From THE PILGRIMAGE
In 1986, when I was on the road to Santiago with my guide Petrus, we
passed through the city of Logroño while a wedding was taking place. We
ordered two glasses of wine, I prepared something to nibble on, and
Petrus discovered a table where we could sit down together with the
other guests.
The wedding couple cut an immense cake.
“They must love one another,” I thought aloud.
“Of course they love one another,” said a man in a dark suit
sitting at our table. Have you ever seen anyone get married for any
another reason?”
But Petrus did not let the question go unanswered:
“What type of love do you mean: Eros, Philos or Agape?”
The man looked at him without understanding a word.
“There are three words in Greek to designate love,” Petrus said.
“Today you are seeing the manifestation of Eros, that sentiment between
two persons.”
“The two seem to love one another. In a short time they will be
fighting alone for life, establishing themselves in a house and taking
part in the same adventure: that’s what makes love grand and dignified.
He will pursue his career, she probably knows how to cook and will make
an excellent housewife because since she was a little girl she was
brought up to do that. She will accompany him, they will have children
and they will manage to build something together, they will be happy for
ever.”
“Al of a sudden, however, this story could happen the other way
around. He is going to feel that he is not free enough to show all the
Eros, all the love that he has for other women. She may begin to feel
that she has sacrificed a career and a brilliant life to accompany her
husband. So, instead of creating together, each of them will feel robbed
in their way of loving. Eros, the spirit that joins them, will start to
display only his bad side. And what God had meant to be man’s most
noble sentiment will begin to be a source of hatred and destruction.”
“Notice how odd it is,” continued my guide. “Despite being good or bad, the face of Eros is never the same in all persons.”
Then he continued, pointing to an elderly couple:
“Look at those two: they haven’t let themselves be affected by
hypocrisy, like so many others. They look like they are a couple of farm
workers: hunger and need have obliged them to overcome many a
difficulty together. They have discovered love through work, which is
where Eros shows his most beautiful face, also known as Philos.”
“What’s Philos?”
“Philos is love in the form of friendship. It’s what I feel for you
and others. When the flame of Eros no longer able to shine, it’s Philos
who keeps couples together.”
“And what about Agape?”
“Agape is total love, the love that devours those that experience
it. Whoever knows and experiences Agape sees that nothing else in this
world is of any importance, only loving. This was the love that Jesus
felt for humanity, and it was so great that it shook the stars and
changed the course of man’s history.”
“During the millennia of the history of civilization, many people
have been smitten by this Love that Devours.
They had so much to give –
and the world demanded so little – that they were obliged to seek out
the deserts and isolated places because love was so great that it
transfigured them. They became the hermit saints that we know today.”
“For me and you who have experienced another form of Agape, this
life here may seem hard and terrible.
Yet the Love that Devours makes
everything lose its importance: these men live only to be consumed by
their love.”
He took a pause.
“Agape is the Love that Devours,” he repeated once more, as if this
was the phrase that best defined that strange type of love. “Luther
King once said that when Christ spoke of loving our enemies he was
referring to Agape. Because according to him, it was impossible to like
our enemies, those who do us harm and try to make our daily suffering
all the worse.”
“But Agape is a lot more than liking. It is a sentiment that
invades everything, fills all the cracks and makes any attempt at
aggression turn to dust.”
“There are two forms of Agape. One is isolation, life dedicated
only to contemplation. The other is precisely the opposite: contact with
other human beings, and enthusiasm, the sacred sense of work.
Enthusiasm means trance, ecstasy, connecting with God. Enthusiasm is
Agape directed at some idea, something.”
“When we love and believe in something from the bottom of our soul,
we feel stronger than the world and we are imbued with a serenity that
comes from the certainty that nothing can conquer our faith. This
strange force makes us always make the right decisions at the right
time, and we are surprised at our own capacity when we fulfill our
objective.”
“Enthusiasm usually manifests itself in all its power in the early
years of our life. We still have a strong tie with the divinity and we
give ourselves with such zeal to our toys that dolls take on a life of
their own and little tin soldiers manage to march. When Jesus said that
the kingdom of Heaven belonged to the children, he was referring to
Agape in the form of Enthusiasm. The children reached him without paying
any attention to his miracles, his wisdom, the Pharisees and the
apostles. They came happily, driven by Enthusiasm.”
taken from... http://paulocoelhoblog.com/
