Pedagogy and the Christian
Law of Love
Marshall Gregory
 Love
is foundational for all teachers, who need a version of love
that evades sentimentality and yet respects its recipients,
that challenges students and yet mediates toughness with charity.
The law of love expressed in the Judeo-Christian tradition
helps teachers critique empty forms of love at the same time
that it helps them employ productive forms of love in the
classroom. We can choose love only if we humble ourselves
sufficiently to look through, rather than at, the tricky lens
of pride and passion and see love residing out there, beyond
ego. The proper love between teachers and students, the love
that Jesus commands us to most fundamentally, is neither eros
nor philia but agape, which underwrites all other loves. This
love offers three distinct advantages to teacherly practice:
it enables us to distance ourselves from the entanglements
of personality; it offers us a way of understanding the kinds
of challenges we extend to our students; and it gives us a
way of positioning our teaching in relation to other professional
goals and activities. Teachers who rely on the energy of pedagogical
passion sometimes mistakenly think that because agape operates
on principle rather than on personality, it must be either
cold or uninterested in individual students. However, agapic
teaching can indeed be passionate, but its passions derives
from a vision of the ends of good teaching and an understanding
of human nature - of both teacher and student - because it
stems from religious convictions that can be matched with
specific Christian doctrines.(1)
Keywords: love, agape, standards, sinfulness,
teacherly practice, ends of education.
About ten years ago in a first-year writing class, I stumbled
with my students into a conversation about teaching, the vividness
of which remains with me today. In every first-year class
I teach I try to help my students recognize and think about
different styles of pedagogy which they may encounter. On
that day, however, for reasons unknown, things got personal.
Not unpleasant, just personal. On that day, being a teacher
talking about teaching was like being a play director talking
about play production. It made my students curious to see
what was behind the set. They seemed especially interested
in and somewhat dubious about my claim that as a teacher I
felt partly responsible for their development as human beings.
More than one of them seemed convinced that as long as I possessed
the appropriate credentials for teaching writing, I should
not have to worry about anything else. I replied abstractly
that teaching is more complicated than being professional,
but this did not satisfy them. Like a litter of puppies intent
on ripping up a newspaper, my students formed a collective
determination to make me get specific. They insisted on knowing
why I felt personally responsible for their development.
Seeing their seriousness, I got serious, too. ‘Caring
about you’, I said, ‘is the heart of my teacherly
commitment. Like your parents, pastors, and peers, I am one
of those people who can potentially influence you to become
the kind of persons you turn out to be’. ‘Clarify
this’, they demanded. ‘What does your being a
specialist in literature and writing have to do with the persons
we become?’ ‘My teaching influences who you are
and who you become’, I said, ‘because insofar
as I persuade you to change what you know, I can’t help
but persuade you to change who you are. A vast portion of
who you are just is a matter of what you know. Besides, I
don’t teach morally neutral, semi-entertaining skills
like how to peel an apple in one unbroken string. I help you
learn to deal with ideas and to express your views with thoughtful
precision. Learning these skills makes you a different person.
When your ideas change, you change. I can’t ignore the
fact that I play an active and guiding role in your makeover.
I’m not a passive spectator.’ (I was beginning
to warm to the topic.) ‘As a teacher I have to think
hard’, I said, ‘not primarily about teaching writing
- I’ve got the skills part of this job down pat - but
primarily about who I should be as the kind of person who
will help determine the kind of persons you will be.’
So far this discussion had opened the door onto an interesting
and completely unexpected topic, but I did not know that the
door was about to swing back and hit me in the head. ‘Okay’,
said a bright young woman, ‘so when you ask yourself
what kind of person you should be - as a teacher, I mean -
what’s your answer?’ ‘Well’, I said
blithely, not seeing my own words in advance, ‘I think
my job is to love you’. In the slight pause that ensued,
I suddenly had a vision of my own words being given a sports
penalty. Ask the referee to start this play over, I thought.
What are you saying? But my words continued tumbling. ‘Unless
I love you properly’, I went on, ‘I cannot teach
you well. Grounding my teaching in love is the only way I
can make sure that I do this job right.’ The air suddenly
went out of the room. A sleeping snail makes more noise than
the eighteen pairs of eyes that stared at me. Feeling now
like a very startled snail myself, I stared back at them.
The truth is, I wasn’t sure what I meant by what I’d
just said. I did not know that I had a view about teacherly
love until I found myself saying it.
I have never pursued this exact conversation with students
again, but I am grateful that I stumbled into it that one
time, however awkwardly, because my comment felt as if it
came from some deep source, as if I were struggling to express
something lying at the core of not just my professional life,
but at the core of my existence. In The Merchant of Venice,
Portia says to her hand maiden, Nerissa, ‘I can easier
teach twenty what were good to be done than to be one of the
twenty to follow my own teaching’.(2) In what follows
here, I invite you to trace my effort to be one of my own
twenty - that is, to follow my own teaching - as I try to
come to a better understanding of this sudden and unexpected
message that came from some deep source in my teacher’s
heart. I believe some of the issues buried in that message
are foundational for all teachers.
Treacle Love
The first thing I don’t mean by loving my students is
floating lazily in that swirling current of contemporary treacle
which unthinkingly advances love as a mawkish, new-age answer
to all human problems, as if love were like magic crystals
or herbal tonics. According to a Petula Clark song still played
endlessly on golden-oldie radio stations, ‘What the
world needs now is love, sweet, love. That’s the only
thing that there’s just too little of.’ On the
contrary, this is just the kind of love there is too much
of. I agree with the novelist, Michael Blumenthal, who fumes
about a ‘Love Letter and Thank You Note’ that
a young colleague of his wrote to her students when she was
departing Blumenthal’s university. In Blumenthal’s
account, his colleague in her farewell note ‘declared
her devotion to what she described as “student-centered,
relation-based teaching”, and attributed her own, self-described
success . . . to the fact that she “love[s] [her] students”’.
