Miroslav Volf critiques ambition, love of status, and superiority, offering a Christ-shaped vision of agapic love and humble glory. “’And if you received it, why do you boast as if it were not a gift?’ If you received everything you have as a gift and if your existence as the recipient is also a gift, all ground for boasting is gone. Correspondingly, striving for superiority over others, seeking to make oneself better than others and glorying in that achievement, is possible only as an existential lie. It is not just a lie that all strivers and boasters tell themselves. More troublingly, that lie is part of the ideology that is the wisdom of a certain twisted and world-negating form of the world.” In Lecture 5, the final of his Gifford Lectures, Miroslav Volf offers a theological and moral vision that critiques the dominant culture of ambition, superiority, and status. Tracing the destructive consequences of Epithumic desire and the relentless “race of honors,” Volf contrasts them with agapic love—God’s self-giving, unconditional love. Drawing from Paul’s Christ hymn in Philippians 2 and philosophical insights from Rousseau, Nietzsche, and Max Scheler, Volf reveals the radical claim that striving for superiority is not merely harmful but fundamentally false. Through Christ’s self-emptying, even to the point of death, we glimpse a redefinition of glory that subverts all worldly hierarchies. The love that saves is the love that descends. In a world ravaged by competition, inequality, and devastation, Volf calls for fierce, humble, and world-affirming love—a love that mends what can be mended, and makes the world home again. **Episode Highlights** 1. “Striving for superiority over others… is possible only as an existential lie.” 2. “Jesus Christ was no less God and no less glorious at his lowest point.” 3. “To the extent that I’m striving for superiority, I cannot love myself unless I am the GOAT.” 4. “God cancels the standards of the kind of aspiration whose goal is superiority.” 5. “This is neither self-denial nor denial of the world. This is love for the world at work.” **Show Notes** - Agapic love vs. Epithemic desire and self-centered striving - “Striving for superiority… is possible only as an existential lie.” - Paul’s hymn in Philippians 2 and the “race of shame” - Rousseau: striving for superiority gives us “a multitude of bad things” - Nietzsche’s critique of Christianity and pursuit of power - Max Scheler: downward love, not upward striving - “Jesus Christ was no less God and no less glorious at his lowest point.” - Self-love as agapic: “I am entirely a gift to myself.” - Raphael’s *Transfiguration* and the chaos below - Demon possession as symbolic of systemic and spiritual powerlessness - “To the extent that I’m striving for superiority, I cannot love myself unless I am the GOAT.” - “The world is the home of God and humans together.” - God’s love affirms the dignity of even the most unlovable creature - Love as spontaneous overflow, not moral condescension - “Mending what can be mended… mourning with those who mourn and dancing with those who rejoice.” **Production Notes** - This podcast featured Miroslav Volf - Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa - Hosted by Evan Rosa - Production Assistance by Taylor Craig and Macie Bridge - A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about - Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give - Special thanks to Dr. Paul Nimmo, Paula Duncan, and the media team at the University of Aberdeen. Thanks also to the Templeton Religion Trust for their support of the University of Aberdeen’s 2025 Gifford Lectures and to the McDonald Agape Foundation for supporting Miroslav’s research towards the lectureship.
Miroslav Volf critiques ambition, love of status, and superiority, offering a Christ-shaped vision of agapic love and humble glory.
“’And if you received it, why do you boast as if it were not a gift?’ If you received everything you have as a gift and if your existence as the recipient is also a gift, all ground for boasting is gone. Correspondingly, striving for superiority over others, seeking to make oneself better than others and glorying in that achievement, is possible only as an existential lie. It is not just a lie that all strivers and boasters tell themselves. More troublingly, that lie is part of the ideology that is the wisdom of a certain twisted and world-negating form of the world.”
In Lecture 5, the final of his Gifford Lectures, Miroslav Volf offers a theological and moral vision that critiques the dominant culture of ambition, superiority, and status. Tracing the destructive consequences of Epithumic desire and the relentless “race of honors,” Volf contrasts them with agapic love—God’s self-giving, unconditional love. Drawing from Paul’s Christ hymn in Philippians 2 and philosophical insights from Rousseau, Nietzsche, and Max Scheler, Volf reveals the radical claim that striving for superiority is not merely harmful but fundamentally false. Through Christ’s self-emptying, even to the point of death, we glimpse a redefinition of glory that subverts all worldly hierarchies. The love that saves is the love that descends. In a world ravaged by competition, inequality, and devastation, Volf calls for fierce, humble, and world-affirming love—a love that mends what can be mended, and makes the world home again.
Episode Highlights
Show Notes
Production Notes
This transcript was generated automatically, and may contain errors.
Evan Rosa: From the Yale Center For Faith and Culture, this is For the Life of the World, a podcast about seeking and living a life worthy of our humanity.
