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Introduction

As we continue these millennial meditations

on two thousand years of agape

we now have the opportunity to see how

agape and bhakti do and can complement each other.

The four-thousand-year-old history

of mysticism and its kind of love in India

has been a great gift for the entire family of man.

As I made my transition from seminary life

at Mt. Angel and St. Thomas Seminary in Seattle

to the Jesuits of Loyola of Chicago

and the Franciscan Sisters and students of Joliet, Illinois,

I was greatly helped in coming to understand

the efforts of meditation and the gifts of contemplation

by Jane Sheldon during the first love of that Sun Valley summer

to the sublimation of erotic inspiration.

I was advised to leave the seminary and then

the Jesuits opened me to all of philosophy.

Mark’s good news is the story of Jesus’ agape

in all nine traits of its altruism, universality,

eternality, unconditionality, childlikeness, celibacy,

missionary love, purgatorial and love of love.

The passion, death and resurrection of Jesus shows us

how to love the other as more important than ourselves.

This agape is the fulfilment of bhakti in all nine ways

and lets us appreciate in the Bhagavad Gita

the two great ways of loving God.

Bataille brings all of this together by showing us

love’s nine great secret things in sex, death, religion,

art, sovereignty, transgression, sacrifice,

violence, and the economy of the gift.

Graduate School

From the Seminary to Loyola of Chicago

After being in the seminary for nine years

I still had to confess the sin of masturbation.

But then I met and fell in love with Jane

and soon I said to myself

“How cleansed and purified I feel.”

I had gone through the first mystical stage

of purgation and now I was ready for illumination.

One night I awakened from a dream about sex

and I just thought of my dear Janie

and the temptation fled away.

I knew that I would love her forever

and that I could be pure forever just like

Dante and the courtly lovers of the Middle Ages.

Ironically now that I could be pure

my confessor asked me to leave the seminary

because a priest should not be falling in love.

Jane was going to Northwestern University

in Evanston, Illinois, just north of Chicago

so I applied to the philosophy graduate program

at Loyola of Chicago and was accepted.

By the time I got to Loyola in January

Jane already had a real and normal boyfriend.

So we had some lovely meetings but I was free

to study philosophy which all seemed so real.

It seemed that at the heart of each philosophy

was a philosophy of love and I just loved

studying Plato especially his Symposium

and his Phaedrus which explained sublimation.

Aristotle, the Stoics, the Medievals and

the Postmodernists each had a new philosophy of love.

From Loyola to the College of St. Francis

Father Hecht SJ, the chair of the philosophy department at Loyola,

took excellent care of me by giving me a scholarship that took care

of everything from tuition, to room and board, to all of my books.

He introduced me to Mr. Kelling who took me to live with him

in a wonderful hotel right next to the downtown Loyola Tower.

Then he told me that they needed a philosophy teacher at St. Francis

College in Juliet, Illinois about fifty miles south of Chicago.

The wonderful sisters of St. Francis took me as their colleague

and after having lived in a community of men for nine years

I was now in a community of most beautiful ladies who had

the highest ideas of holy love and wisdom as they were educated

and then taught others in grade school, high school and college.

I could teach whatever I wanted to learn and we always thought

together about the Augustinian, Thomistic and Franciscan philosophies.

I took a course on Plotinus at Loyola from Fr. Nurnberger SJ

and I thought deeply about Augustine’s reflections on him.

Augustine’s motto came to be “credo ut intellegam,”

“I believe that I might understand,”

and that took him beyond mystical monism

to the gift of faith in the dignity of all persons as children of God.

The Franciscan nuns loved making clear how the Franciscans

built upon this and how Scotus showed the uniqueness of each person

and how Ockham showed how we can never know the complex person

but how our faith can let us love all as did St. Francis.

As a youth in the seminary I read the works of St. John of the Cross.

The active meditative night of the soul and the passive contemplative

night of the soul fit right in with Augustine fulfilling Plotinus

and with the Franciscan extension of love to all of God’s creatures.

I was so fortunate to be able to learn with the beautiful Sisters

and the beautiful students and for nine years absence made

my heart grow fonder then all of a sudden presence gifted me

with the heavenly delight of the other half of my soul for ever and ever.

From Loyola and St. Francis to the Phenomenology Workshop

In 1964, Herbert Spiegelberg got a grant and was able to invite

ten philosophers for a two-week seminar on phenomenology.

I was one of seven Americans and John Mayer, who founded the

philosophy department at Brock, was one of the three Canadians.

We all came to see that phenomenology is a theory of intentional

consciousness, an attitude of respect for the concrete and a

method of description begun by Husserl and continued by many.