The colleague claimed to love her students because ‘I
saw such inspiring, fragile, invincible, vulnerable beauty
in them . . . the same kind of beauty I see in the just-about-to-fall
spring petals on the trees’.(3)
Blumenthal nearly retches in response to this treacle love,
and is moved to say to students in his farewell letter, ‘And
now, my young friends . . . let me make a terrible confession:
I do not love you. . . . I love my son and my close friends
. . . but I was not brought here - your former professor’s
mushy rhetoric notwithstanding - to love you, but, rather,
to teach you.’ But here’s the point at which my
sympathy with Blumenthal’s gag reflex gets complicated,
for while I also reject pedagogical sentimentality, I don’t
want to retreat to the position which he now takes, and which
my students ten years ago took: the instrumentalist position
that my teacherly job is to teach professional content only,
not to care about my students as persons. Despite its dangers,
‘love’ is for me the only word that captures my
deepest sense of what it means to desire for other persons
not what they may want, but what is best for them, measured
by the distance between what they are and what they might
become. But the helium-light love of pop songs and new-age
vapors fails to give me any traction. I need a notion of love
that has less to do with feeling gushy and more to do with
behaving coherently. In short, I need a version of love that
contains standards.(4) Christian insights offer me assistance,
for the necessity of standards has everything to do with Christian
love.
The Law of Christian Love
The Judeo-Christian law of love is profoundly different from
the triviality of Hallmark cards, new-age ‘spirituality’,
and TV sound bites. The Christian notion of love strikes out
at once for deep water. Christianity views love not as a feeling,
or not just a feeling, but as a standard of conduct. For Christians,
love may sometimes be a matter of how you feel, but it’s
always a matter of what you do. Love is Christians’
most fundamental standard of behavior; they consider themselves
made and judged by its law. Jesus articulates the law of love
in Matthew 22:36-40 - ‘Thou shalt love the Lord thy
God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all
thy mind’ - as ‘the first and greatest commandment’.
He also adds, ‘and the second [commandment] is like
unto [the first], Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself’.(5)
Finally, Jesus offers an even more stringent formulation of
the law of love in John 15:12 when he says, ‘This is
my commandment, that ye love one another ‘as I have
loved you’ (emphasis added). Now this commandment is
different from ‘love thy neighbor as thyself’.
The commandment to love one another ‘as I have loved
you’ challenges what is most difficult: to overcome
our natural inclination toward rationalization and self-love
in favor of a love for others that attempts to model itself
on Christ’s love for humanity.(6) Jesus’s Passion
and his Cross, both as facts and symbols, confront us with
a commandment not only to give up that which we are most loath
to yield, namely our self-interest, our self-protection, and,
most of all, our self-love, but, on certain occasions, to
face the prospect of sacrificing our own interests for those
of others.
When I say that what we are most loath to yield is self-love,
I refer to that predilection which Christianity views as the
aboriginal human sin: the kind of self-love which induces
human beings to deny their sinful nature, a self-love which
persistently (mis)leads us to explain our destructive and
cruel conduct as the consequence of forces and agents other
than, to adapt a line from a Wordsworth sonnet, ‘the
gliding of our own sweet will’.(7) We say, for example,
following Plato’s analysis, that we do evil things because
of our finiteness, weakness, and ignorance,(8) but that as
soon as we find the proper educational cure for weak ignorance,
then we will stop behaving wickedly. But Plato’s belief
that wickedness is just a form of ignorance blinds him to
human perversity, and, in his blindness, prevents him from
giving any deep account of it. If education and knowledge
could cure wickedness, we’d have found a way to school
ourselves into virtuous conduct long before now. Or we say
that we do evil things because of our lower nature - the lustful
and irrational demands of the body - but that as soon as we
find the proper educational cure for bodily importunities,
perhaps by developing our minds or by mortifying the flesh,
then we will cease doing wicked deeds. St. Paul pays eloquent
testimony in Romans 7:19-24 to the typical human tendency
to attribute our wickedness to ‘the sin that dwelleth
in me’, as if sin forcibly breaks down the gates of
our better nature, when the truth is that we often open the
gates to the city all too willingly. Or we say that we do
evil not because we really want to but because we are forced
to do so by necessity, perhaps ‘national security’,
defense of ‘our way of life’, and so on.(9) Citing
the public good is a chilling way to justify doing evil deeds
on a massive scale, as compared to the more limited scope
of evil that we as individuals commit in everyday circumstances.
Finally, we justify our destructiveness by saying that we
are victimized and warped by corrupt institutions and historical
social baggage, but that as soon as we reform those institutions,
which we are always in the process of doing, then we will
be liberated to be our ‘true’ selves: innocent,
creative, and ever-loving.
The point to such rationalizations is their blind insistence
that we don’t choose. If we do evil but don’t
choose it, how can we be bad? We let ourselves off the moral
hook by pretending to be victims who are misled into wickedness
when we would really all prefer goodness. Our pretense usually
rides the rails of complex and tortured rationalizations that
mirror Milton’s representation of Satan’s serpentine
movements as he begins to lead Eve to the forbidden tree:
‘He leading swiftly rolled / In tangles, and made intricacies
seem straight, / To mischief swift’. (Book IX, ll. 631-33)
To all of humanity’s twisted and tangled rationalizations
designed ‘to make intricacies seem straight’,
as we run headlong ‘to mischief swift’, Christianity
responds with a resounding ‘humbug’. Christianity
views all such rationalizations as self-induced falsehood
and delusion. Christian thought recognizes that social institutions
and bodily importunities and confused thinking are forces
that human beings must deal with, but it also views them as
inadequate explanations of why human beings choose evil rather
than good. The Christian view tells us that it is our desire
to give in to compulsion, rather, that leads us into evil.
