in his Divine and human nature
(6) for in accord with the idea of Divine persons humans
were seen as individual substances of a rational nature
(7) for from Augustine to Aquinas the Caritas Synthesis
embraced and learned from all persons of eros, affection, friendship