Miroslav Volf: My love for myself should be agapic, such that it both precedes and grounds any of my achievements as I'm part of the world. In loving myself, aga, I relate to the world and to myself with the same kind of love. Kierkegaard puts this idea precisely, and as in many cases, uh, he does it unforgettably. You shall love yourself in the same way as you love your neighbor.
When you love him as yourself, if you received everything you have as a gift, if your existence as a recipient is also a gift, what is the ground for boasting? Correspondingly striving for superiority over others. Seeking to make oneself better than others and glorying in that achievement is possible only as an existential lie.
It is not just a lie that all strivers for superiority and bolsters tell themselves though, more troublingly that lie is part of the ideology that is the wisdom of a certain twisted and world denigrating and world rejecting form of the world.
Evan Rosa: If we want to embrace unconditional love for the world, we have to contend with forces that will undermine that love. Just one of those forces is the near constant striving for superiority over others. This relentless pursuit of being better than others permeates our lives and all domains practically from cradle to grave, constantly undermining.
Our intrinsic human value trading it for a never ending game of one-upmanship. In this final 2025 Gifford lecture, Miroslav Volf offers a theological and moral vision that critiques the dominant culture of ambition, superiority, and status tracing the destructive consequences of this relentless race of honors, Miroslav contrasts it with God's self-giving, unconditional love, drawing from the apostle Paul's Christ Hymn, and Philippians two on philosophical insights from Rousseau, Nietzsche and Max Scheler.
Miroslav makes a radical claim that striving for superiority isn't merely harmful, but it's fundamentally false. If everything you've received is a gift, and if your existence as the recipient is also a gift, then you have no ground for boasting. As the apostle Paul reminds the Corinthians, that means you're striving for superiority is an existential lie.
But the love that saves is the love that descends in a world ravaged by competition, inequality, and devastation. Miroslav calls for a fierce, humble, and world affirming love, a love that mends, what can be mended and makes the world home again. If you're only now joining us for this series, you might consider jumping back to the first lecture and join them in order.
Delivered by Miroslav at the University of Aberdeen for the 2025 Gifford lectures. This series is entitled Amor Mundi, and in it Miroslav considers God's love for the world and what that should mean for our love, our love of God, our love of all creation, and our love for each other. A special thanks to Paul Nimmo and Paula Duncan at the University of Aberdeen for allowing us to run these lectures in our podcast and for the support of the Templeton Religion Trust, which helped make the lectures possible.
Thanks for listening. I hope you enjoy this final lecture of Miroslav Volf’s 2025 Gifford lectures, humility and the glory of love, St. Paul and Max Scheler on love and striving for superiority.
Miroslav Volf: Thank you. Thank you, Professor Lord.
I'm grateful for all of you to have come for that have come to listen to this last, uh, lecture.
Um, some of you have seen a different title than this the present one.
Uh, something about being singed by ambition,
um, by the flame of ambition. Actually, the proper title is humility.
Or at least I decided after I've written the lecture, actually, that the proper title is Humility and Glory of Love.
In the passage from his first epistle, to which I referred in the first lecture,
Saint John writes, do not love the world or things in the world.
And if you read only that, you would say, what kind of theologian are you?
He then adds that the love of God is not in those who love the world.
In his gospel, however, he insists not just that God created all things, but that God loves all created things without reservation. A contradiction?
The key to reconciling First John,
First Epistle and his gospel on love for the world is the distinction he makes between things that come from God and things that do not.
Now, two quote unquote, things in particular do not come from God, and each is not,
strictly speaking, a thing, but a comprehensive mode of relating two things.
These two qualify, therefore, the entire lived world.
They give the world a specific form that should not be loved.
So in the name of love, we refuse to love in a certain way.
The first thing that isn't from God is a particular form of desire - epithumia.
As I have argued in lecture two. It places the self and its lack at the centre of the self's world
turning things into mere means. As it moves restlessly from one object to the, not to the next,
Slaking, slacking. Slacking? Slaking is the right word,
the self's thirst. Epithumia, I said garbages all things.
The second thing that isn't from God is pride of possessions.
Commenting on this cryptic phrase, Augustine glosses it as a kind of pride in view is the desire to promote oneself by honours,
whether because of riches or because of some power to experience oneself as great, which I think always means greater than others.
On this reading, pride of possession is striving for superiority.
In this feature of the world, the self and its thirst are once again at the centre of the self's world.
In the last lecture, I contrasted Ivan’s epithumic love with Zosima’s unconditional, agapic
love
and then noted the Zosima's love is an echo of God's unconditional love for all creatures.
In this final lecture, I will elaborate on agapic love for the world by contrasting it with the world
negating character of desire for superiority. Striving, which is how I define it,
not so much to be excellent according to some accepted standard, but to best a competitor. Like consumption construed broadly,
striving for superiority everywhere in contemporary world it is not just an aspiration of honour hungry individuals,
though it is that too, as it evident these days on the world stage.
More troublingly I'm not sure it's more troublingly, but in some ways it is more troublingly,
it is essential to the inner dynamic of most modern institutions.
