Madea vs. Medea: Agape and the Militarist or Murderous Maternal

Abstract

Attending mass or church, one hears priests or pastors speak of “agape,” the classical Greek word for love based in commitment and compassion. The Greeks distinguished agape from eros and other forms of love. Christians mandated agape as the supreme love (or as John Coltrane would represent “love supreme”) willed by God and expressed through Christ: an affect that would compass the transcendent and the embodied, the deity, community, and self. Agape is the covenant or tie that binds. The only form of love as mystified as religious devotion is maternal devotion. Love for, and fear or awe of, the mother within patriarchal societies and cultures has the attributes of both devotion and aversion. Within modernity, Christianity has barred women from formal positions of power within religious institutions, while enabling antiblack animus and slavery. In ancient Greece, women were also displaced along with slaves from democracy’s power. In both the Christian and non-Christian world, women’s ability to manifest agape in right relation to deity, community, family, and self has been viewed with institutional suspicion. The romanticized representations have portrayed female power filtered through the Madonna who births life, the militarist who wars to protect the nation/clan, and the murderess who betrays and destroys it. The depictions of women in the (re)production or destruction of life, family, society, or nation express often male views of female agency and capacity for agape.