At Loyola I was introduced to phenomenology by studying

Sartre’s Being and Nothingness and we read Heidegger’s

Being and Time as soon as it was translated into English.

I continued to work on it with Barbara Henning at St. Francis.

I memorized the eighty-four headings in the table of contents and gave

a talk on it at the second workshop in 1965 and John Mayer

asked me if I would like to come to Brock University to teach.

That was fortunate for me because at St. Francis a beautiful

young nun, Sister Carolyn, became ill with tuberculosis

and when I visited her in the infirmary I told her that I would

pray for her twice each day and I believed that she would recover.

I told her that I loved her as if she were my sister, or my

mother or my wife and that I would always love her forever.

She told this to Sister Anita Marie, the president of the college.

Sister called me to her office and told me I should not

speak like that and that I should get a job teaching elsewhere.

So when Dr. Mayer asked me to come to Brock it was a relief.

Studying phenomenology prepared me well for what I would

encounter at Brock and especially the idea of intentional

consciousness helped me to think about agape and bhakti.

The monistic mysticism which sees Atman as Brahman

sees Brahman as pure being, pure bliss and pure consciousness.

A personal God always has an intentional consciousness

as distinct from the pure consciousness of monistic mysticism.

From the Catholic World to a Secular University

Mervyn Sprung grew up a Protestant and received his PhD

in Philosophy from the University of Berlin and deep in his mind

and heart he was a Buddhist for he loved a philosophy of peace.

As a Corporal in the army he thought about the war-like ways

of the people of the Book and the Indian world was not like that.

Mervyn was always most friendly to me and I thank him from

the bottom of my heart for because of him I was able to learn

the philosophies of the East and even came to teach the Gita.

John Mayer was born of a Jewish father and a Calvinist

mother and had no inclination in either direction but became

a Unitarian loving process philosophy and the thought of Buber.

John also studied the Hindu and Buddhist philosophies and,

like Mervyn, felt more at home with them than Judeo-Christianity.

At Brock we never had an Islamic philosopher but we did

have several Islamic students and some became majors.

As a Catholic I could be open to other religions and their

philosophies just as could John and Mervyn and they saw

and appreciated that as we debated and worked together.

Just as Augustine learned from Platonists and Thomas from

Aristotelians and the Franciscans from the Stoics so now

with John and Mervyn I was eager to learn from India.

In my introductory course I often taught the Bhagavad Gita

together with Plato, Augustine, Descartes, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche.

From the beginning I taught the philosophy of love and

many students came to love understanding how agape,

eros, bhakti, amor fati and the Works of Love could all

work together and compliment each other in a person’s life.

Many students came to love the love of wisdom and the wisdom

of love and became members of the Brock Philosophy Society.

Still today, Jews, Catholics, Moslems, Protestants, Secular

Humanists, Hindus, Buddhists, Taoists, and others work together.

Mark’s Good News

The Agapetos Reveals Trinitarian Love

Mark begins his Gospel with the Baptism of Jesus.

No sooner had he come up out of the water

then he saw the heavens torn apart

and the Spirit, like a dove, descending on him

and a voice came from heaven.

“You are my Son, the Beloved;

my favor rests on you.”

The original Greek word for “Beloved” is “Agapetos” and so Jesus’

new love is announced right away in this little statement.

We are told about the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit who is like a dove.

Then right in the middle of Mark’s Gospel at the transfiguration

again we read,

And a cloud came, covering them in shadow;

and there came a voice from the cloud,

“This is my Son, the Beloved, Listen to him.”

Again the Father refers to his Son with the word agape which is

what Jesus came to act out by exorcising the possessed,

healing the sick, forgiving sinners and caring for the poor.

The entire message of Mark’s Gospel is the good news of this love.

Mark’s Gospel nears completion with the centurion, the Roman

soldier saying, “In truth this man was a son of God.”

He came to see this because of the love and peaceful tranquility

which Jesus exhibited as he suffered the cruelest torture and death.

These three statements at the beginning, the middle and the end

of Mark’s Gospel emphasize the agape of Jesus which he came to

preach, teach and exemplify to his disciples and to all persons.

Right away we learn of the love between the Father, the Son,

and the Holy Spirit and this love is the basis not only for

the equal dignity of the Divine persons but also for all humans.

From Son of David to Son of Man to Son of God

The Jewish people were already expecting the Son of David

or the Messiah or the Christ to come and let them have a King

and a great kingdom again and even to drive out the Romans.

They were also expecting the Son of man who would come to be

a judge of heaven and earth but they never expected a Son of God.

