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The True Self
The unborn within me, my true self, was a mystery, so after stumbling around for years exploring Hinduism and Buddhism, I turned to the deepest understanding of the human person that Christianity offers.
The Patristic Fathers embraced the theological insights of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopogite: God is not any of the names used in the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, not God of gods, Holy of holies, Cause of the ages, the still breeze, cloud, and rock.[1] God is not Mind, Greatness, Power, or Truth in any way we can understand, for He “cannot be understood, words cannot contain him, and no name can hold him. He is not one of the things that are, and he is no thing among things.”[2] God is the Unnamable.
According to St. Gregory Palamas, we know the energy of God, not His essence: “Not a single created being has or can have any communion with or proximity to the sublime nature [of God]. Thus, if anyone has drawn near to God he evidently approached Him by means of His energy.”[3] A person becomes close to God by participating in His energy, “by freely choosing to act well and to conduct [himself] with probity.”[4] Here, Gregory distinguishes between God’s essence, or substance (ousia), and His activity (energeia) in the world. The energy of God is experienced as Divine Light, such as the light of Mount Tabor or the light that blinded St. Paul on the Road to Damascus.
Given this understanding of God, the image of God within us means that the essence of each one of us is unnamable and that we are known to others only through our activity in the world, that is, through a socially-constructed self. We are unknowable to ourselves, although through meditation, or what the Patristic Fathers called contemplation, we can witness our thoughts, memories, and storytelling, and thus know that we are not what we witness. Through more advanced contemplation, we may experience Divine Light, the presence of God.
At the core of our being is the unnamable, the “empty mind” of Zen Buddhism, the “pure consciousness” of Hinduism, and the “spirit” of Christianity, although all words ultimately fail to capture our true self. We, the unenlightened, believe that the false self given to us by culture is permanent and fail to see that the false self is an illusion, with no more permanency than a smoke ring, destined to vanish with the death of the body. Because we take our culturally-given self for our true self, we fail to experience who we truly are. Our true self is always present, completely perfected with no need for development from us; we must merely step aside. Every spiritual master calls for the death of self and a spiritual rebirth beyond egoistic desires, beyond religious practices, beyond any given culture, beyond the dictates of society, into the law of love, into compassion for every living being.
The Death of Self
Jesus told his followers, “He who loves his life loses it, and he who hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life.”[5] St. Paul confesses, “I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me . . .”[6]
St. Paul’s confession is a mystery to us ordinary mortals; we struggle to understand his straightforward but mysterious description of his new life. Perhaps, the best place to begin is with “it is no longer I who lives,” that is with the death of Saul; recall before St. Paul’s conversion to Christianity, he was Saul, a persecutor of the early disciples of Jesus. On the road to Damascus to persecute Christians, a light flashed about Saul; he fell to the ground and heard a voice, “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” Saul was blind for three days; when he recovered his sight, a new person was born, Paul, who became instrumental in explaining Jesus’ message to the world.
We will call the birth of a new person through mystical experience, intellectual insight, or intense suffering Christian enlightenment. For skeptical non-Christians, Homer, in the first great book of Western civilization, gives a precursor of Christian enlightenment.
At the opening of the Iliad, Achilles is angered because Agamemnon, the leader of the Greek expedition to Troy, has taken for himself Briseis, a beautiful and clever woman captured by Achilles. Since Achilles thinks he is the greatest warrior amongst the Greeks, he feels dishonored by Agamemnon, retires to his ship, and refuses to join in the battle against the Trojans. Blinded by his anger, Achilles allows his best friend, Patroclus, to use his armor and to do battle against the Trojans. Patroclus, masquerading as Achilles, is killed by Hector, the greatest Trojan warrior. Achilles goes berserk — enters battle, kills every Trojan in sight, including Hector, and in his rage attacks a river, the height of madness.