It is dominant in education and sports, in economy and politics, in entertainment and arts.
In all these domains, one climbs, demonstrates oneself to oneself and to others one's worth by besting the competition.
Today, we tend to associate striving for superiority with material and cultural progress, with improved performance in all domains of life.
We have forgotten its darker side, which thinkers like Adam Smith and especially Jean-Jacques Rousseau highlighted.
And as I have learned this very evening, as Spinoza did, as apparently as well. Rousseau wrote that we owe to striving for superiority.
What is best and what is worst among men? Our virtues and our vices, our sciences and our errors, our conquerors and our philosophers.
Yes, philosophers, yes. This both/and statement gives the impression of a balance between advantages and disadvantages of striving for superiority.
But that's not what Rousseau thought.
The same sentence concludes that we owe to striving for superiority a multitude of bad things, and the small number of good. In this.
In the third lecture, I argued that striving for superiority is Nietzsche's main way of pursuing his chief good - not the only way,
but the main way of enhancing power.
I suggested also that he thinks that it hinders him from properly affirming, let alone loving, almost anything in the world.
In the present lecture, I will show how agapic love is not just a compelling alternative to epithumia,
desire for goods, epithumic desire for goods, but also equally to epithumic desire for superiority over others.
I will explain why Saint Paul rejected striving for superiority in favour of agapic love,
and how he exposed boasting that results from striving, successful striving for superiority as an existential lie.
Max Scheler will help me to reinforce Paul's position, especially to highlight the nobility of agapic love.
Unconditional neighbourly love and renunciation of status were two cardinal values of the early Christian ethic.
Love of neighbour was more, is more basic, but the renunciation of status and consequent,
I think rejection of striving for superiority is more surprising in Paul's thought, though the two are intimately related.
The rejection of striving for superiority follows from the affirmation of unconditional love.
Both are rooted in the example of Christ.
We find them seamlessly united in his hymn to Christ. Paul uses the hymn to underwrite the following advice to his congregation in the Philippi:
Do nothing out of rivalry or vainglory, but in humility regard others as more important than yourselves.
Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others.
In ancient Rome colonies like Philippi. As in Rome itself, honour was paramount.
An important road to glory involved coming to occupy
ascending order of offices. This was known as cursus honorarium - race of honours. In "Reconstructing honour in Roman Philippi"
Joseph Hellerman proposes that the story of Jesus Christ in Philippians two is about a very different race,
about cursus pudorum - race of shames, referring to Jesus Christ.
Paul writes, who, though he existed in the form of God,
did not regard equality with God as something to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave,
assuming human likeness, and being found in appearance as a human,
he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death, even death on the cross.
Now each stanza describes a step in Christ abdication of status.
Hellerman explains Jesus descends in cursus pudorum, from equality with God.
Status level one through taking on of humanity and status of a slave.
Status level two to public humiliation of death on the cross.
Status level three.
Now I'm going to make some comments about Philippians, about kenosis, and I feel like I might be bringing some lousy clothes, uh, coals to Newcastle.
Uh, there are people here who have written on this subject, uh, very eloquent, uh, books.
And some of them I dipped in, but, uh, not properly read.
So my apologies to Paul and Bruce and, uh, other folks here.
Jesus Christ starts at the very top of the honour scale.
He existed in the form of God and was in fact equal to God.
Now, kings and rulers of the period sought to usurp equality with God in order to achieve the highest superiority and exercise uncontested rule.
In the Hymn to Christ, the contrast to such usurpation of equality is not that Jesus did not aspire to equality with God.
He had no need for this because he actually he was God.
In contrast, the contrast is rather that he sought neither to hold to his equality graspingly, nor to exploit it for his own benefit.
Instead, he gave up the outward appearance of divinity that would manifest his superiority to humanity and legitimise his rule as God.
He became human. As human he took the form of slave.
As a slave, he was obedient to the point of death, and the death to which he willingly went was the most shameful execution of all.
Here, then, we have the extreme, and for us mere mortals, unattainable form of the stance
Paul is exhorting Philippian Christians to take. Jesus Christ, the one with unmatched status, acted as if even the least important human.
And most wicked person were superior to him.
He looked not out for their interest rather than his own.
Now there's a sharp break in the middle of the hymn - Christ will journey downward ended with the death on the cross.
From then on, obviously he is no longer the agent of his own story.
God the father is; therefore God exalted him highly.
One common way to understand the link, to understand that therefore between the two parts of the poem,
is to think of the exaltation as the reward for Christ's
self-abasement. The way to get to the highest honour is to run the race of shame, instead of, as one would expect, a race of honours.
On this reading, God confers honour on those who do this honourable service.
Nietzsche’s “Luke 18:14 improved”
would then be vindicated.
He who humbles himself wants to be exalted.
Now the quotation in Jesus says will be exalted, right?
So Nietzsche translated that in humility as a mode of self elevation.
It seems, however, more plausible that with the exaltation of the crucified Christ,
his entire journey from not grasping, holding onto equality with God to dying on the cross was declared as exalted.
