Agape
In terms of our love for one another, all four forms of love are good. But our love towards our fellow human beings is rooted in our love for God. Love for man in Christianity is not humanitarianism, which sees man as the supreme good and goal of life. Our love towards one another can often be distorted and sinful. Philia, eros, and storge, while in themselves good, can be perverted and exaggerated. This is why agape is the word most often used for Christian love. Agape is the purest form of love. It is love for all people. Love for one person that excludes love for others is not Christian love.
Love for friends (philia), for example, can lead us to show favoritism and partiality, to treat those who do not belong to our circle of friends unfairly.
Eros, sexual love, can be even worse, since it is the most passionate form of love and can even cause us to harm others. It can lead us to want to please the person we love at all costs. It can also lead easily to envy and possessiveness of the person we love. Its lowest and most distorted form is unbridled lust, when sexual gratification becomes the ultimate goal.
Storge, compassion, also needs to be controlled. Excessive pity for one person can cause us to overlook the needs of others. It can also lead us to spoiling others. This is particularly common in parent-child relationships.
Philia, storge, and eros are therefore to be directed by agape, by divine love. It is not that the other forms of love are bad and should not exist, but the objects of our friendship, compassion, and sexual desire are not to become goals in themselves. Love for God, divine love, is that which gives true meaning to all other kinds of love; in it they find their proper place and proportion.
Thus the spiritual struggle of Lent and of Christian life as a whole is not a matter of avoiding the passions, but of mastering them. This mastery requires discipline. This discipline, this mastery over the passions, is known in Orthodox spirituality as “dispassion” (apatheia). It is regarded as an exalted state of virtue. It is sometimes misconstrued as “passionlessness,” but this is not what it means. St. Isaac the Syrian says, “Dispassion does not mean no longer to feel the passions, but no longer to accept them.” (11) Dispassion is harmony between body and soul. It is the attainment of wholeness or chastity.
This harmony is one of the chief purposes of fasting and asceticism. Thus our physical fasting is, together with prayer, one of our key weapons in the battle to master the passions and attain holiness: “This kind can come out by nothing but prayer and fasting” (Mark 9:29).
~Vassilios Papavassiliou, Meditations for Great Lent: Reflections on the Triodion
11 Mystic Treatises, ET Wensinck, p. 345.