From Achilles’ immense suffering, a new person emerges. He sees that he has been exactly like other men — foolish, caught up in winning prizes, striving for eternal glory. The new Achilles is compassionate and even smiles at the foibles of his fellow warriors.[7] Eva Brann, classics scholar and recipient of the National Humanities Medal, is surprised that “with the unaccountable suddenness of a divinity, Achilles is another being: the courtly, peace-keeping, tactful, and generous host at Patroclus’ funeral games.”[8]
The last event of the funeral games for Patroclus is spear throwing. Agamemnon and Meriones step forward to compete for “a far-shadowing spear and [for the first prize] an unfired cauldron with patterns of flowers on it, the worth of an ox.”[9] The Iliad is about to begin over again, this time with Agamemnon taking a prize from Meriones.
Achilles with a newly acquired wisdom intercedes to stave off an intense conflict between the ruler and the ruled. Achilles tells Agamemnon, “For we know how much you surpass all others; by how much you are greatest for strength among the spear-throwers, therefore take this prize and keep it and go back to your hollow ships; but let us give the spear to the hero Meriones.”[10]
What follows next are the two most remarkable lines in the Iliad. Achilles no longer seeking honor and prizes entreats Agamemnon, “If your own heart would have it this way, for so I invite you [to give the spear to Meriones].” Achilles spoke, “nor did Agamemnon lord of men disobey him.”[11]
Achilles has become a wise ruler of men.
Homer shows us in the Iliad that suffering can destroy a person’s ego, correct his misunderstanding of himself, and join him in a more profound way to others. Suffering can move a person from narrow self-love to an expansive love of others.
Homer’s insight that we are not determined by fate or culture but can free ourselves from our ill-formed habits and faulty thinking, often through suffering, so as to connect ourselves to others is an essential part of the Western understanding of the human person. For example, James Baldwin, an American, Black writer, citing contemporary experience, agrees with Homer: “You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was Dostoevsky and Dickens who taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who ever had been alive.” And the following words of Baldwin could have been spoken by Achilles, “Only if we face these open wounds in ourselves can we understand them in other people.”[12]
The Western tradition that from immense suffering, a new person can emerge rests on nature; every human being comes into this world through suffering. A mother in labor experiences intense pain and willingly accepts the risk of death. The fetus, once floating contentedly in amniotic fluid, feels the rhythmic contraction of the uterus and begins the difficult and painful passage through the birth canal to air, light, and a new life.
The Buddha Maintains that Love Always Leads to Suffering
The Buddha holds, and he may be right, that the love of another always leads to suffering. In the Visākhā Sutta, the Enlightened One tells a grandmother grieving for her recently dead grandson that “those who have a hundred dear ones have a hundred sufferings. Those who have ninety dear ones have ninety sufferings. . . . Those who have one dear one have one suffering. Those who have no dear ones have no sufferings. They are free from sorrow, free from stain, free from lamentation, I tell you.”[13]
If we follow the Buddha, as the writer Peter Matthiessen does, we would seek to alleviate our suffering regardless of others. Unhinged by the death of his second wife, Matthiessen goes on a two-month trek in Nepal in search of the Lama of Shey, who resides at the ancient monastery on Crystal Mountain. He hopes the Lama will show him a way of overcoming the suffering caused by death of a loved one.
Matthiessen leaves behind in Sagaponack, New York, his eight-year-old son, Alex, with the family who has taken over his house while he is gone. Alex, in a short letter to his father, writes, “How are you. I am fine. I was very sad, I was even crying, because I didn’t write to you. But I feel a lot better since I’m writing to you now. The cat and the dog are great, but I’m going to be sad when they die. School is doing pretty well. I hope you can make it back for Thanksgiving.”[14]
Like his father, Alex is brooding about death. The young boy is worried his two pets may die, and then he will be left alone without a mother and with a father absent in Nepal. Matthiessen’s pursuit to alleviate his suffering causes his son to suffer acutely by himself.
Despite what the Buddha preaches, we are always bound to others through love, the love of parents, siblings, spouses, offspring, other relatives, friends, teachers, and even neighbors and colleagues at work, although these loves vary in intensity and duration.
