I played a dirty trick on a lot of people when I took this job. My role at my school is formally “Dean of αγάπη,” or “Agape” (a-gah-pay) in the Anglo, a Greek word that might be familiar to some parents but will send most to Google Translate. Who can blame them? That’s our world now and I put them in that position. Invariably, those who wish to make a comment on it come back to me with what I can only describe as “resting Anthony Crispino face.”
And then they hit me with the fruits of their latest research: “So,
[looks both ways before leaning in]
you’re the dean of LOOOOOVE, huh? What’s that about?”
I’ll tell you.
We had to reboot our school last year, changing our name and location, and with it, we decided to alter our leadership structure as well, opting for a flat administration run by four deans instead of a headmaster. Each of us is in charge of a different aspect of the school, and I, being the veteran Pollyanna of the bunch, took on the husbandry of school culture, communication, and discipline. But I didn’t want to be the dean of culture, or communication, or discipline, because those things aren’t bound in a single logos, and they didn’t sound Classical enough to me (like I said, veteran Pollyanna). Our Dean of Administration suggested “agape” instead, and I immediately jumped at it.
The most prominent explanation of agape for us is found in C.S. Lewis’s book The Four Loves, but in order to contextualize Lewis’s wisdom, I want to briefly return to a concept we’ve already discussed: the organs of the Soul.
Recall that one of Classical Education’s principal missions is to develop the soul, to lead it to a place where it can pursue the True, Good, and Beautiful on its own. This requires assessment and prescription, identifying the parts of the soul that need to be restrained or encouraged in order to help the student desire virtue and harmony. If you’re keeping score at home, this is what mythos is for.
There are three organs of the Soul: the belly, the chest, and the mind (there’s also the nous, but we’ll save that for another time). Each organ influences our behavior by desiring one thing and abhorring another. The belly desires pleasure and hates pain, the chest desires honor and hates shame, and the mind desires knowledge and hates ignorance. From birth, the soul is governed from the belly up, and the work of the school is that of teaching students to restrain their base desires until they desire properly won honor and knowledge; that is, honor and knowledge received from virtues, not acquired at the expense of others’ shame and ignorance.
With that in mind, let’s look to Lewis. Lewis’s The Four Loves is an examination of the Greeks’ four words for love. They are: eros, storge (“stor-gay”), philia, and agape. In modernity, we think of these as, respectively, romantic love, affection, brotherly love, and charity. In reality, our understanding of these concepts is captive to the modern zeitgeist, hence the need for Lewis’s explanations.
The thing that makes the four loves complex is that they are filtered through the soul, and, depending on which organ or combinations of organs they are filtered through, the meaning or expression of that love can change. And make no mistake, even this is an oversimplification of their complexity. Whole schools of thought and scholarship are dedicated to this. But allow me to give an example using this framework.
One popular (modern) interpretation of The Iliad is that Achilles and Patroklos are in a homosexual relationship. Setting aside the fact that they are cousins, the case is simple enough. Homer’s words for their relationship are often translated in “love” terms, Achilles often refers to Patroklos with phrases such as “my heart’s companion,” and Achilles mourns Patroklos with the kind of pain and ferocity that we moderns typically only associate with people who have either a nuclear relationship or a sexual bond with one another. Achilles and Patroklos aren’t brothers, therefore their bond must be erotic, in the modern sense. But this is not so. Yes, it is fair to say that Achilles and Patroklos are lovers, but their love is not sexual in nature.
Instead, the eros that they hold for each other is not filtered through the belly, where lust and sexual desire manifest, but through the chest and the mind. They love each other, in the philial sense, and their eros, their desire, is for the other to attain glory, to realize his full potential and become the best version of himself. They desire each other to find the freedom in their form, or, as Lewis will put it a few paragraphs from now, to “liberate their splendor.” Patroklos’s death cuts him off from that realization, and this fuels Achilles’s mournful rage.
Now, the first three loves are the so-called “natural loves.” Eros is desire, and storge is a mixture of empathy and familiarity that cultivates our affection and bonhomie toward our fellow man. Of the four loves, storge appears to be the most at risk of extinction, all but vanished now underneath the hail of cliques and ideologies that we have stapled to the concept of identity. I won’t mourn this loss further. If you’re interested, Lewis wrote another book called The Abolition of Man that explains it.
Philia is friendship, but a kind of friendship that Lewis mourns as a sort of lost art; in which, “This love, free from instinct, free from all duties but those whose love has freely assumed, almost wholly free from jealousy, and free without qualification from the need to be needed, is eminently spiritual.” Philia, for Lewis, is the most admirable of the natural loves, because it calls people to a place beyond their humanity out of common understanding and appreciation, and this call is answered entirely by the self, without the potent gratifications of sex or enfranchisement.
