In all human love (eros), unless this is sustained beyond desire and beyond self-indulgence by agape, there can be no lasting "reality." To read 1 Corinthians 13 at a wedding is meaningless if "love" is associated merely with human love in the common sense. What that great chapter is saying is that in every human affection, every action, every deed, every quality, there must be the guiding strength of agape, the divine love, the further and eternal quality of being.

II

The cosmic dynamic

Agape, it seems, is that current within things that influences towards unfoldment, development, fruition and further stages in the cosmic process. When barbarian invaders are within a few miles of a cultural centre, they halt and are held there for many years until they themselves have been brought to an understanding of values which, when they at length advance, make them respect and foster the work of that centre. Such was the case; we are told, at Glastonbury in the dark ages. By the time the Saxons arrived, they themselves were Christianised. It was then from that centre, under Dunstan, that England developed educationally, through the chain of monastic centres he organised.

An example from science - the critical temperature and conditions for the emergence of life on Earth are within such a narrow range that the chances of its being established (and maintained) were very small indeed. Yet that margin was secured. It is at significant stages in the unfolding of the cosmos that there is this extra impulse, an unforeseen, incalculable factor, which makes for, and secures, the further progress. Agape is this principle of indeterminacy, which works within the measurable components, actions and reactions, of energy - the immeasurable within the measurable.

It may be contended that over a Universe so vast as that in which we exist, the infinity of chances available will ensure that, at least occasionally, the most unexpected results will be found, that even a million-to-one chance will emerge as fulfilled fact.

But we are dealing with events in the comparatively small compass of our own planet and its limited history, and human experiences within that frame. For most of us, validation of this extra dimension occurs within the period of our own lifetimes. What we call "coincidence" strikes too often for us to ignore the creative interplay of events and experiences. There is, indeed, a further and subtle cohesive quality which shapes our lives, in many and various ways - if we sensitively open ourselves to awareness.

Boundaries of the knowable

The difficulty of expressing our apprehensions at such boundaries of knowledge and human thought has been brilliantly expressed in a seminal article by the Professor of Physics at the Open University, Russell Stannard (1983). I quote.

"What is light? What is matter? These are questions fundamental to a scientific understanding of the world. Or are they? Certainly they are questions long known to have no simple answers. Indeed, a recently completed experiment goes so far as to indicate that they might have no answers at all. If this interpretation is right, science is not what we thought it was: some might argue it has begun to look a little like theology. Light, for example, was found to act as a wave and also as a particle. No-one could reconcile the contrasting concepts. Bohr then stated his epoch-making thesis [the quantisation of energy ­ Ed]. Science tells us nothing ultimately about the world as it is - it cannot answer such questions as 'What is...?' It can tell us only of the ways in which we interact with the world. The long controversy which then started had Einstein in the opposite camp. More and more [scientists], however, came to share Bohr's view. Bohr continued that we should never get beyond the ability to speak of our interactions; that was the boundary of the knowable."

What lay beyond, words could not "define." The ability to speak meaningfully of our interactions was no temporary restriction. It is the barrier of the knowable.

In theology, says Professor Stannard, we are again faced with such paradoxes as the Three in One and One in Three, Jesus as Perfect God and yet Perfect Man, and so on. Attempts to state without paradox lose something of the proven experience. We are at the limits of statement.