The point of Mark’s Gospel as Jesus performs his miraculous

works of love is to slowly convince them that he is Son of

David, Son of man and also Son of God and those who became

his disciples, both men and women, saw him as Son of God.

Mark wrote his Gospel to let the agapetos convert, edify,

infuse faith, enlighten it and defend it against various opponents.

Jesus shows himself to be the Messiah or Son of David but he

is not the kind of King anyone expected for slowly they see

that his is a kingdom of love in which he and his followers

will love others, even their enemies, as more important than self.

He also taught them that he was the son of man but in a way

that they never would have thought and at Mark 9:31 he says,

The Son of Man will be delivered into the hands

of men; they will put him to death; and

three days after he has been put to death

he will rise again.

They did not understand what he meant and they were afraid

to ask him why he would suffer and die out of love

and they could not understand his talk about a resurrection.

The Kingdom of God which Jesus, the Messianic King, taught them

had to do as we see at Mark 10:29 with leaving

house, brothers, sisters, father, children

or land for my name sake and for

the sake of the gospel . . . and not

without persecutions.

Jesus made sense to them but his teaching about suffering did not.

The Reconciling Love of Mark’s Jesus

In revealing to us the agape of Jesus Mark’s Gospel

shows us how that love can bring about reconciliation.

The logic of reconciliation, the physiology of reconciliation,

the doxology of reconciliation and its mysticology all

become clearer if we think with Bataille about Mark’s Jesus.

The Kierkegaardian Bataille does bring out the logic of reconciling

as their Jesus loves others as more important than himself.

The Nietzschean Bataille knows that for amor fati to be real

we must not feel any resentment in our bodies

and the childish yes and amen for all others

must take place in the interplay between our body

and our heart and our brain as right loving

lets the flow of brain chemicals such as oxytocin

get going just right and our testosterone and estrogen

can balance so that we have a happy, holy love.

Jesus’ whole mission and our imitation of him could

be seen as related to the doxology of reconciliation.

Jesus basically teaches us the prayer of

Glory be to the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit

as it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be.

As agape fulfills the Jewish loves of Hesed and Ahava,

of God’s love for us and our love for God

and for our neighbor the unmanifest does become

more manifest even in its unmanifestness.

Bataille with the inner experience of mystical love

can help us appreciate how the disciples

had to keep meditating on Jesus in an active

night of the soul that they might come to love him.

The women seemed to mystically contemplate Jesus

in a passive, receptive night of the soul

in which they received the gift of love from him.

Agape’s Messianic Secret

The introduction to Mark’s Gospel

in the New Jerusalem Bible says

that “Mark’s Gospel concentrates not

on Jesus’ teaching but on the mystery

of his person, the gradual way in which

the disciples reach an understanding of him

which remains hidden from the crowds.”

Even the disciples have a hard time

understanding that he must die out of love.

At Mark 8:31 we get the first prophecy

of his passion and Peter cannot grasp it

and at Mark 9:9 Jesus tells them again

to keep it a secret that he will be killed

but then be resurrected from the dead.

At Mark 9:30 he repeats the secret and

only slowly do they come to understand

the relation between agape and being

killed out of love for others and then

this strange mystery of rising from the dead.

They are being taught the great mystery

that Christmas can be everyday

especially on Good Friday because of

Easter Sunday and it wasn’t until

he died and rose from the dead

that they would begin to understand.

Three times Jesus predicts his passion,

death, and resurrection and each time

he is misunderstood by his followers.

How to redeem suffering and let it be

even joyful is the mystery of agape

and is central to the mission of Jesus.

Bhakti

The Bhakti of the Bhgavad Gita

We now get to explore the Hindu love of bhakti

and the Christian love of agape in their differences,

their likenesses and how they might complement each other.

The Bhagavad Gita is a beautiful, wonderful poem

that can introduce us to the varieties of Hindu mysticism.

It is part of humankind’s longest poem, the Mahabharata,

and in it Lord Krishna is explaining to Arjuna,

who is a member of the warrior caste,

why it is his duty to kill some of his relatives

in a just war to maintain the Kingdom as it should be.

Lord Krishna shows three paths to Arjuna as to why

he should fight; the paths of knowledge, action, and devotion.

The path of knowledge is metaphysical and teaches

Arjuna not to worry because persons do not really die

but continue on with rebirth and become other beings.

The path of action is ethical and shows Arjuna that

he should act out of duty alone and not for self-gain

and then he will receive a good rebirth.

The path of devotion teaches him how God loves him

and gives him the grace to love God so that he is

no longer motivated by freedom from the wheel of rebirth

but rather by the salvation to love God forever.