In the words of Reinhold Niebuhr, ‘man is not divided
against himself so that the essential man can be extricated
from the nonessential. Man contradicts himself within the
terms of his true essence. His essence is free self-determination.
His sin is the wrong use of his freedom and its consequent
destruction’. Niebuhr continues:
‘The Christian estimate of human evil is so serious
precisely because it places evil at the very center of human
personality: in the will. This evil cannot be regarded complacently
as the inevitable consequence of his finiteness or the fruit
of his involvement in the contingencies and necessities
of nature. Sin is occasioned precisely by the fact that
man {sic] ... pretends to be more than he is. ... The law
of his nature is love, a harmonious relation of life to
life in obedience to the divine center and source of his
life. This law is violated when man seeks to make himself
the center and source of his own life. ... Man, in other
words, is a sinner not because he is one limited individual
within a whole but rather because he is betrayed by his
very ability to survey the whole to imagine himself the
whole.’(10)
According to this view, original sin is not some nasty joke
that God has played on humanity, not some built-in defect
like a faulty computer chip, but is, rather, bound up with
the temptation to turn any virtue or strength we have into
a vice or a weakness by pushing it too far or by relying on
it too exclusively. We all have that self-love in our nature
which spurs us to feel and frequently to proclaim that we
are the center of things, sufficient to all purposes and ends.
By ‘in our nature’, I do not refer to a directly
inherited genetic sinfulness, but to something just as inevitable
that I call cognitive transcendence, which we indirectly inherit
as the by-product of a brain that gives us the cognitive power
of continuous self-inspection. The Christian insight about
original sin - about the inevitability of sinful human pride
- cuts to the bone. What this insight recognizes is that our
cognitive transcendence - our ability, that is, to know that
we are knowers; to know that we are thinking; to know, even,
that we are thinking about our thinking - hands to us our
freedom of will, and, with that freedom, the occasion for
sin and the need for redemption.
We can choose because we can think about what choices mean,
and we can do this on at least three important planes. First,
we can think about what choosing means with respect to the
integrity of ourselves as choosers. Second, we can think about
the consequences for others of our choices. Third, we can
think about whether our choices might violate or embrace the
law of love. Whether we do think on these three planes is
another issue, but the fact that we can means that when we
don’t we are also making a choice. Self-love germinates
in the soil of our self-satisfied sense that our freedom of
choice places us in control of our lives and makes us self-sufficient.
We mistake our capacity for cognitive transcendence, which
we really do possess, with our desire for independent existential
completeness, which we can never possess. ‘What a piece
of work is man!’, says Hamlet. ‘How noble in reason,
how infinite in faculty, in form and moving how express and
admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how
like a god - the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals!’(11)
The Christian response to these words is that if sinful humanity
ever hopes to save itself from the sin of pride, it must stop
believing its own propaganda. We who write the press releases
about our own goodness cannot be trusted to tell the truth.
However, we really can choose love if only we humble ourselves
sufficiently to look through, rather than at, the tricky lens
of pride and passion and see love residing out there, beyond
ego. When we look at that lens we only see our own reflection;
when we look through it we see realities that lie far beyond
our subjective self. In we give up our habit of living by
evasions, fantasy, and rationalization, we really can choose
to walk the path of love ‘as I have loved you’.
Either free will puts that choice in our hands or it is not
free will.
The Law of Love in Relation to Pedagogy
But what does ‘as I have loved you’ actually
mean for teachers? The book of James gives one answer to this
question, a scary answer: ‘Let not many of you become
teachers, my brethren, for you know that we who teach shall
be judged with greater strictness’.(12) This injunction
brings into hard focus the need for teachers to choose carefully
the kind of love, or whatever other ultimate value they select,
upon which they found their pedagogy. My concern is to understand
as fully as possible how the commandment to love others ‘as
I have loved you’ translates into teacherly attitudes
and teacherly conduct.
It will help our quest if we try to sort out different kinds
of love more precisely. Traditional taxonomies of different
loves consistently distinguish among agape, eros, and philia.(13)
All three of these loves - agape, the steadfast love of God
and neighbor; eros, the love of preferential desire; and philia,
the love shared by friends - play a role in everyone’s
life at some point, but only one of them is the grounds of
all other kinds of love, and only one of them can guide teachers
toward consistently productive relations with students. Among
these three, eros cannot describe the proper love between
teachers and students, for eros refers to appraisal love,
a love, that is, which appraises the value of a thing and
then desires it. While teachers may have desire on behalf
of their students, they do not, in any proper relationship,
desire their students as such. Students are not our other
half.(14) Nor does philia describe the proper kind of love
between teacher and student, for the love of friends is the
love of equals, and while all of us, including teachers and
students, possess equality in some elemental sense as fellow
human beings, students and teachers are not equal in their
relations as students and teachers. Students are not our friends
- they are not our equals in the way our friends are - for
students are our charges, our responsibility. They may become
our friends when they cease being our students, but as long
as they remain our students we owe them a kind of love that
relieves them of the responsibility of tending to our needs
as we tend to theirs - a responsibility we cannot relieve
our real friends of - in the interest of helping them travel
the distance between what they are and what they might be.
