Agape's object is always the concrete individual, not some abstraction called humanity. Love of humanity is easy because humanity does not surprise you with inconvenient demands. You never find humanity on your doorstep, stinking and begging.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes that true love is directed towards individual people rather than a vague notion of humanity.
Peter Kreeft highlights the distinction between loving humanity as a concept and loving individual persons with all their complexities and needs. He argues that while it's easy and comfortable to claim love for humanity in general, real love involves engaging with the actual, imperfect individuals around us, who may present unexpected challenges and demands. This love requires a deeper commitment that often goes beyond idealized notions.
In practice
In a speech about community service, one might quote this to emphasize the importance of personal connection.
Trusting God's grace means trusting God's love for us rather than our love for God. [...] Therefore our prayers should consist mainly of rousing our awareness of God's love for us rather than trying to rouse God's awareness of our love for him, like the priests of Baal on Mount Carmel (1 Kings 18:26-29).
Remembering the facts of death and Heaven gives us an even more pressing reason to learn to pray: We do not have an infinite amount of time. We are one day nearer Home today than we ever were before. I guarantee you that after you die you will not say 'I spent too much time praying; I wish I had watched more TV instead.'
Like apes, we breed, sleep, and die. Yet like God we say, "I am." We are ontological oxymorons.
The modern mind always tends to reduce the greater to the lesser rather than seeing the lesser as reflecting the greater.
Our soul, like Mary's body, is to receive God Himself if only we, like her, believe, consent and receive; if only we speak her truly magic word fiat, "let it be." It is the creative word, the word God used to create the universe.
Protestants believe that the sacraments are like ladders that God gave to us by which we can climb up to Him. Catholics believe that they are like ladders that God gave to Himself by which He climbs down to us.
Of all the worldly passions, lust is the most intense. All other worldly passions seem to follow in its train.
They lived the slow and invisible interpenetration of their universes, like two stars gravitating around a common axis, in ever tighter orbits, whose clear destiny is to coalesce at some point in space and time.
It is a wonderful subduer, this need of love-this hunger of the heart-as peremptory as that other hunger by which Nature forces us to submit to the yoke, and change the face of the world.
For several long moments we remained locked together, and I think I covered her hair with small sacred kisses, her perfume crucifying me with memories.
I think that sexuality is only attractive when it's natural and spontaneous.
You don't love someone because they're perfect, you love them in spite of the fact that they're not.
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