My Three Passions
Knowledge, pity, and agape
Explain why pity is earth-bound and how Russell's pity relates to agape.
With equal passion, Russell has sought knowledge. He has wished to understand the hearts of people, to know why the stars shine, and to understand how number holds sway over the changing world. A little of this, he says, he has achieved, but not much.
Love and knowledge, as far as they were possible, led him upward, towards the heavens. But pity always brought him back to earth.
The cries of pain echo in his heart: children dying of hunger, victims of cruelty, helpless old people who are a burden to their own children, and the whole world of loneliness, poverty and pain. He longs to help, but he cannot, and so he too suffers.
Still, he has found his life worth living, and he says he would gladly live it again if he were given the chance.
The book also quotes Martin Luther King, who described agape: an unselfish love for all people, which seeks their good and helps to heal the community.
Love and knowledge lift us up; pity keeps us human.
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