When Jesus commanded his disciples, and by extension commands
us, to love one another ‘as I have loved you’,
the love he commands us to most fundamentally is, then, neither
eros nor philia, but agape, which underwrites the other loves.
In the words of theologian Tim Jackson,
‘”Agape” is the New Testament Greek word
for the steadfast love God has for human beings, as well
as for the neighbor-love humans are to have for one another
… [A]gape is characterized by three interpersonal
features: (1) unconditional commitment to the good of others,
(2) equal regard for the well-being of others, and (3) passionate
service open to self-sacrifice for the sake of others. The
first feature is suggested by the steadfastness of God’s
covenant with Israel and the graciousness of God’s
gift of the Messiah; the second feature reflects the inclusiveness
and attentiveness of Jesus’s practice of neighbor-love;
and the third feature follows, at a respectful distance,
the example of Golgotha/Calvary … [With regard to
this third feature,] I do not make actual sacrifice essential
to every expression of agape. Openness to it under the right
circumstances, however, I do take to be definitive of the
virtue.’(15)
At last, I seem to have discovered what I might have meant
by my assertion to my students that my role as a teacher is
to love them properly. As I have already confessed, I was
muddled about what I meant at that time, and if anyone had
suggested that what I meant possessed a religious idea at
its core, I would have been flabbergasted. Be that as it may,
I now think that I was awkwardly trying to articulate the
Christian notion of agape. In Christian terms, to love my
students ‘as I have loved you’, demands that I
relate to them according to the three features of agape: first,
to be unconditionally committed to their good; second, to
have regard for the well-being of all of them equally; and,
third, to be open to the possibility of self-sacrifice on
their behalf, when and if appropriate circumstances demand
it.
Self-sacrifice is disturbing to think about. I’m sure
that seeking it out is, at least most of the time, to commit
the sin of pride, but I’m also sure that running from
it when it is really called for violates the law of love.
Jacques Maritain says that ‘[t]he saints and the martyrs
are the true educators of mankind’,(16) and I see what
he means, but surely saints and martyrs define the extreme
upper limits of self-sacrifice. If we wait for the moments
to be heroic, we may miss the homelier occasions that call
for forms of sacrifice that actually lie within our everyday
grasp. We do not need to wait on the occasions for martyrdom
in order to say yes to agape-based appeals for sacrifice.
When a first-year frightened about his grades shows up in
my office door at 5:30 p.m. on a day when I am exhausted and
ready to step out the door for home, my decision to take off
my coat and invite him in for a consultation is a sacrifice
of my comfort, a sacrifice of family time, and perhaps a sacrifice
of my research and writing as well, but, as long as I offer
that sacrifice without either grudging it on the one hand
or taking excessive pride in it on the other hand, it is also
an expression of agape. If I can remain true to the law of
love on such homely and unheroic occasions as these, I will
leave martyrdom to others for as long as I am able, hopefully
for a life time.
Insofar as I apply the demands of agape to my everyday teacherly
functioning, doing so grounds me in a stance that helps me
avoid the temptation to stroke my own ego (‘No one knows
this material better than I do!’), the temptation to
manipulate my students to stroke my ego (‘How they adore
me!’), and the temptation to assess my worth and success
primarily by criteria that have little or nothing to do with
providing proper care to my students’ needs (‘I
may not be the world’s best teacher, but I published
three articles this year!’). In Tim Jackson’s
words again, ‘Christianity equates agape with uplifting
others to their supernatural origin and end, in ways more
primitive than eros and more profound than either justice
or friendship … Human sanctity precedes personal dignity,
in the sense that creatures’ impersonal needs and passive
potentials, engaged by agape, come before their meritorious
actions and mutual enjoyments’. (Jackson’s emphasis)(17)
Having come to comparative clarity - I certainly do not claim
ultimate clarity - about what teacherly love of students might
mean, let me point out three distinct advantages it offers
to teacherly practice. First, taking agape as the foundation
of my pedagogy enables me to distance myself from the entanglements
of personality - those entanglements of personal likes and
dislikes - that can corrupt teacher/student relations with
both petty and fiery emotions. As a teacher committed to agape,
I have to love even the students I don’t like, and agape
prohibits me from ever excusing a deteriorating relationship
with a student by merely saying that ‘he and I have
a personality conflict’. It may be true that we have
a personality conflict, but this is irrelevant to my proper
teacherly functioning. As a committed agapist, I owe all my
students - and I owe all of them equally - the same kind of
care. From this perspective it does not matter which students
I am fond of or not, which students appreciate or fail to
appreciate my efforts, students are more or less socially
cultivated, or which students are like or unlike me in terms
of shared tastes and habits. The Christian version of agape
tells me that all my students are children of God, or, to
put it in naturalistic terms, they are all human beings, and
as human beings I owe all of them the same quality of care
that I give to any one of them. If they were my friends, I
would expect them to return my care - this is the duty and
joy of the love that is philia - but agape is the love that
bestows worth regardless of reciprocity. As Tim Jackson puts
it, in an agapic relationship, ‘reciprocity is not a
prerequisite and unilateral or unrecognized giving is often
the norm. . . . Agape wants communion, to be sure, but it
first promotes the other as such’.(18) As a committed
agapist, I must promote the good and the well-being of the
other in the person of my students as such.
Second, agape offers me a way of understanding the kinds
of challenges I extend to my students, as well as my proper
attitude in extending these challenges. If my task as a strong
agapist is to promote the good and the well-being of my students
as such, it follows that I am obliged to be kind but it does
not follow that I have to be easy pickings for student entreaties
to go easy on them because, as they sometimes argue, they
have other classes, busy social lives, or problems with room
mates. Agape gives me no reason not to criticize a bad job
as a bad job merely to avoid hurting a student’s feelings.