The Four Loves
We English speakers use the word “love” to describe our relationship to people, pets, sports, food, and pretty much everything we encounter in this world. In Koine Greek, love is divided into storgē, philía, erōs, and agápē. Storgē, often called familial love, is a natural affection that arises from the familiarity of persons, such as two women who daily sit next to each other on a commuter bus. The most intense form of storgē is that of a parent for an offspring; however, storgē is so broad that it even refers to the relationship between pets and their owners. In American English, the word that corresponds most closely to storgē is “affection.”
Philía is usually translated as friendship. In his Nichomachean Ethics, Aristotle argues that we love what is good, pleasurable, or useful about another person, and thus there are three kinds of friendship.[15]
When the motive of friendship is usefulness, we do not feel affection for another as such but seek to fulfill the desire for some material good through them. These friendships are not always morally reprehensible. Many friendships of utility, for instance, are founded on the exchange of favors. These relations are common among neighbors and acquaintances and include such everyday associations as carpools and food co-ops. In the workplace, where utility generally reigns, many people because of ambitionwish to receive affection from superiors and use flattery, pretending to be a friend in an inferior position. In the vernacular, ass-kissing is a common way to advance a career because most men and women love flattery, for they wish to be loved rather than to love.
Friendship based on usefulness is subject to complaints and rapid dissolution. The sharing of money, power, and honor invariably leads to disputes. The desire for more is insatiable, and the feeling of being treated unfairly is seldom absent. Aristotle, in his realistic manner, observed over 2,300 years ago, “Most people wish to be recipients of good deeds, but avoid performing them, because they are unprofitable.”[16] Some things in human life never change.
Friendships based on pleasure are not that different from friendships of utility. We love witty people not for what they are but for the pleasure they give us. Children call one another friends because of the pleasure they have when playing together; yet, such childhood friendships can advance human growth and development. My grandson Yasu, when he was four years old, told me he had “lots of friends.” He played more intensely and more imaginatively when one or two of his friends were present. I watched one of his friends imitate Yasu jumping from a stool to the floor. Soon the two friends developed a game in which the two boys took turns standing on one leg on the stool, shouting something about pirates, and then jumping to the floor. In their play, Yasu and his friend developed social skills, physical dexterity, and imagination.
In the third kind of friendship, the one based on the good, a common life is shared. Whatever makes life desirable is pursued together. Some friends engage in sports together, others perform music, yet others pursue social justice. What friends love most in life is what joins them together; their mutual love enhances their love of the third thing that binds them together. Such friends feel pleasure and pain from the same things, and understand and judge the same things in the same way — in a sense, they are one soul, and such unity of souls, in itself, is pleasurable.
In the truest, most long-lasting friendship, a friend acts for the good of his friend for the friend’s sake, as if his friend were another self. In this highest form of friendship, we love our friends in the same way we love ourselves. Aristotle defines the highest form of friendship as the love that wishes for another the “things which we believe to be good, for his sake but not for our own, and procuring them for him as far as lies in our power.”[17]
Erōs is an intense, passionate desire to be joined to another person, to beauty, to truth, or to any good outside of oneself. We were born radically incomplete.[18] When we emerged from the womb, we sought a human face and listened for a soprano voice. Our very first experience in life was connecting ourselves to another person. The first word spoken about us was either “boy” or “girl,” a word that drew attention to our anatomy that exhibited that we were physically incomplete but had the latent desire for a profound union with another person. As a baby, we were a lovable bundle of erōs, the natural desire for full existence. This self-love is not a selfish love, although like any love, it can become selfish.
Perhaps, as an adolescent, we fell in love with Mozart’s music. Such erōs developed our hearing, attuned our soul to beauty, and conformed our emotions to a rational structure. When we heard Mitsuko Uchida play K. 545, the Sonata Facile, we also fell in love with Ms. Uchida, the embodiment of musical perfection; such love is often called earned or deserved love; we hoped in some small way to return the great good she had given us.
