McDermott (Un)Conditional Love

 My favorite band Young the Giant has a song title “I Bite.” One of the lyrics in it is “love is unconditional under the right conditions” and I’ve always really liked listening to this song because of that lyric – I think it’s genius.

Like I said with the whole gift giving and agape debate in an earlier blog post, I also find it hard to grasp agape and find unconditional love to be something pretty much impossible (that said, I’m open to objections). For storge, we see that a parent must want the child or the child must get good grades – there are countless cases where a parent’s love for their child is entirely conditional. For philia, friends can’t be selfish, but a lot of people won’t hang out with certain people because they have a reputation or image to maintain – the condition must be that they’re socially acceptable in some way. Even in eros, the condition is that they must feel romantic attraction and feel emotions, things that some people (like psychopaths) physically cannot do.


For agape, true unconditional love, I also think there are conditions that have to be met for it to be uncondidional. You have to be a human to receive God’s love (like, in my church, we were always told that pets and animals don’t go to heaven). For a more concrete example, God also does not love Satan, whether that be because he’s evil (condition: you must be good) or a fallen angel/devil (condition: humanity). So receiving God’s unconditional love only happens under the two conditions that you are not evil and human, which doesn’t sound very much like agape to me.

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