I am sorry when students are hurt by my giving them a lower
grade than they wanted, but I’m not very sorry, frankly,
for I know that I hurt them worse, and I violate my care for
their well-being, if I fail to hold them to standards that
help them grow. Teachers must never let their commitment to
excellence deteriorate into knee-jerk mean-spiritedness, but,
barring this deterioration, agape helps me look through the
confusion of my own emotional softness to the kind of responsibility
that I and my students must both be tough enough to accept
if we are both to avoid forming habits of evasion and rationalization
that can last a life time.
Third, the perspective provided by agape gives me a way of
positioning my teaching in relation to other professional
goals and activities. Agape as the ultimate Christian standard
of conduct is not much interested in the status of my professional
prestige, in the size of my salary, or in the numbers of books,
articles, and honors that appear on my resume. I cast no contempt
or discredit on any of these facets of professional life.
They all have their proper places of concern. However, when
professionalism is approached from the standpoint of agape,
concern about prestige, salary, and publications become secondary.
Although important, they can never become all-important, and
there is a great liberation in knowing this. Liberation does
not come from supposing that agape relieves me of the obligation
to be as highly accomplished and as wide-ranging a professional
as I can be - I must still pursue excellence - but it comes,
instead, from the sense of having my life aligned with more
elemental, enduring, and profound truths about human flourishing
than when I am consumed with an ego-centered concern about
my own professional success or consumed with envy at others’
professional success. When I succeed in hanging that first
piece of wall paper absolutely plumb or in making a picture
frame with perfect right angles, I feel that I have aligned
myself with universal constants - a plumb line and a right
angle will be the same everywhere, at least in our universe,
like the speed of light - and when I succeed in ordering my
professional life according to the standard of agape, I feel
that I have aligned my interests and concerns with truths
of existence, as Wordsworth says in one of his great odes,
that ‘give thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears’.(19)
Passionate Teaching: Agape vs. Eros and Philia
I must confess, however, that many teachers resist the view
I am advancing here. They reject my claim that pedagogical
energy and teacher/student relations should be dominated by
agape. Many teachers prefer the energy of eros over what they
view - mistakenly, I think - as the milk toast blandness of
agape. I regularly direct pedagogy seminars for faculty both
at my own university and at Emory University, and intermittently
as a consultant at other universities. One of the most persistent
values I find among teachers is a deep intuition backed up
by experience that much, perhaps most, good teaching relies
on the teacher’s passion. In What Is Art, Leo Tolstoy
persistently uses the metaphor of infection to account for
the power of art to recreate in an auditor’s mind and
heart the same emotions contained in the work of art itself.
Many teachers rely implicitly on this metaphor of infection
to explain their best teaching. They have the sense that good
teaching is infectious and that the agent of infection is
passion. The pedigree for the value of pedagogical passion
is distinguished. It goes all the way back to Plato’s
Phaedrus, at least, where Socrates describes the infectious
effect of that philosopher/teacher who comes to students fresh
from his or her communion with beauty: ‘At first a shudder
runs through [the student]’, says Socrates, ‘and
again the old awe steals over him; then looking upon the face
of his beloved [teacher] as of a god he reverences him. …
During this process the whole soul is all in a state of ebullition
and effervescence’.(20) It’s as if the soul in
its spasms of learning grows wings, says Socrates.
Well, this is indeed hot stuff, unabashedly erotic, and it’s
not only a vision of teaching that is difficult for teachers
to resist, but it’s a vision of teaching that works.
All of us know that when students have a deep personal feeling
for their teachers, they tend to get hot for the teacher’s
subject as well. Loving the teacher puts students in the way
of loving the subject, and many teachers rely on erotic energy
in the classroom to make their subjects compelling. In a chapter
of Teaching to Transgress called ‘Eros, Eroticism, and
the Pedagogical Process’, bel hooks asserts the teacher’s
need to understand that ‘eros is a force that enhances
our overall effort to be self-actualizing, that it can provide
an epistemological grounding informing how we know what we
know, enables both professors and students to use such energy
in a classroom setting in ways that invigorate discussion
and excite the critical imagination’.(21)
This is precisely the position advocated in a recent Harper’s
article by Christina Nehring, subtitled ‘Bringing Eros
Back Into Academe’. In this article, Nehring stoutly
maintains that
‘knowledge is unremittingly personal: the best students
fall in love with teachers; the most engaged teachers respond
strongly - and variously - to students. … When a student
has a crush on a teacher, it is a powerful and productive
thing: she or he works much harder, listens far more voraciously,
appropriates, in many cases, the teacher’s intellectual
enthusiasms. The student becomes a sponge for knowledge.
When a teacher has a weakness for even one student in a
lecture hall, the whole class benefits: she or he speaks
with far greater care, switches from autopilot to real-think
mode, and (with luck) even looks forward to reading papers.’(22)
In this same vein, a graduate colleague of mine now at another
university, upon reading a draft of this paper, challenged
my argument in the following terms. ‘In my experience
of the pedagogical relationship’, he says, ‘the
‘fiery emotions’ of eros and philia
are somehow still central, dynamic elements in the mix. In
relational and emotional terms teaching is for me an incredibly,
yes, disturbingly promiscuous activity, if I may use that
word. I feel myself surrounded by potential friends and lovers;
or to put it another way, feel myself aspiring to be friends
or lovers of them all. Of course I know perfectly well that
in the vast majority of cases there will be no such outcome.
But knowing that doesn’t seem to undercut the charged
and irrational ‘erotics’ of the pedagogical situation.