In the ancient world, two lovers under the sway of erōs strove to gain an intimate knowledge of everything that pertained to the beloved, to penetrate the other’s soul. Such lovers sought to possess each other perfectly by entering the heart of the other. At times, two lovers wished to be united into one, a union that would destroy one or both. Aristophanes claimed that if the god Hephaestus came to a pair of lovers and offered to weld them together, no lovers would refuse to be merged into an utter oneness.[19]
In Modernity, erōs is usually taken to be romantic love as depicted by movies, magazine ads, popular songs, and romance novels. Psychoanalyst Eric describes how this intense, all-consuming love happens: “If two people who have been strangers, as all of us are, suddenly let the wall between them break down, and feel close, feel one, this moment of oneness is one of the most exhilarating, most exciting experiences of life. It is all the more wonderful and miraculous for persons who have been shut off, isolated, without love.”[20]
Fromm points out that in Modernity because of individualism, “One can often find two people ‘in love’ with each other who feel no love for anybody else. Their love is, in fact, an egotism à deux; they are two people who identify themselves with each other, and who solve the problem of separateness by enlarging the single individual into two.”[21] The love of such lovers is exclusive; friends, family, and previous interests must be brought within the sphere of their love or abandoned outside. In practice, little can be incorporated into their love; so, in effect, they are separated from the rest of humankind; in their view, this makes their love more magical.
As I or any older adult can testify to personally, almost no one escapes the madness of being crazy in love. When a young couple falls in love, they are primarily in love with the pleasurable emotion produced by the other person. Such lovers wish to be together all day and to live together forever. When apart, life is flat, and each lover dreams of the other. Such a love frequently dissolves, often painfully, because ultimately, when push comes to shove, it becomes clear that each lover is pursuing his or her own ends and wishes to receive more than to give.
In the New Testament, the Greek word erōs does not occur once, while agápē, used infrequently in ancient Greek, occurs 116 times and stands for a new understanding of love. In the King James Version of the Bible, agápē is translated as charity, a word that now means to most people giving handouts to the homeless or contributing to United Way. In the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, agápē is translated as love, an ambiguous word in English that can mean sexual love, affection for another, or even a strong like, say for a particular sport or food.
In the Christian tradition, agápē means God’s selfless love for human persons, a love that cannot be earned and that excludes no one. Such love gives and expects nothing in return. In an attempt to capture this sense of love, agápē is sometimes inadequately translated as “unconditional love.” Since no English translation accurately renders how agápē is used in the New Testament, probably the best recourse is for the reader to stop, ignore the proper Greek, which only a minority of us know, and try substituting agápē and agápēd for “love” and “loved.” For example,
John 13:34: A new commandment I give to you, that you love [agápē] one another; even as I have loved [agápēd] you, that you also love [agápē] one another.
Despite the butchering of the Greek, this substitution shows that Jesus is calling upon us to practice a new and distinct love, to love the way God does, to love our neighbors and even ourselves without desiring a reward, without wanting something in return.
Another, more lengthy rendering of John 13:34 is:
A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another [without desiring a reward]; even as I have loved you [without desiring a reward], that you also love one another [in the same way].
Perhaps, the most mysterious and complicated action in the universe is love. Consider one of the simplest aspects of love, my other grandson, Kaz, an eight-year-old beginning violin student. Even as a young child, he loved music and the sound of the violin. To learn to play the violin well, Kaz must suffer, first the physical pain of repeatedly pressing the strings and later the frustration of playing wrong notes. If Kaz bears his suffering and learns to play the violin well, he will eventually discover the joy of losing his self in the music; he will become the music. The loss of self will teach Kaz that the music is everything, not monetary rewards or praises from others. The course of Kaz’s love then will be from erōs to agápē, from the desire to be joined to the beautiful sounds of the violin to the loss of self and the desire to serve the music, to give excellent performances that do justice to the composers and enlighten the audience.
