MLK and his love of αγάπη: How the civil rights leader embraced the Greek concept of love

By Georgia Logothetis: Fifty-six years ago today, Martin Luther King Jr. stood at the podium in Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama and spoke about αγάπη, the Greek concept of love.
As The Martin Luther King, Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change explains, King was deeply interested in this Greek approach to love and made agape a core tenet of his philosophy:

“Agape, a Greek word for love, was central to Dr. King’s theology and philosophy of nonviolent social change. He spoke of three kinds of love: philia, affection between friends; eros, romantic love; and agape, a universal, all-embracing love for others for their sake.”

When King would take the podium at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church on November 17, 1957, it wasn’t the first time he would speak about why the concept of agape was so important to the civil rights movement. King frequently laid out the various ideas of love in Greek culture in letters and speeches. However, it was his speech that day, titled “Loving your enemies,” that perhaps best laid out why King believed agape was so important to the civil rights movement:

The Greek language, as I’ve said so often before, is very powerful at this point. It comes to our aid beautifully in giving us the real meaning and depth of the whole philosophy of love. And I think it is quite apropos at this point, for you see the Greek language has three words for love, interestingly enough. It talks about love as eros. That’s one word for love. Eros is a sort of, aesthetic love. Plato talks about it a great deal in his dialogues, a sort of yearning of the soul for the realm of the gods. And it’s come to us to be a sort of romantic love, though it’s a beautiful love. Everybody has experienced eros in all of its beauty when you find some individual that is attractive to you and that you pour out all of your like and your love on that individual. That is eros, you see, and it’s a powerful, beautiful love that is given to us through all of the beauty of literature; we read about it.
Then the Greek language talks about philia, and that’s another type of love that’s also beautiful. It is a sort of intimate affection between personal friends. And this is the type of love that you have for those persons that you’re friendly with, your intimate friends, or people that you call on the telephone and you go by to have dinner with, and your roommate in college and that type of thing. It’s a sort of reciprocal love. On this level, you like a person because that person likes you. You love on this level, because you are loved. You love on this level, because there’s something about the person you love that is likeable to you. This too is a beautiful love. You can communicate with a person; you have certain things in common; you like to do things together. This is philia.
The Greek language comes out with another word for love. It is the word agape. And agape is more than eros; agape is more than philia; agapeis something of the understanding, creative, redemptive goodwill for all men. It is a love that seeks nothing in return. It is an overflowing love; it’s what theologians would call the love of God working in the lives of men. And when you rise to love on this level, you begin to love men, not because they are likeable, but because God loves them. You look at every man, and you love him because you know God loves him. And he might be the worst person you’ve ever seen.
And this is what Jesus means, I think, in this very passage when he says, “Love your enemy.” And it’s significant that he does not say, “Like your enemy.” Like is a sentimental something, an affectionate something. There are a lot of people that I find it difficult to like. I don’t like what they do to me. I don’t like what they say about me and other people. I don’t like their attitudes. I don’t like some of the things they’re doing. I don’t like them. But Jesus says love them. And love is greater than like. Love is understanding, redemptive goodwill for all men, so that you love everybody, because God loves them. You refuse to do anything that will defeat an individual, because you have agape in your soul. And here you come to the point that you love the individual who does the evil deed, while hating the deed that the person does. This is what Jesus means when he says, “Love your enemy.” This is the way to do it.

(listen to the audio of King’s speech here)
Years later, in a 1962 letter, King explained that it was this concept of agape that formed the very beating hear of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference:

It would have been easy for King to look at all of the discrimination and prejudice of the time and feed into the cycle of hatred and violence. He chose not to. He chose instead to look to the Greek concept of love, a concept with far more dimensions than in any other culture. It was that multi-faceted concept and its core of agape that informed his philosophy of non-violence.

It’s a concept that deserves reflection not just on the anniversary of King’s speech, but every day, by us all.

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