Jesus Christ was no less God and no less glorious at his lowest point than he had
been either before the journey started or after he was almost highly exalted.
His exaltation which is about his public acknowledgement, is a declaration of the glory of God, God's radically other regarding love.
His entire journey then reveals what it means to be the Most High.
Being God, who is by definition free from pressure to outdo anyone in anything.
Christ acts as though the seemingly most insignificant person is more important than he.
In their own and limited way, human beings are empowered to regard one another as though the other were more important than they themselves.
And to look for the interest of others and not primarily their own.
This is neither self-denial nor denial of the world.
This is love for the world at work.
In the letter of Philippi, Paul was writing to a church that was willing to go where he was leading them.
In the church in Corinth, some 350km to the south.
Paul was facing outright rebellion against him. His opponents, through his opponents,
making the crucified Christ the cornerstone of spirituality amounted to an ideology of losers.
They wanted to be winners, and they preferred the theology of glory to theology of humility.
At the centre of the dispute between the parties, where their radically different assessments of striving for superiority.
And behind that dispute was a divergence about the importance of agapic love.
The position against which Paul's adversaries were rebelling is the core of what Paul is about, both as a person and apostle.
The gospel, he proclaims, unapologetically and without eloquent wisdom, can be summed up in one ignominious phrase.
The word of the cross. Christ crucified is the stumbling block to the Jews who demand signs and foolishness, to Gentiles who desire wisdom,
to those who are called both Jews and Greeks, that very weak and foolish Christ is the power of God and the wisdom of God.
And we might add that very Christ is agapic love of God incarnate.
Two kinds of love. Two kinds of power.
Two kinds of wisdom are clashing: wisdom, power and love as understood by the present fleshly and therefore perishing form of the world,
and wisdom, power and love as redefined by the crucified and resurrected Lord.
What from perspective a one appears as wisdom, power, and love looks from the other as folly, weakness, and a kind of distortion of love.
Whatever God's intentions might have been with the crucifixion of Christ,
the Corinthians wanted a God of the resurrection, not Paul's humble God of crucifixion.
To them, to make them rethink, Paul appeals to their own social status when they embraced the gospel.
Consider your own call, brothers and sisters. Not many of you were wise by human standards.
Not many were powerful. Not many worth noble birth.
For Paul, God's liberation of those who are pushed aside or exploited as inferior, in fact,
whom others treat as inferior, and who often eternally internalise such treatment and see themselves and inferior.
God's treatment of them is paradigmatic of how the humble and glorious agapic love works.
As the songs of three prominent women, Miriam, Hannah and Mary attest,
the God of the Bible is on the side of those whom others discard and mistreat, as inferior as nobodys.
In Paul's words, God, who loves all equally, chooses the things that are not,
I'm quoting him now, chooses the things that are not to reduce to nothing,
things that are. Things that are being here above all those who make themselves into something by diminishing others.
God's love is unconditional agapic, moved by the need or by any kind of predicament of the beloved.
This is the first half of Paul's case, and Corinthians are likely to be with Paul up to this point, nodding heads in the congregation here.
Applause even. That's the kind of God worth having.
God who puts to shame those who are superior and brings them to nothing.
The same God, Corinthians thought, elevates those who are inferior to the position of superiority.
But there's something deeply incongruous, inconsistent in the Corinthians position.
Theirs was an ideology of losers who craved the tables to be turned.
A stance that spring from ressentiment as Nietzsche has so powerfully argued.
They themselves are strivers for superiority, who do not seem to have, in principle anything against inferior rising others.
Their love is erotic and epithumic, greedily fixed on qualities they have been socialised to regard as marks of superiority.
Precisely at this point, Paul's argument makes a very sharp turn, at least from the Corinthians' perspective.
Why does God turn somebodies? Those who, according to ordinary standards, are generally recognised to be somebodies into nobodies?
Why? Paul responds so that no one might boast in the presence of God.
No one means not just those who are deemed superiors and seek to maintain their superiority,
but also those who are deemed inferior and aspire to achieve what has come to count as superiority.
God's action undercuts
what Luise Schottroff has called the “structure of bragging” that motivates striving for superiority at any stratum of the social hierarchy
Now God does elevate the inferior and does bring down the superior.
The God of the Hebrew Bible does. God of the gospel does as well.
But if God only did that, we might be tempted to think that God is the God of the weak and resentful.
This Nietzsche argued, perhaps, that God is even their invention.
But God does more than that. God changes the standards according to which the inferiority superiority scales that are set,
most notably by revealing the crucified Christ to be in his agapic love to be, to be, sorry.
Declaring the crucified Christ with his agapic love, to be the Lord of glory rather than the Roman Emperor.
And yet. If God only set up new standards of value.
God would be the God of radical moralists and strivers for moral superiority.
God, in fact, does more than even that, Paul insists. In getting rid of the practice of boasting,
God cancels the standards of the kind of aspiration whose goal is superiority.