... My ‘erotic’ account explains this: pedagogy
takes off when an individual student discovers for him/herself
an erotic or philial bond with the teacher’.(23)
It is certainly the case that modern depictions of student/teacher
relationships on TV and in movies support people’s intuitions
that erotic and philial models of teaching are not only natural
but best. Picking a few popular movies more or less at random,
we can see that Glen Ford in Blackboard Jungle, Sidney Poitier
in To Sir, With Love, Robin Williams in Dead Poets’
Society, Michelle Pfieffer in Dangerous Minds, Michael Caine
in Educating Rita, and Danny de Vito in Renaissance Man, movies
tend to repeat contemporary culture’s prejudices in
favor of passion, passion, passion, always manifested as variants
of either eros or philia, and often as both.(24) My elevation
of agape as the model of love among teachers and students
receives a powerful challenge from such arguments about the
primacy of eros and philia. However, despite the eloquence
and fervency, even, of these testimonials, and despite my
agreement that passion - a certain kind of passion - is indeed
a most useful facilitator of good teaching, I remain convinced
that the appropriate passion in student/teacher relations
is not erotic passion, or even the passion of friendship (even
potential friendship), but agape.
It is not necessary, I hope, to defend from charges of lechery
those many teachers who prefer erotic or friendship approaches
to teaching. The issue for such teachers is seldom some crude
version of sexual exploitation. This happens occasionally
and when it does none of us is deeply confused about how to
assess it. What is deeply confusing, and what is at stake,
however, is the extent to which a kind of erotic energy, not
necessarily a sexual outcome, is either necessary to or at
least conducive to good teaching and learning. In my view
this confusion can be sorted out in such a way as to preserve
the highest value I have placed on agape. The confusion arises,
I think, from the value that many teachers place on pedagogical
passion and on their deep intuition that the infectiousness
of what they teach can be transferred to students only through
the medium of passion. These teachers place such a value on
passion in teaching that they cannot imagine an effective
pedagogy without it, and - here is where they commit their
logical fault, I think - they find it much easier to identify
all passion, pedagogical or otherwise, with eros rather than
agape. To such teachers agape seems bloodless, perhaps even
cold, and not very interesting. And I concede that agape is
disinterested; it operates on principle; to some extent agape
flattens out the individual differences among students in
the interest of equal treatment and other-regarding care for
them all.
But because agape is disinterested does not mean that it
is either cold or uninterested in individual students. What
agape flattens out are precisely those high points of individual
attraction that make me want to respond to some students more
positively than to other students. What agape does not flatten
out is the passion for caring and concern that teachers can
extend to their students as such, not because John is handsome
and smart and reverences my knowledge, and not because Michelle
is robustly intellectual and enjoys the camaraderie of give
and take with me, but because Michelle and John are both human
beings, children of God, and deserve my caring and concern
on these grounds alone. They would deserve my caring and concern
on these grounds alone even if John were handsome but dumb
and even if Michelle were sullen and obtuse. Nehring reminds
us that when a student has a crush on a teacher he or she
works harder, reads more, and learns more, and that teachers
who have crushes on students improve their performance as
well. This may be true in some cases. I do not deny that it
is possible. But I do deny that it is necessary. I would remind
Nehring, and all of us, that it is sometimes possible to do
the right things for the wrong reasons. It seems to me that
teachers who rely on or exploit the very real potential for
erotic energy between themselves and students run a real risk
of relying on or exploiting the wrong mechanism to support
the right thing: good teaching.
Agape offers just as much grounds for passionate
teaching - from the teacher’s perspective - as does
eros, but agapic teaching is grounded on a different vision
of the ends of good teaching than the vision that grounds
erotic teaching. Erotic or philial teaching cannot escape
a vision of learning which starts with and depends on the
student wanting to be like the teacher. Eros enfolds. Agape
bestows. Teaching based on erotic energy invites too little
cultivation of the student’s need to become like himself
or herself, not like the teacher. I’m well aware of
the value of models and the role of imitation in learning,
but adopting as a model and imitating the practice of a teacher
toward whom the student feels an erotic interest, or vice
verse, runs the risk of become a model and a practice that
smothers, not cultivates, the student’s growth toward
autonomy. Now if intensely personal relationships were the
only means by which passion could ever enter the teaching/learning
transaction, cultivating it might be worth the risk. But I
can get passionate about a vision of my students’ growth
as independent persons, and I don’t have to feel an
erotic charge in order to feel that passion. The vision of
my students becoming fully themselves in their own right is
a riveting and inspiring vision, and I don’t have to
be erotically charged in order to have it. Nor do my students
have to be my friends in order for me to wish the fulfillment
of this vision on their behalf. The proper end of teaching
is to lead our students toward autonomy - not an ultimate
existential autonomy that sinfully views the individual as
self-sufficient - but toward the kind of autonomy that allows
the individual to see his or her needs in relation to his
or her own situation. The reverencing of teachers which Socrates
describes in the Phaedrus, which bel hooks advocates
in Teaching to Transgress, and which Nehring describes in
Harper’s invites students to see their needs or to understand
themselves not autonomously, but in light of their teacher’s
passions and predilections.
Instead of being deeply gratified when we I see this reverence
sprouting wings on the souls of my students, I see it as a
potential problem that can undermine both my teaching and
their learning. It’s not that I am too pure to be tempted
by the ego gratification that such reverence offers, and it’s
not that I haven’t been sometimes guilty of indulging
myself in that gratification - the enjoyment of being loved
by certain students because I know that they want to be like
me and want to know what I know - but I also know that to
give in to this temptation will make me less clear about agape’s
true commitment, on the one hand, to the caring and concern
of my students as such, and also will make me less clear,
on the other hand, about the temptations to self-pride that
might lead me to substitute my good opinion of myself for
a principled assessment of what my students need for themselves.