We are often divided in our loves, especially of other persons. We wish our siblings, spouses, offspring, and friends every good thing, and at the same time, we love them for reward, perhaps our emotional well-being, improved social status, or simply pleasure. As we travel through life, our loves invariably become misdirected, at times even desiring what is harmful. Disappointment with love causes us to close in upon ourselves, to hate others, and to despair. Yet, we stagger on. Most of us hope to be loved well rather than to love others well. This is not to deny that a love between two persons can become so distorted, so hateful, so miserable that the relationship is irreparable and must be abandoned. No person can fulfill the longing for everlasting, untainted love, only God can. “You have made us for yourself, [O Lord,] and our hearts are restless until they rest in you,” Augustine rightly observed.[22]
In my youth, I did not accede to Siddhartha Gautama’s contention that the problem of human life is suffering. I accepted suffering as an integral part of living, not a pleasant part, but a reality that could not be denied or avoided. My life was driven by erōs, by the natural desire for full existence, for deep encounters with truth and beauty. Despite my best intentions, I could not keep from concluding that what separated the Buddha and Jesus were opposed orientations toward human life. For the Buddha, the core of human life was suffering, for Jesus love; arguably, Jesus was correct. We hate the decrepitude of old age because we love the beauty and vigor of youth; we hate sickness because we love health; we hate death because we love life. From this perspective, what prompted Siddhartha Gautama’s Great Going Forth that led to his enlightenment was the suffering caused by the impermanence of love.
Yet, the Buddha focused on a core truth of human life, no one escapes suffering. Every year in America over 800,000 divorces are concluded, 1,700,000 new cancer cases are diagnosed, and 2,700,000 people die. This morning, you and I woke up, but 7,432 of our fellow citizens did not.
When we are young, we comfortably drift along in life; then, a mother’s Alzheimer’s disease cannot be denied, an MRI discovers a spouse has a brain tumor, or an adult child’s addiction to opioids becomes obvious, and we are plunged into a sea of suffering. We suffer with our loved ones, because storgē, philía, and erōs bind children, friends, and spouses together as if they had one soul; so, when my wife or child suffers, I suffer, too.
Suffering clouds the mind; with a toothache, no one is a philosopher, much less a good counselor, or an excellent intervener with physicians, hospitals, and insurance companies. If the only love we have for others is storgē, philía, or erōs, then we are of no use to them when disaster befalls them. The only way our love will not fail them is if our love has advanced to agápē, the disinterested, tranquil love, where we can act for the good of others with clarity of mind.
The pain and suffering of our loved ones force us to realize that we do not have the time to become enlightened like the Buddha or to attain the spiritual depth to walk through the world healing the sick the way that Jesus did; instead, reality compels us to step out of ourselves, to see that our own petty cares and fears are nothing, and to serve others the best that we can.
Friendship with God
For Aristotle, friendship with God was an impossibility. He argued friends must be more or less equal: Persons much inferior in station “do not expect to be friends with kings.”[23] But “God is remote from man;”[24] therefore, no person can be a friend with God.
In the Aristotelian cosmos, the Prime Mover (God) is nonmaterial, actuality, unmoved, and eternal, yet the cause of all motion. “The heavens and the world of nature”[25] depend upon such a being, for the “Prime Mover causes motion as the object of love, while all other things move by being moved.”[26] A star and a fertilized ovum both desire to be like the Prime Mover. The star being made of celestial matter can move most perfectly, in a circle, and forever in the same way. A fertilized ovum, whether that of a petunia, a cat, or a human being, is essentially all potentiality. The life within the ovum desires full actuality in the form of an adult organism. All adult organisms are composed of terrestrial matter that is corruptible; consequently, no organism can maintain itself forever. The only way a petunia, a cat, or a human being can attain a kind of eternality is by reproducing, so its species continues forever.
Homo sapiens, however, transcends biological life. A person, in particular an advanced philosopher, because of the “divine element within him,”[27] through contemplation can attain a state, if only briefly, akin to the life of the Prime Mover, which is thinking upon thinking, a life “most good and eternal.”[28] A philosopher and the Prime Mover, however, never share the same life as friends do.
