Oct 30 – Agape (re-edited)

I.

Christianity, as far as my ignorance allows, is the first belief system to introduce the concept “love” – particularly “agape” or unconditional love – into the Godhead: to attribute God (or any of the gods) with Love beyond mere admiration, beyond vanity, passing pleasures, pleasant feelings, and pleasing sights, Christianity which has the audacity to claim not only that God actually loves man – weak, sinful, and finite – but is, in fact, Love itself; Love not from an impersonal distance but a demonstrative Love that emptied Itself of Its divinity and made Himself of no reputation by taking the form of a bondservant fashioned in the likeness of man in which He humbled Himself by becoming obedient unto death, even death on the cross {Phil 2: 5-11} so that He, as our great High Priest, might intercede and make continual sacrifice before God on our behalf, {Heb 5:1- 10:18} all of which, though most certainly echoed, foreshadowed, imitated, and intimated in disconnected miniature through myth, symbol, religion, and song before the Incarnation, had yet to fully culminate in the life, times, and deeds of a single individual as it did in the life, person, and works of Christ: the fulfillment and completion of humanity’s hitherto master Epic.

For in Him did every prior mythological and transcendent artistic expression – in all their disparate and seemingly unrelated forms – find their most perfect embodiment, synthesis, actualization, and narrative integration, inasmuch as such things were created in some way by Him, and for Him {Col 1:16}. In His coming were the “truest myths” heralded by innumerable peoples of the innumerable past galvanized, ordered, fulfilled, and thus granted immediate relevance and everlasting authority to speak to the highest, most beautiful, and truthful artistic endeavors of man, whether man was aware of his artistry or not: Christ the Master Protagonist of every epic, myth, tale, and religious aspiration as well as the immutable Form that archetypes every Hero from the innumerable past until now; He whose substance validated and still validates every earnest and ardent working of man and always ever most will, even when Faith in Him is completely lost among our ignorant and impertinent ranks.

II.

For the believer to speak well of his belief and to preach its virtues to the unbeliever so as to win such a one to his cause is not merely ineffective but deleterious to both the apprehension and understanding of the very Truth he is espousing as well as its honest, unbiased communication.

No, the most effective – which is to say, enduring, objective, universal – argument for any idea or belief can only be raised by one who (though he certainly might err to its side) does not fully “believe” in that which he argues. Such a one is, of course, relatively free from the limitations of bias and the mystifications that his own personal prejudices impose upon his mind; prejudices which, imbalanced and thus inadequate as they are to ascertain anything that they are not, tarnish irreparably any hopes for “understanding” let alone apprehending the blinding verities of Truth that can only be approached by way of the sacrifice of all prior forms of belief and certainty that a man holds fervently dear, no matter how blemished and marred his conscience might be for maintaining such a grip.