However, one construes what makes people superior.
The goal isn't just for tables, as they're set to be turned - to make the strong weak and weak strong, leaving the structure of bragging in time.
The goal isn't even just to have the table set entirely differently,
to redefine what it means to be strong so that one can strive for the right kind of superiority.
The goal is to have tables that do not need to be turned or reset for each unique
member in the social body to have equal honour and receive the same care.
This is exactly what Paul goes on to argue later in that same epistle.
The kind of reordering of social reality is a chief effect of the practice of agapic love.
Now. So far, I'm explored Paul's argument against striving for superiority that leans on the character of love,
as evident in the story of God's saving people mending the world.
In first Corinthians four, he delegitimises boasting by building on character of love, evident in the story of God's creating the world.
His argument is terse. But powerful.
It takes form of three rhetorical questions.
Who makes you different, meaning better, from another?
What do you have that you did not receive?
And then if you received it, why do you boast as if it were not a gift?
Corinthians'
boasting implies that each would answer the first question what makes you something special in roughly the way a striving for superiority would?
They might answer, I do. I myself make myself distinguished, by my work and abilities.
All of this I do with God's help. Of course, God helps those who help themselves.
Therefore I merit status that I have.
Paul's second question is formulated to invalidate that implied response.
What do you have that you have not received?
The expected or at least appropriate response is not very much.
He nudges them, to affirm that everything they are and they have is received.
It is theirs above all as a gift.
As I have argued earlier in lecture four, this is what it means to be a creature, to be abiding agapically loved by God into existence.
And that's what it means to exist and have one's identity in a historically extended and planetary network of relations.
Central to Paul's critique of superiority is the command to imitate agapic love of Christ as Saviour and as creator.
Equally important is a kind of a native sense that one is a small part of interconnected world that God created out of love,
such that one's entire self is a gift of grace that received existence
and love should regulate one's relation not only to others, but I think importantly also to one's self.
Agapic self-love is not, as it may seem, a contradiction in terms.
It is a mode of relation of the self, to the self that corresponds to the very character of the self as a gift.
My life for myself ought not be erotic based on qualities and achievements.
It cannot be erotic if I, if who I think I myself am, is not to be an existential lie, because I am myself entirely a gift.
To myself. My love for myself should be agapic, such that it both precedes and grounds any of my achievements.
I am part of the world as I am part of the world in loving myself, agapic.
I relate to the world and to myself with the same kind of love.
Kierkegaard puts this idea precisely and as in many cases, uh, he does it unforgettably.
You shall love yourself in the same way as you love your neighbour, when you love him as yourself.
Paul draws the consequence for striving for superiority and boasting in the final rhetorical question.
It assumes that the Corinthians agree with him that they have received from God everything they have.
And if you received it, why do you boast as if it were not a gift?
If you received everything you have as a gift, if your existence as a recipient, is also a gift, what is the ground for boasting?
Correspondingly, striving for superiority over others, seeking to make oneself better than others,
and glorying in that achievement is possible only as an existential lie.
It is not just a lie, that's all strivers, all strivers and strivers for superiority and boasters tell themselves, though more troublingly,
that lie is part of the ideology, that is the wisdom of a certain twisted and world denigrating and world rejecting form of the world.
Over to Max Scheler. We are skipping about 18 centuries as if nothing happened.
Max Scheler is a philosopher, but the account of love he, uh,
he places is the foundation of his critique of striving for superiority is theological. To formulate it,
he draws, draws to Paul's hymn to Christ.
Here it is just at the beginning, his brief critique of striving for superiority.
And then I'll go to his account of love. In the modern world, everyone is potential competitor, all compare themselves with everyone else,
and all seek to surpass all others in order to ward off the oppressive feeling of inferiority.
Striving for superiority, Scheler notes, is intrinsically boundless.
Every position is always under threat. A mere transitional point in the universal race of all
against all. Those who have been here for the lecture, Nietzsche will recognise some of these, uh, formulations.
When superiority over others becomes the dominant value, everything becomes a means to something deemed more important superiority itself.
As I have suggested in lecture three, the consequence is a general inferioritzation making things and persons inferior.
The worth of the self is systematically eroded because it is indexed to the position that the self occupies on the inferiority superiority scale.
Since I'm always in both an inferior and superior position in regard to someone,
I often oscillate between aggressive pride and depressive self-loathing.
Next, the worth of all goods and services is eroded as well.
The value that each good has in its own right is secondary tertiary.
That its primary value is to rescue me from the sense of inferiority,
but that primarily value lasts only as long as my competitors do not possess superior goods.
To the extent that I'm striving for superiority, I cannot love myself unless I am the goat, the greatest of all time,
and I cannot love any good that is, uh, inferior to the goods of others, whether that good is my spouse, my child, or anything else.
The key for Scheler's push against striving for superiority is what he takes to be the advantage of Christian over Greek accounts of love.
Most important is the direction of love's movement.