Thus there are two main mystical ways in the Gita.

The metaphysical and ethical paths take us beyond illusion

so that we see that each person is Atman, the great world soul,

and Atman is Brahman or pure Being-Consciousness-Bliss.

The devotional path of Bhakti believes that each person

can love the supreme spirit of the personal God

here on earth and then be happy with him

for ever in a heaven of eternal love or bhakti.

From Bhaj to Bhakti

The etymological root of bhakti is the word bhaj

which means “to share,” “to partake of” and “to participate.”

The ancient Sanskrit word for love is Prema which

means affection, eros, friendship, and devotion.

Prema and bhaj in the variety of their meanings

were synonyms for each other and from earliest times

in the great hymns of the Rig Veda there was

an outpouring of reverence, devotion, friendship and love

so that a scholar like Raj Singh can claim that

bhakti was already there throughout the whole history

of the Indian culture in all of its art and literature.

But the bhakti that is in the Bhagavad Gita

is very different in its world view from

the Advaita Vedanta view that is in the Gita also

and that developed in the Upanishadic times.

Scholars like Dhavamony see a great difference

between bhakti in the Gita and anything that

came before it in the entire Sanskrit tradition

and they ask where this bhakti came from.

They show why they think it came from

the Dravidian culture of the Tamil people in the south.

They have a special kind of literature which

is often written from the woman’s point of view.

Whether this view of God’s love for humans and

God’s grace that lets humans love God came from

the mystical experience of the Tamils of Southern India

or from a Judeo-Christian influence is hard to say.

In any case, the transpersonal monistic view

was discovered in mystical experience and

the active meditative effort and the passive

contemplative receptivity remind one of John of the Cross.

The Gita’s Self-Realization Ethics

The metaphysical, the ethical and the devotional pathways

in the Gita are jnana yoga, karma yoga, and bhakti yoga:

the ways of right knowledge, right action and right love.

Both the great religious ways of The Gita

and the six orthodox systems and the three

heterodox systems have a self-realization ethics.

As with all the philosophies of the Greeks

the main point is to become all one can be.

The meaning of virtue is one’s own excellence.

The Jewish love of ahava in the Hebrew Bible

is concerned with the love of God and of neighbor.

But only with Jesus, as Mark shows us,

is there a completely altruistic love ethic

which loves the other as more important than self.

The pathway of bhakti or true love

that mysteriously appears in the Gita

also has an ethics of self-realization.

God loves us and gives us the grace

that we might love him with our whole

heart, mind and soul but there is no mention

of loving your neighbor as yourself or

loving others as more important than yourself.

Bataille following Kierkegaard sees in Jesus

the torment of this love and yet the glory

of sacrificing one’s ego and oneself.

Bataille clearly sees the limits of Hindu mysticism

in that it gets rid of persons in its monism,

but even in its personal salvation theology

it does not get beyond a salvation ethics.

In order to get beyond the scandal of

the caste system you need to love others as yourself.

Getting Beyond the Caste System

The transpersonal mysticism of the Gita

which is the predominant view of the Hindu systems

can bring one to great religious perfection

as we see with Guru Nanak of the Sikhs.

One can live in the sweet presence of the name of God

and be taken beyond all illusion and this name

can help the Christian understand herself when she says,

“In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit”

and when she says “Our father who art in Heaven

hallowed be thy name” which may not be

that meaningful for the Christian who says “name” so often.

But the caste system is deeply rooted

in the Hindu belief system for there are

four character types with which we can be born

according to the wheel of rebirth

depending on how we have lived our past lives.

Jnana, or wisdom, is the character type of Brahmins.

Karma yoga is natural for the warrior caste

and a lower form of it for farmers and workers.

Finally, the masses of the people have deserved

to be untouchables and if they accept this

gracefully with devotion and bhakti

they will be reborn into a higher caste.

The religion of both kinds of Hindu mysticism

promotes the politics of the caste system.

Ghandi who learned of Jesus’ altruistic love

does try to free Indians from it with non-violence.

Mother Theresa shows how agape can fulfill bhakti

and many lovely Indian ladies joined her

as sisters of charity to help the poorest of the poor.

Bhakti brings so much to agape and agape to bhakti.

Bataille

Love’s Nine Great Secret Things

As one ponders Bataille’s book Inner Experience

one can find there agape’s nine unique traits

and see how Bataille connects them

with his nine great secret things.

His book is all about altruistic love

and the secrets of sex and its ecstasy.

It is about an eternal love for all

and the secrets of death and its torment.

It is about universal love for every other

and the secrets of religion in its missionary

task and in the varieties of its mysticisms.

