Agape is the last of the four loves. It is love for the neighbour or the other, and the feature which clearly distinguishes it, is that it is the sort of love that can be commanded. " You shall " love your neighbour as yourself, is the way the Bible specifies it.

The notion of command is foreign to the loves of affection, friendship, and eros . No parent, except one who is delinquent or brought up for child payments, has to be made to love a child. Friendship too is not constraint or compulsion, but choice. And eros is either free or it revolts. Agape is different.

If agape is love that can be commanded, its raison d'etre cannot lie with the emotions. The emotions are not susceptible to taking orders. "You shall not feel depressed this morning; you shall be joyful" is a ludicrous statement. But "you shall love your neighbour" makes eminent Biblical sense.

Obviously, too, as something that can be commanded, agape could not be a matter of liking people. At the same time "I do not like you" though "as a Christian, I love you" is an awful travesty of the obligation of agape . No one wants to be at the receiving end of that kind of love.

The love which is agape refers to is a certain kind of regard, which sees the other under the aspect of creature or child of God - like oneself. Another name for this regard is respect. Respect has nothing to do with my feelings or my decision.

The other, as such, imposes a claim upon me to be treated in a certain way, simply because he or she exists and for no other reason. It helps if I find them congenial or "my type," or someone I like, but these are really quite irrelevant considerations.

Agape is to be extended to one's enemies. " Love your enemies ," Jesus commanded. " Do good to those who hate you ." But how does one love an enemy?

What form does love take here? The first requirement is that one should not pretend that the person is somehow a friend. If I pretend to like someone, when I really cannot stand him/her I will end up secretly resenting him/her.

Loving enemies, i.e. people we don't take to for one reason another, or who don't take to us, means displaying certain attitudes, like being civil to them. Civility is something I can bring myself to, irrespective of my feelings.

The Bible also says that we must pray for them. This could hardly mean that we ask God to shower them with blessings. That would be friendship. What it means is that we simply recommend them to God, without adding words that we can't feel, or wishes that make little sense. By "recommending" I mean simply saying: "Lord, I recommend X to you." More than this is not required.

Again, enemies vary. Some are more serious than others. Imagine the situation between Palestinians and Israelis, or between South African blacks before apartheid ended. The commandment to love remained the same, of course.

It didn't change because of the complex character of the enemy. But the response did and does. How do I love an oppressive enemy, for instance, who has his foot on my neck? I must ask him to remove it, and if he doesn't, I must take steps to see that he does.

In other words, some forms of love for an enemy has justice as a prerequisite. In this sense, the slogan makes complete sense: no justice, no love.

In striving for justice, love also functions, one should note, as a mode of constraint on what I may not do. If all it takes to have my enemy remove his foot is to push it off, I am not free to break it or cut it off. Love, in other words, imposes a certain proportionality in what may be done to ensure that the claims of justice are met.

In times of great oppression, the notion of proportionate love tends to be observed more in the breach. This led the great ethicist Reinhold Neibuhr to hope that too much reparative injustice would not occur in such situations before the work of love or justice was finally done.

A powerful form of love for an oppressive enemy is non-violence. Non-violence is not only a matter of strategy. It is a concrete entailment of love for an enemy.

Non-violence shames or shocks the enemy into a sense of awakening to the personhood of the person or group oppressed. It was used, as we remember, to enormous effect both by Mahatma Ghandi and Martin Luther King Jr.

Agape also functions to identify Jesus in a particularly strong way with the neighbour in need. This we see in Matthew 25, in the scene of the Last Judgment. Neither the unjust nor the just see Jesus. All they see are different kinds of people in need. The just attend to them, and the unjust pass them by.

Both are surprised when the true identity of the neighbour is revealed, but the surprise is keener for the unjust. They say in effect: Lord, had we known it was you in that guise, how could we have passed you by? But all they saw, all that we keep seeing, is the neighbour.

Agape as regard or respect for the other simply as other affirms personhood in all the other loves. It sets limits both on what is permissible and what is not.

I may never disrespect the object of my love, no matter what form of love I deal with. A family member, friend, or lover is always a subject, even though some objectification in life is inevitable. A person is always an end in himself or herself, even if I have to deal with them sometimes as a means.

What follows from respect in each love relation depends on the relation in question and the issue or issues that are at stake.