Now, I'm not interested here really. I'm interested here only in Scheler's position.
Not whether he's gotten especially Greek love correctly.
So it's not a historical study. It's Scheler's study. For the ancient Greeks, love is a desire to ascend.
In all human relations there is a lover and the beloved, and the lover is always subordinate to the beloved.
The beloved is the object of lovers striving and the model for the lovers being willing and acting. Correspondingly.
God is never. Corresponding,
God is always only beloved, never the lover.
In contrast to God, the entire universe is a great chain, great chain in which the lower always strives for and is attracted by higher,
which never turns back, but strives and is turned upward toward, but is still higher.
This process continues up to the deity which itself does not love,
but represents the eternally resting and unifying goal of all these manifold movements of love. Complete in itself,
the perfect being cannot love. If it did, it would only love itself.
In Christianity, the movement of love is reversed.
The perfect one loves but is imperfect.
The highest one loves those who are the lowest.
The Messiah comes to the sinners and publicans.
Scheler is drawing here mainly his contrast, mainly from the life of Christ.
But he's reading them through the story to Paul's hymn to Christ.
Commenting on that hymn, he writes an event that is monstrous for the man of antiquity that is absolutely paradoxical according to his axioms.
Is supposed to have taken place in Galilee.
God spontaneously descended to man, became a servant, and died the bad servant's death on the cross.
They then change radically the nature of God's relation to the world, and therefore also human relation, both to God and to the world.
God is no longer the internal, unmoving goal like a star,
for the love of all things, moving the world as beloved moves the lover.
Now the very essence of God is to love is to serve.
Creating, willing and acting are derived from these original essential qualities.
Consequently, the greatest good is no longer some thing or some state of affairs, but an act.
It is the value of love itself as love, not for its results and achievements.
But what kind of love is this? First, it is a love that does not spring from the need alone.
It is not epithumic of love. All acts motivated by need consumed themselves in realisation of the desired goal.
A point which, as we have heard, Schopenhauer
and Nietzsche made as well.
For Scheler, loves action does not originate from need, but rather love itself is the origin of action and the goal of action.
Far from spending itself and disappearing in its goals, love grows in its action.
Second to rational principle,
No rational principle regulates who and what ought to be loved, or how much love ought to be bestowed on those who ought to be loved.
Love is not tailor to the worthiness of the beloved.
It is not erotic in my sense, but unconditional agapic.
All are worthy of love, Scheler writes.
Friends and enemies. The good and the evil.
The noble and the common. The cornerstone of Scheler's argument is that is the claim that to love, to serve,
to bend down is God's own essence.
But one can serve in many different ways and for many different reasons.
One can be also forced to serve as many are even today as well.
When one serves freely out of love, Scheler notes two ways in which one can do so.
A love that serves can be motivated by self loathing, surprisingly by hatred of one's own weakness and misery, goaded by the sense of inferiority,
lovers then help the downtrodden. For instance, in order to acquire a reputation for generosity and strength,
to show themselves as superior both to those standing by idly and the downtrodden themselves.
In my terminology, such service is the epithumic.
In contrast to the false lovers search for superiority, genuine lovers are not after their own glory.
Instead, they seek to affirm the positive value of those they love, however weak and lowly they might be.
That's because genuine love is not predicated on lack, but on abundance.
It is a spontaneous overflow. It is not motivated by the need of lovers, not even by the need to free themselves of the burden of their goods.
As we saw, was the case
with Zarathustra.
Love presupposes that one is rich enough, that one feels that one is rich enough to freely share one's being and possessions.
Though genuine lovers aim to do good, usefulness is not their main concern.
They worry, in fact, of the insulting condescension toward recipients that often accompanies our giving. More important than usefulness,
Scheler argues, controversially, is the act of loving itself.
His example is the poor widow who gave to the temple treasury two small copper coins, while the rich gave vast sums.
Jesus praises her for having put in more than all, because she, out of her power to, has put all she had to live on.
Almost nothing can be worth more
then vastness of sums. The strange math works because the main value of the gift lies in the loving act itself.
It illuminates and ennobles the loving person.
That is also the main, not the sole, but the main benefit
the loving God imparts to the beloved.
Instead of underscoring their inadequacy as some gift giving, does it illumines their soul by celebrating their inestimable worth.
Scheler's main example is Francis of Assisi kissing the festering wounds of lepers.
The kiss enacts the conviction that even nauseating leprosy has not diminished preciousness of the leper.
The act of love, unsullied either by the plague of inferiority or by the craving for superiority,
affirms the dignity of even the most fragile, downtrodden, seemingly unlovable creature, whether human or non-human.
Agapic love for the world. It illuminates and celebrates
the world. I've come to my conclusion for the lectures as a whole.
These lectures have been about the effect of the faith in the God of Jesus Christ,
on the lack of, um, or the lack thereof on our relationship to the world.
Over the course of these lectures hovered the enormous figure of Augustine, his history shaping account of our relation to God and to the world.