From a Christian viewpoint, Aristotle’s insights acquired through reason without the aid of Revelation are amazing, although incomplete and at times wildly off. In his way, Aristotle grasped that the cause of existence is love. The root meaning of the Greek word kosmos is order, and the fundamental ordering principle of the Aristotelian cosmos is love. If love were to disappear, the universe would collapse into motionless, dead matter. Every organism desires to emulate God, and the interior life of a human is structured by the desire for good. Underneath all the confused and conflicting human desires is the desire for God, the ultimate object of love. For Aristotle, God is self-sufficient, separate from the world, happy in thinking upon thinking, and never reciprocates the love of nature or humans.
Aristotle did not understand, nor could any philosopher through reason alone, that not only is God an object of love, God loves the world. “For God so loved [agápēd] the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.”[29] On the night before his crucifixion, at the Last Supper, Jesus tells his disciples, “No longer do I call you servants, for the servant does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all that I have heard from my Father I have made known to you.”[30] Through his crucifixion, his suffering on the cross, his taking on all the suffering of all the world, Jesus gave birth to a new life for humanity, a life of agápē.
When we have friendship for a particular person, for his sake, we love everyone intimately connected to our friend, be they his parents, children, or spouse. Indeed, if we truly love our friend, we love even those close to him who hate or injure us, although they are not our friends because they do not wish us well. Jesus tells us that God loves all persons, for “He makes His sun rise on the evil and the good, and sends rains on the just and on the unjust.”[31] If we have a true friendship with God, we will love the same way He does, we will love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us, even though we can never be friends with them.
“You shall love [agápē] your neighbor as yourself,”[32] Jesus tells us; and in the Parable of the Good Samaritan, he explains who our neighbor is. A Jew was traveling from Jerusalem to Jericho, when robbers “stripped and beat him, and departed, leaving him for dead.”[33] By chance a priest and a Levite came to the place, saw him, and passed by on the other side of the road. “But a Samaritan, as he journeyed, came to where he was; and when he saw him, he had compassion, and went to him and bound up his wounds, pouring on oil and wine; then he set him on his own beast and brought him to an inn, and took care of him.”[34] Samaritans and Jews generally despised each other, but the good Samaritan helped the injured Jew, and thus shows us that our neighbor is anyone in need, in sickness, or in poverty. When we are friends with God, not one of our fellow human beings is a stranger. When we feed the hungry, clothe the poor, and heal the sick, we love on a supernatural plane that is available to every human being, not just saints or advanced philosophers. Jesus, through the Incarnation, raises human love to the divine, so in daily life, every person can participate in the life of God. In the deepest sense, the Christian life in this world is building up a friendship with God, beautifully summed up in the first epistle of Saint John, “If we love [agápē] one another, God abides in us and His love [agápē] is perfected in us.”[35] When God dwells in us, we are still in the world and yet lifted beyond it; we obtain a new perspective and see the divinity in each person.
Every person could become a “partaker of divine nature,”[36] because, in Christ, a Divine Person, the human and the divine are joined together in a perfect and indissoluble unity. In Christ, God Himself descended into our midst, so we “may have life, and have it abundantly.”[37] Many Church Fathers were fond of telling their brethren, “God became man so man might become God.” Made in the image of God means a divine element inheres in every human person, in Jew and Greek, in master and slave, in male and female.
In all the Greek city-states during Aristotle’s time, every household had at least three or four slaves. Not surprisingly, Aristotle claimed that “from the hour of their birth, some are marked out for subjection, others for rule.”[38] A man is a slave by nature “if he participates in reason to the extent of apprehending it in another, though destitute of it himself.”[39] Christ revealed true human nature, that advanced philosopher and ignorant peasant, that factory owner and manual worker, that husband and wife, that each human person has the capacity and the destiny to be joined to God, and that love [agápē] should govern all human relations, not economic gain or political self-interest. In the ancient world, the exalted Christian understanding of the human person was unimaginable.
