174 struggling with the worldrequires a heightened vulnerability. Because it draws on the imagina-
tion of other people as the radical individuals that they are or seek to
become, it looks to the person beyond the contingent and limiting so-
cial role. It is penetrated by a search for the infi nite, which is both its
power and its infi rmity.
Th e teaching that puts love (understood in this fashion) rather than
altruism at the center of our moral experience diverges so radically
from the beliefs that have been paramount in the world history of
moral thought and moral experience that it takes hold only with great
diffi culty, over a long historical time, and in contest with ideas that op-
pose it. If it is an orthodoxy, it has always been an unannounced, con-
tested, misunderstood, and derided orthodoxy, even in those places
and periods in which the sacred or profane versions of the struggle
with the world have enjoyed greatest infl uence.
Th us, even in early Christian theology, the highest expression of
the relation of self to others was taken to be agape, a disinterested and
inclusive fellow feeling, designated by a word that was itself borrowed
from the vocabulary of Hellenistic philosophy. Th is agape is just an-
other word for altruism. Its associations are with the doctrines of the
overcoming of the world, such as we might fi nd them expounded by a
Plotinus.
In the subsequent history of modern moral theory, oft en a transpar-
ent secularization of Christian belief, the centrality accorded to a prin-
ciple of altruism in the ordering of our moral experience was regularly
associated with resort to a method, such as Bentham’s felicifi c calculus,
Rousseau’s social contract, or Kant’s categorical imperative, with the
aid of which we could assess our obligations to one another. By dis-
charging these obligations, we render ourselves blameless, although
neither loving nor beloved. We do so from the middle distance of an
experience of interaction with strangers in which we view them with
detached benevolence and act toward them with punctilious rectitude.
However, the reduction of love to altruism, as well as to the pietism
of the middle distance with which the principle of altruism is closely
associated, has an uneasy place in the religion of Jesus. If he consorted
with thieves and prostitutes, how can we prefer purity to love? If he de-
fi ed the law at every turn, how can we allow our moral campaigns to
begin in rule mongering and to end in hand washing? If he, God incar-