Though we should appreciate the world as we would a beautiful engagement ring.
We should love truly only the heavenly bridegroom.
Augustine's critics mostly agree that turning the world largely into a means for union with God is bad for the world.
Some even insist that it ramified 15 centuries later, into a deep ecological crisis of today.
I'm kind of sceptical of this, but let's let it stand for a moment.
In the course of these lectures, I have pushed against Augustine's account of the relations between human God and the world.
I have argued that the world is not the space from which to flee into eternity,
but the domicile to perceive as a gift and to enjoy and love precisely because we love the giver.
I have also argued that the epithumic love is not the great, world affirming good that we, moderns in particular, have made it to be.
Augustine himself points to a personal agent involved agent involving aspects of epithumic as badness.
The ineradicable restlessness of our hearts can find no rest in the world.
Nothing like blessedness is possible within the frame of the world alone.
He's right about that.
I hope that I have shown that also, that unleashing our unendingly, escalating desires upon the world is bad for the world as well.
Much worse, in fact, than reducing is to a springboard to God.
As Hannah Arendt has suggested, it triggers a repudiation of the earth more intense than the faith in the father in heaven.
As a springboard to God. The world is still God's creation.
A beautiful engagement ring to be appreciated, just not loved in its own right, as if it were not a sacrament of the relationship with the lover.
Even the kind of relationship to the world Augustine does recommend can push against revocation of the world,
against letting the void of our once swallow it, and the flame of our desire scorched.
Shortly before writing this lecture, I came across Sunil Amrit,
colleague at Yale book "The Burning Earth: A Global Ecological History of the past 500 years."
He writes, at the beginning, the transformation of the world began with desire, even as most human lives scrabbled for subsistence.
The desire of powerful rulers for symbol of rank and distinction, for pearls and pepper,
for gold and silver and sugar, as well as desire for maximum profit in the shortest time.
The body of the book connects astonishing human achievement with ravaged earth and
millions of maimed and destroyed human lives in the course of five centuries.
In the epilogue, titled "Road to Repair", Amrit calls for a stern love of the kind that- [Stumbles over words]
My dyslexia has totally kicked in. What's the first name of Gandhi?
There we go. I can recognise it.
I just can't pronounce it right now.
That that, one exemplified, and Martin Luther King practised in seeking to build the beloved community. Derided by many political realists
as too soft, King nevertheless insisted that love is exactly what the civil rights struggle demands.
In my own ways, I have argued that the that the damage Earth two and all that is in it groans under our rapaciousness,
and it demands that we love it. It ought to be loved into its own dynamic and always incomplete wholeness.
Not mainly because its revenge is fierce, which is true too, but because its value is inestimable.
A more apt image for the world than Augustine's beautiful ring is the image of home, the world as the home of God and humans together.
As I noted in lecture four, that vision was originally articulated between the lines in the first book of the Hebrew Bible.
The world God created bears the subtle but unmistakeable marks of a temple.
We generally think of a temple as demarcated holy space within the secular environment.
In Genesis, the whole creation is the temple.
The two last chapters of the last book of the Christian Bible sketch and intensified version of this image.
The entirety of the world has become holy. In fact, it has become Holy of Holies in virtue of God's presence in it.
But what about the world? Between the primordial beginning and post historical ending? Between Genesis and Revelation 21 and 22,
Two gospel stories, one told after another but partly, with partly concurrent action,
illustrate well the way to think about our relation to the world for which I was arguing.
In these lectures, I'm referring to the story of Christ's transfiguration and the story of a boy possessed by an evil spirit.
In what was for centuries considered to be the most famous painting in the West,
Raphael portrayed these two stories on a single vertical canvas split in the middle.
The mountaintop scene of the transfiguration above, the scene of demon possession below.
In "The Birth of Tragedy", Nietzsche saw the top panel Apollonian in the top, Apollonian world of illusion, and in the bottom one,
the chaotic Dionysian world that gave rise to the dark wisdom of the ancient Greek satyr silliness that it is best not to have been born.
And if one has been born, to die young.
In Raphael's painting there indeed is something dreamy about the top of the mountain world.
Transfigured Jesus, robed in extraterrestrial white with eyes turned upward, is flanked on each side by Moses and Elijah,
and the wind from below is making all three levitate against the bright cloud of divine presence.
In Nietzsche's reading,
the scene was designed to divert our minds from the chaos below so that we can sit quietly in our rocking rowboat in the middle sea,
absorbed in contemplation.
Now Apostle Peter, the Apostle Peter, witnessing Christ's transfiguration, experiences the situation in a kind of simplified Nietzschean line.
He wants the dream to last, and, not quite knowing what he was saying, proposes to make dwellings on the mountaintop.
The way Raphael paints the scene, however, pushes against the instinct
like Peter's and Nietzsche's.
You can't see it in the in the painting, but if you look at the painting, I'm told, because I actually haven't looked at it in this fashion at all.
