An agape was a frugal meal that the early Christians ate together to symbolize their ideals of charity and sharing, and to commemorate the last supper of Jesus and his disciples. Appropriately enough, agape, usually pronounced to rhyme with bag a pay, is a Greek word meaning love. It did not take long, however, for the agape meal to degenerate from a frugal celebration of love and sharing to an exercise in extravagance: by the fourth century, the typical agape had become such a banquet of excess that St. Augustine chastised those who celebrated it, and a Papal council was convened to forbid the feast from being celebrated in churches. The Eucharist—the Christian sacrament of eating and drinking consecrated bread and wine—is a vestige of the original agape celebration. Slightly older than the word agape, which appeared in the early seventeenth century, is the term love-feast, which denoted the same commemoratory supper. Love-feast gained new currency in the mid eighteenth century, when John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist church, used it to denote a supper where Christians of different denominations could eat together in good fellowship.
Unselfish love that is considered only with the welfare of the beloved.