It is about child-like love in its play

and the secrets of art especially in surreal poetry.

It is about unconditional love in its self-sacrifice

and the secrets of a sovereignty which

let us get beyond the servility of any subject.

It is about celibate love in its sublimation

and the transgressions against the workers’ taboos

and the secrets of its mysticism of sin.

It is about missionary love in its mission

and the secrets of sacrifice even of

the sacrifice of literal meaning in Proust’s poetry.

It is about purgatorial love in its purification

and the secrets of the violence that justice demands.

It is about loving love and the God who is Love

and the secrets of the gift in its pure giving.

For Bataille the nine great secret things

help us better understand agape’s nine unique traits.

He learned this from Kierkegaard, Nietzsche,

and all the great Catholic mystics.

Bataille had his Predecessors

Bataille was a great student of comparative philosophy

and that took him deeply into comparative mysticism.

Most of all he loved Nietzsche and he understood

with him that many gods have died including

the gods of Descartes, of Kant and of Hegel,

of Luther, of Calvin and of Henry VIII.

He saw how, in 1881, Nietzsche had his great conversion

and came to be a child-like believer in Jesus

with his “Yes and Amen” for the eternal return of all existence.

He came to appreciate also the literary work of Kierkegaard

whose pseudonymical writings all led up to the Works of Love

in which he explains the agape of Jesus

and the logic of its reconciliation

in loving the other as more important than oneself.

Bartaille himself converted to Catholicism

and even studied to be a priest and came

to greatly love the works of St. John of the Cross

and St. Theresa of Avila and of St. Ignatius of Loyola.

But he did not like dogmatic servitude

which he felt at times the church imposed upon him.

So he left all servility to become a sovereign person.

He also made a great study of Hinduism

and of Buddhism and he mistrusted their mysticisms

which led to the loss of the sovereign person

and did not bring about the end of the caste system

which kept millions enslaved in servitude.

Bataille, like Nietzsche, is a Franciscan

with Scotus’ metaphysics of excess

and Ockham’s nominalistic scepticism.

But with Nietzsche, Bataille lives this out

in the play of a dancing ecstasy.

Bataille had His Followers

We will see how Julia Kristeva greatly appreciated

Goerge Bataille, which she explained in nine ways:

1) Bataille and Kristeva’s Psychoanalytic Revolution

2) Bataille and Kristeva’s Poetic Revolution

3) Bataille and Kristeva’s Semiotic Revolution

4) Bataille and Kristeva’s Sexual Revolution

5) Bataille and Kristeva’s Women’s Revolution

6) Bataille and Kristeva’s Philosophic Revolution

7) Bataille and Kristeva’s Scientific Revolution

8) Bataille and Kristeva’s Christian Revolution

9) Bataille and Kristeva’s Political Revolution

We will also study in detail in just what way Michel

Foucault appreciated Bataille so much in nine ways:

1) Bataille, Foucault, and the Heart of Divine Love

2) Their Notion of Animal and Human Sexuality

3) And of Transgression and the Sacred

4) In the Play of Limits and Transgression

5) Transgression can even be Glorious

6) And can help us discover the forgiving God

7) And can be an Affirmative Postmodern Leap

8) So that Bataille and Foucault are Men of Prayer

9) As Transgression takes them beyond Hegel

Bataille had His Critics

Several great philosophers took Bataille very seriously

and it is interesting to think about why great existentialists

like Sartre and Marcel would have been opposed to him

while postmodernists like Foucault, Derrida, and Kristeva

valued him so much and got so much from his thought.

We will think about this in detail and see why Sartre

even though he was a great existentialist philosopher was

opposed to Bataille’s altruistic ethics which Bataille

explained in terms of mysticism and the agape of Jesus.

Sartre thought of Bataille as arguing for an altruistic

ethics and yet as very unethical in his promiscuity.

He saw Bataille as writing about mystics like St. John

of the Cross and yet he could not stomach his very

erotic writing, which Bataille would see as ethical and religious.

Gabriel Marcel, a Roman Catholic existentialist, living at

the same time as Sartre and Bataille, saw Bataille as

an atheist for refusing to believe in salvation as

miserable without God and his radical nihilism was

the thought of an egomaniac and madman who had

a boundless pride and even a superiority complex.

We will see how Leslie Boldt and Peter Connor defend

Bataille against these criticisms of Marcel and how they

argue that Marcel completely misunderstood Bataille.

What we see in the criticism of Sartre and Marcel is

that there can be excellent existentialists who

however are not postmodern and even though they might

appreciate Kierkegaard and Nietzsche they do not understand them.