So trust my colleague John Hare, who I'm not sure from whom he got this idea, but, uh, I trust him.
So, um. As we are looking at the painting, it is as though we are level with each panel.
We are at the same time in transcendent glory and in earthly chaos and despair.
Raphael painted two persons from the troubled crowd below, pointing toward the mountaintop.
The source is good, to put it, of effective power and succour.
In the gospel story, however, it is not just that these two scenes and interacting with one another, the problem below and the solution above,
which is true, but not just that suffering and bewilderment are in one way also inside the scene of glory.
Moses, a nation builder and lawgiver, is also the great, the reluctant liberator.
His image evokes the long years of Israel's oppression and slavery as well.
Elijah is both despairing and triumphant prophet who stood against royal overreach and castigated the false, false call to fertility.
Most importantly, there is the heavenly voice addressing Peter, James and John, declaring, This is my son, the beloved.
Listen to him. Strong and contradictory emotions are associated with beloved sons in the Hebrew Bible tenderness, terror, suffering, hope.
Isaac was the beloved son who almost got crucified.
Sorry. Sacrificed. I'm going to the son who is going to be crucified.
Sacrificed. Joseph, too, was beloved and considered himself lucky to have been sold into slavery rather than robbed of life.
Each of them, in his own way, faced death and was then resurrected.
So the voice is not just announcing Jesus oneness with God that this is the son.
Equally significantly, it implies that the path to salvation is not power and glory, but suffering
agapic love. In the scene just preceding transfiguration,
Jesus was teaching about just such path of suffering love, and above all,
about salvation through his own suffering and also suffering of his disciples in mending the world.
The divine voice underscores that teaching.
Listen to him. The horrors are not just below.
They are also in what Nietzsche calls illusion.
They are what the mountaintop experience is fundamentally about.
The God of unconditional love.
Who grieved over possible destruction of the world in Genesis six is the God who gets crucified to save the world from its captivity to sin.
It was the chaos below, not illusion above,
that interested Nietzsche the most. It was,
It symbolised for him the nature of the world, essentially chaotic, impervious to any fundamental reform along moral lines.
In his view, a life that's worth living will involve the embrace of chaos and the will to power within it.
For Schopenhauer,
the scene below would not so much symbolise chaos as the utter incapacity to avoid suffering a world we do best to hate and will it's nothingness.
Schopenhauer and Nietzsche are mistaken in their respective accounts of the world and our relation to it.
At least they're mistaken from the perspective of the faith in the God of Jesus Christ.
Still, there is something very dark about the world in which God gets crucified, in which God is killed for loving the world.
At the bottom half of Raphael's painting, we see underscore that it would be a mistake to minimise chaos.
And to think that we can manage it with mere moral suasion and social reform.
Echoes of Dostoyevsky. The boy possessed by a demon is only one of many instances of demon possession
in Mark. Demon possession is, of course, not a medical diagnosis, but a description of an experienced phenomenon.
The boy was utterly in the power of murderously destructive alien force.
His father was in despair, unable to help him.
Jesus disciples, too, were impotent, facing an illness that had afflicted the boy since early childhood.
Within the good creation, a chaotic power has broken loose and made life nearly impossible.
The father who brings the boy to the disciples, and the disciples who try but fail to heal him, love him in their way
agapically, impotent. Their actions say, I want you to be, and I want you to be well.
I will not break faith with you. Even if it is Jesus who heals the boy.
The father and the disciples are part of the community of care.
Talk of the demonic possession is ancient, but the feeling of being in the grip of power we cannot control is very much still with us.
All our sophisticated technologies designed to help,
not withstanding. Indeed, partly because of these same technologies, it is so. In private lives we are often in the grip of an uncontrollable power.
But we experience powerlessness also in systemic inertia of technological development, economy and politics.
We often feel that we live in a runaway world with no escape ramp in sight.
Another instance. Another instance of possession in Mark is a man from Gerasa.
He lived among the tombs naked and his fierce power was such that he could not be restrained for harming himself.
As he told Jesus he was possessed by a legion.
Some interpreters, New Testament scholars,
suggest that he symbolically represents, that his demon possession symbolically represents occupying power of Rome,
against which the native population was helpless.
Jesus healed the man as he healed the boy.
Rome's oppression remained. So did illnesses and incapacity of many individuals he encountered.
Still in healing some Jesus planted seeds of a new form of the world in the old one.
Amor mundi. Love for the world. By practising fierce, unconditional love,
we should join God in keeping unbreakable faith with a world that so stubbornly resists being healed.
Mending what can be mended. Improving what can be improved.
Mourning with those who mourn and dancing with those who rejoice.
Thank you very much.
Evan Rosa: for the life of the world as a production of the Yale Center For Faith and Culture at Yale Divinity School. This episode featured Miroslav Volf production assistance by Taylor Craig and Macie Bridge. I'm Evan Rosa and I edit and produce the show. For more information, visit us online at faith.yale.edu.
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