We are viatores, travelers through this world, beings who are not yet, but hope to be. Except for a handful of hermits, we live in communities, our lives intertwined; we travel together in need of each other. But our messy lives of love and hate, hope and despair, success and failure help some and hinder others. Sometimes at three in the morning when it is raining the whole world over, we glimpse that without hope we become inert, despondent, and eventually die and that without love we shrink into the narrow world of self and never fulfill the vast potential hidden within each human soul. We must never forget that we are viatores, traveling through this world, stumbling, getting up, and moving on, perhaps never fully grasping who we are and never living life as well as we possibly can.
The featured image is a detail of “Achilles Lamenting the Death of Patroclus” (between 1760 and 1763) by Gavin Hamilton (1723–1798) and is in the public domain, courtesy of National Galleries of Scotland.
Endnotes
[1] Pseudo-Dionysius, The Divine Names in Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, trans. Colm Luibheid (New York: Paulist Press, 1987), 596A.
[2] Ibid., 872A.
[3] Gregory Palamas, Topics of Natural and Theological Science and on the Moral and Ascetic Life: One Hundred and Fifty Texts in The Philokalia, Vol. IV, ed. and trans. G. E. H. Palmer, Philip Sherrard, and Kallistos Ware (London: Faber and Faber, 1984), p. 382.
[4] Ibid., p. 383.
[5] John 12:25. RSV
[6] Galatians 2:20. RSV
[7] The Iliad of Homer, trans. Richard Lattimore (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1951), Bk. 23, line 555.
[8] Eva Brann, Homeric Moments: Clues to Delight in Reading the Odyssey and the Iliad (Philadelphia, PA: Paul Dry Books, 2002), p. 68.
[9] The Iliad of Homer, Bk. 23, line 885.
[10] Ibid., Bk. 23, lines 890-893.
[11] Ibid., Bk. 23, lines 894-895.
[12] James Baldwin, quoted by Jane Howard, “Doom and Glory of Knowing Who You Are,” Life magazine, 54, No. 21 (24 May 1963), p. 89.
[13] Visākhā Sutta: Visākhā, trans. Thanissaro Bhikkhu, 2012, http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/kn/ud/ud.8.08.than.html. Italics added.
[14] Peter Matthiessen, The Snow Leopard (New York: Penguin, 1978), p. 37.
[15] For a detailed discussion of the three kinds of friendship, see Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, Bks. VIII and IX. Available http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3atext%3a1999.01.0054.
[16] Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, trans. Martin Ostwald (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1962), Bk. VIII, line 1163b25.
[17] Aristotle, Rhetoric, Bk. II, Ch. 4, line 1381a. Available http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3atext%3a1999.01.0060.
[18] For a detailed discussion of our radical incompleteness, see George Stanciu, We Need Others.
[19] Plato, Symposium in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), 192e.
[20] Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving (New York: Harper, 2006 [1956]), p. 4.
[21] Ibid., p. 51.
[22] Augustine, Confessions, trans. John K. Ryan (New York: Image, 1960), I, 1.
[23] Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, Bk. VIII, Ch. 7, 1159a1.
[24] Ibid., 1159a5.
[25] Aristotle, Metaphysics, Bk. XII, Ch. 7, 1072b14.
[26] Ibid., Bk. XII, Ch. 7, 1072b4.
[27] Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, Bk. X, Ch. 7, 1177b27.
[28] Aristotle, Metaphysics, Bk. XII, Ch. 7, 1072b26.
[29] John 3:16. All quotations from the Bible are from the RSV.
[30] John 15:15.
[31] Matthew 5:45.
[32] Mathew 22:39.
[33] Luke 10:30.
[34] Luke, 10:33-34.
[35] 1 John 4:12.
[36] 2 Peter 1:4.
[37] John 10:10.
[38] Aristotle, Politics, Bk. I, Ch. 5, 1254a19.
[39] Ibid., 1254b20.