Finally, agape is God’s love, which is not a feeling or an emotion, but instead a selfless, unconditional will to care for His creation. The natural loves, Lewis contends, are not self-sufficient, but demand a kind of overriding goodness that enables and protects them. Lewis explains it in terms of a garden, a gardener, and “The Gardener:”
“To say [the natural loves are not self-sufficient] is not to belittle the natural loves but to indicate where their real glory lies. It is no disparagement to a garden to say that it will not fence and weed itself, nor prune its own fruit trees, nor roll and cut its own lawns. A garden is a good thing but that is not the sort of goodness it has. It will remain a garden, as distinct from a wilderness, only if someone does all these things to it. Its real glory is quite of a different kind. The very fact that it needs constant weeding and pruning bears witness to that glory. It teems with life. It glows with colour and smells like heaven and puts forward at every hour of a summer day beauties which man could never have created and could not even, on his own resources, have imagined. If you want to see the difference between its contribution and the gardener’s, put the commonest weed it grows side by side with his hoes, rakes, shears, and a packet of weed killer; you have put beauty, energy and fecundity beside dead, sterile things. Just so, our “decency and common sense” show grey and deathlike beside the geniality of love.”
He goes on to elaborate on the distinction between the natural love of God and the created energies that give life to the garden, and our mundane labor that is pathetic by comparison, but is compelled, and nevertheless brings order and harmony to the energies contained in the garden fence. “To liberate that splendor, to let it become fully what it is trying to be […] is part of our purpose.” Emphasis mine.
So agape is distinct from the other three loves. It is God’s love, not ours, which is present throughout every created thing. Every breath we take is a gift of agape, and insofar as we can participate in agape ourselves, we can only marshal it here and there in small ways that are restrained by our earthly powers, vis: gardening, giving alms, and doing the work necessary to “liberate the splendor” of our responsibilities.
Which brings me to my job. As the Dean of Agape, chiefly, my title is a charge to myself, and a logos for the work of our school. Obviously, I do not possess God’s love, nor am I a competent conduit for it, but agape encompasses the office I hold for the school because the school is literally an organism made of splendor to be liberated. It is hard, frustrating work every day, but how else could I describe our students?
We are approaching the end of our first school year under this new banner, and I don’t know that I can actually define what being Dean of Agape means, so much as acknowledge what this role is really asking of me, and all the ways in which I’m going to have to change in order to make it work, much less succeed. The first step, every day, is taking stock of my soul, contemplating where my organs are, how loud my belly is, how incensed my chest is, and how attentive my mind is.
The report is often distressing, like a ship that doesn’t have the supplies needed to make it back to port, and I wonder how I can possibly hold the authority needed to direct and counsel our students toward their liberation. I have to actively attend to the needs of the students with my mind and then direct my response through the chest, i.e. engaged, supervised discipline that is oftentimes more inconvenient for me than it is for them, instead of the belly, i.e. “be quiet,” “don’t do that again,” “leave me/him/her alone,” “sit out lunch for ten minutes,” et cetera. (And to be clear to my grammar stage teachers who may be reading this, it’s engaged discipline when you sit out of lunch with your students, but it’s not when I do it.)
Agape, therefore, is no longer just a name I wanted to use for the job I have. It’s a logos that has power- Christ’s power -and that power has made me conscious of my own sins and shortcomings on a level I either haven’t known or have ignored before this year. It adds a thimble of holy terror to my coffee each morning. It puts blooms on the weeds in my garden so I can’t mistake them for anything else. It empowers me to turn bad feelings, classroom arguments, playground disputes, and difficult classes into onions. It has grafted a branch onto my microcosmos for the order and harmony and liberation of the school, and that branch is in danger of dying, sagging, or growing disproportionately if I am not constantly discouraging certain things here and encouraging certain things there.
Agape is holy toil. That’s not to say that I’m some kind of pious person like priest or a monk, but rather, a custodian, a janitor in God’s pentagon, who has no choice but to ensure that the holy aspects of his charges- that is, their souls -are constantly encouraged toward proper order and kept so, in order that, among many other things, they may go on to experience eros, storge, and philia in their fulness. It’s hard to see that when the chemistry homework is vexing and the handwriting is indecipherable and the long division isn’t coming out right, but education is for life, and life is so much bigger than the classroom.
I don’t deserve this job. Or rather, our school deserves better than me in it. I’m not good at it, and I didn’t really understand what it was when I took it on, and especially not when I named it. But the title has laid claim to me now, and I have to do it, because it’s necessary and good. God wills me out of bed and into our halls every morning because it’s His work I’m there to do, and despite all my faults, despite the disorder in my soul, He wants me to do it.
And you know what? There’s really only one word for that.
May our Lord illuminate the righteous path He has laid before each of us and compel us to walk it dutifully and with joy.