Conclusion: Agape as Act vs. Agape as Belief
Some of my readers may wonder why I felt it necessary to precede
my analysis of agape with Christian considerations of such
issues as sin, guilt, repentance, and so on. Some of my teacher
readers may want to ask, ‘Why can’t I just concentrate
on love?’ However, the Christian notion of agape cannot
be separated from Christian notions of human sinfulness. The
Christian insight is that love does not exist for the easy
picking, that aligning our conduct with agape requires us
to understand our own nature. Endlessly invoking our belief
in ‘love, sweet love’ will solve no problems.
We cannot fully grasp agape until we perform the critical
act of dropping our pride, but since pride is a natural part
of our constitution, a consequence of our cognitive transcendence,
it is unlikely that we will drop pride out of a general instinct
for benevolence or the generic desire to teach well.
We will never give up pride without repenting the occasions
on which pride has led us to hurt or damage others. The garden
of Eden story, like most great stories, says something profoundly
true, and what it says is that pride dissolves the cohesiveness
of creation. The crucifixion story, another great story, also
says something profoundly true, and what it says is that love
strengthens (and can even heal and rebuild) cohesiveness.
When we commit the sin of pride we must repent the damage
we have done to creation. We must see and admit to ourselves
and before creation’s author the damage we have done.
Repentance is necessary because it puts us back in alignment
with truth. Wishing to concentrate on love alone without thinking
about sin and repentance is like wishing for a ball to roll
up a hill by itself without acknowledging that what the ball
wants to do is cooperate with the natural force of gravity
pulling it down. In order to concentrate on love we must acknowledge
our natural tendency to cooperate with the force of pride
that pulls us not upward toward love but down and away from
it. In short, we must concentrate on agape.
Human beings always shape the world according to the nature
and content of their ultimate faith, whatever that faith may
be. For the Christian teacher, agape-based pedagogy will have
an emotional and intellectual resonance that stems from general
religious convictions that can be matched with specific Christian
doctrines. For the non-Christian teacher, agape-based pedagogy
will have an emotional and intellectual resonance that stems
from a conviction about the value of human beings that operates
like a religious conviction in that it is an ultimate article
of faith, but that cannot be matched with any specific religious
doctrines. One potentially significant difference between
the two is that the Christian teacher will, by virtue of specific
Christian doctrines, acknowledge from the outset - more so
than her secular counterpart, perhaps - that any kind of pedagogy
(agape-based, vocational, liberal, professional, or whatever)
can be corrupted by the teacher’s sinful indulgence
in pride and ego. The Christian teacher knows that the temptation
to accept this invitation is always present, must always be
resisted, and must always be repented when yielded to.
At the end of Paradiso, Dante says that God ‘conceives
of all things in a single volume bound by Love, of which the
universe is the scattered leaves’. (Canto 33) Perhaps
in constructing this image Dante is thinking of Ephisians
2:10, where St. Paul refers to human beings as God’s
‘workmanship’, a translation of the Greek poiema,
which raises the interesting possibility that, as God’s
poiema, we are, perhaps, God’s ‘poems’.(25)
In any event, whether I think in Dante’s terms of the
universe as God’s book of love or extrapolate St. Paul’s
‘workmanship’ into a vision of persons as God’s
poems, both images, to a book and a poem lover such as I,
combine many connotations that move me deeply: the connotations
of learning, of pleasure, of knowledge, of beauty, of unity,
of coherent construction, of goodness, and, ultimately, of
that profoundly unspeakable yet curiously knowable love from
which all these other goods derive their energy. Dante’s
is a vision of agape at its highest and purest level. To us,
to the everyday teachers of everyday students, neither of
whom is writing the book of the universe but who both have
their fullest life only when they align themselves with its
truths, working out our own commitment to and our own vision
of agape, in however homely or personal a form, is a life
long task that both guides us in our teaching endeavors and
honors those endeavors at the same time.
References
- I am indebted to Adolf Hansen of Garrett Theological Seminary,
Tyron Inbody of United Theological Seminary, and Walter
Reed of Emory University for giving me helpful critical
readings of this article in manuscript form. I am also indebted
to Jennifer Holberg of Calvin College for inviting me to
work out these ideas as a conference presentation in the
first place. (This article was first presented at ‘Christian
Scholarship … for What? An International Interdisciplinary
Conference’ at Calvin College, Grand Rapids, Michigan
September 27-29, 2001. It was subsequently published in
Journal of Education & Christian Belief, Volume 6, Number
1 (Spring, 2002) and it appears on this website with the
kind permission of the author and the editors and sponsors
of Journal of Education & Christian Belief.)
- Shakespeare, Merchant of Venice, I, ii, 14-15.
- Blumenthal, Michael, ‘A Letter to My Students’
in Chronicle of Higher Education Section B (August 17, 2001)
p. 5.
- The necessity of living with standards, in the absence
of which there is no living at all that we could call fully
human, forces us to make judgments all the time about who
knows worst, better, and best, and who does worst, better,
and best. Moreover, when practicality forces us to make
these judgments, we not only make them but we often make
them in extremely thoughtful ways, with our justifications,
evidence, and rationales well in order. We may not always
enjoy applying standards - I don’t even like being
gruff to my terrier when she’s being obnoxious - but
whether we are analyzing baby formula for potential pathogens,
making tenure and promotion decisions, deciding whether
a foul has been committed in some sport, considering whom
to elect to the presidency, or just checking up to see if
the kids have done their chores, we not only cannot live
without standards but we don’t apologize for them.
The danger that those who have the power to enforce standards
may be, and often have been, wrong, prejudiced, self-privileging,
oppressive, or cruel is a clear and present danger. But
teachers who think that some sugary act of ‘love’
lets them off the hook for holding standards that may temporarily
make students feel ‘unloved’ simply misunderstand
the essence of the educational process, which, as the etymology
of the word ‘education’ suggests - from educare,
meaning to ‘lead out’ - requires that those
who know more lead those who know less.
- A formulation he had already offered the rich young ruler
in Matthew 19:19
- Although the commandment to love our neighbors as ourselves
does challenge egoism, we can still find wiggle room in
it for not loving our neighbor to the point of actual self-sacrifice,
for we can always say that we are too generous to want anyone
to love us in denial of their own interests. Saying this
sounds good, but this kind of comment is really more self-serving
than generous, for what follows from pretending to reject
others’ self-sacrifice for us is that we let ourselves
off the hook for sacrificing ourselves for them. The commandment
to love one another ‘as I have loved you’, however,
cuts out the wiggle room, for Christ does indeed love humanity
to the point of, and, indeed, on the other side of, self-sacrifice.
- Wordsworth, William, ‘Composed upon Westminster
Bridge, September 3, 1802’, l. 12.
- Plato’s texts say in many different places that
evil derives from ignorance. For a typical passage of this
sort, see Republic 585 b-e.
- This is the archetypal ‘it’s not my fault’
excuse that Milton so deliciously parodies in Paradise Lost
when he constructs a soliloquy of Satan’s in which
the Devil, conducting an imagined colloquy with Adam and
Eve in his own mind before he has actually seen either one
of them, says that the ruin he is about to bring on Eden
is not motivated by his own malice but by the overweening
necessity of state obligations. Milton’s version of
Satan’s rationalization goes like this: ‘And
should I at your harmless innocence / Melt, as I do, yet
public reason just - / Honor and empire with revenge enlarged
/ By conquering this new world - compels me now / To do
what else, though damned, I should abhor’. (Book IV,
ll. 388-92)
- Niebuhr, Reinhold, The Nature and Destiny of Man, Vol.
1, Human Nature (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons,
1941) pp. 16-17.
- Shakespeare, Hamlet, II, ii, 293-297.
- James 3:2, Revised Standard Version, 1953.
- C. S. Lewis, among others, also includes a fourth love
- storge, which Lewis calls ‘affection’ - but
while this love is certainly relevant to the present discussion,
it is not central and I will not deal with it here.
- See Aristophanes’s myth about love as the search
for our other halves in Plato’s Symposium.
- Jackson, Timothy, Love Disconsoled: Meditations on Christian
Charity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) pp.
11-15.
- Maritain, Jacques, Education at the Crossroads, (New
Haven: Yale University Press, (1943) 1971) p. 25.
- Jackson (1999) p. 90.
- Jackson (1999) pp. 81-82.
- Wordsworth, William, ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’
(1807), l. 205.
- Plato, Phaedrus, Trans. Benjamin Jowett, Great Books
of the Western World. Vol. 7. Ed. Robert Maynard Hutchins.(Chicago:
Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc., 1952) pp. 115-41 (pp. 126-127).
- hooks, bel, Teaching to Transgress (New York: Routledge,
1994) p. 195.
- Nehring, Cristina, ‘The Higher Yearning: Bringing
Eros Back to Academe’ in Harper’s Magazine CCCIII.1816
(September 2001) pp. 64-72 (pp. 71, 69)
- Unpublished letter.
- The only notable exceptions I recall are the two versions
of The Browning Version, one made with Michael Redgrave
in the fifties and the remake with Albert Finney in the
nineties.
- I am indebted to Walter Reed of Emory University for
bringing poiema to my attention.
Bibliography
- Bible, King James Version, 1611.
- Bible, Revised Standard Version, 1953.
- Blumenthal, Michael, ‘A Letter to My Students’
in Chronicle of
- Higher Education Section B (August 17, 2001) p. 5.
- Dante Alighieri, The Inferno, Trans. John Ciardi (New
York: New American Library, Inc., 1954).
- hooks, bel, Teaching to Transgress (New York: Routledge,
1994).
- Jackson, Timothy, Love Disconsoled: Meditations on Christian
Charity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
Lewis, C. S., The Four Loves (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich,
1960).
- Maritain, Jacques, Education at the Crossroads, (New Haven:
Yale University Press, (1943) 1971).
- Nehring, Cristina, ‘The Higher Yearning: Bringing
Eros Back to Academe’ in Harper’s Magazine CCCIII.1816
(September 2001) pp. 64-72.
- Niebuhr, Reinhold, The Nature and Destiny of Man, Vol.
1.
- Human Nature (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons,
1941).
- Nussbaum, Martha, Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense
of Reform in Liberal Education (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1997).
- Plato, Phaedrus, Trans. Benjamin Jowett, Great Books of
the Western World. Vol. 7. Ed. Robert Maynard Hutchins.(Chicago:
Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc., 1952) pp. 115-41.
- Plato, Republic, Trans. G. M. A. Grube (Indianapolis:
Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1992).
- Plato, Symposium, Trans. Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff
(Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1989).
- Shakespeare, Hamlet.
- Shakespeare, Merchant of Venice.
- Tolstoy, Leo, What Is Art? And Essays on Art. 1898, Trans.
Aylmer Maude (London: Oxford University Press, 1930).
- Wordsworth, William, ‘Composed Upon Westminster
Bridge, September 3, 1803’, 1807.
- Wordsworth, William, ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality
from Recollections of Early Childhood’, 1807.
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