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Eros and Agape

Agape and Eros
Author Anders Nygren
Translator Philip S. Watson
Language Swedish
Subject Love: Religious aspects, Christianity
Publisher S.P.C.K., Westminster Press, Harper & Row
Publication date
1930, 1936
Published in English
1953 (complete)
Pages 764 pp.
OCLC 77003058
231.6
LC Class BV4639.N813

Agape and Eros (Swedish: Eros och Agape) is a treatise written by the Swedish Protestant theologian Anders Nygren, first published in Swedish in two parts in 1930 and 1936.

Nygren was one of the theologians who had formed the so-called Lundensian School of Theology, in which other important figures were Gustav Aulén and Ragnar Bring. They all shared a keen interest in rediscovering major motifs of Reformation theology, and examining how such motifs had been employed in different ways throughout history. In this context, Nygren was examining the motif of love.

The English subtitles of Eros and Agape of the respective volumes and sections are:

• "The Problem of Agape and Eros" (introduction)
• Part One: "Two Fundamental Motifs" (agape, eros, and their fundamental contrasts)

• Part Two: "Fundamental Motifs in Conflict" (synthesis as to nomos, eros, and agape: preparation from post-apostolic times, completion, and destruction from Luther).

Nygren analyses the connotations of two Greek words for love, eros and agape (unconditional love).

Nygren's argument is twofold. In the first place, he argues that agape is the only truly Christian kind of love, and that eros turns us away from God. Either we love others and God in the manner of eros, purely for ourselves, in which case we do not really love them at all; or we love them in the manner of agape, for themselves, with a true love, in which case we act against our own self-interest and happiness.

Secondly, he traces the historical roots of what he perceives as the loss of this concept of agape. For Nygren, agape is the properly Christian understanding of love, as is evident from New Testament texts such as the Synoptic Gospels, Paul's theology of the cross, and the identification of God and agape in 1 John. However, he argues that from Augustine onward this focus on agape became polluted by an attempt to synthesis the concept with that of eros, in a synthesis of caritas. Nygren argues that most medieval theology of love was based around this attempt at a caritas-synthesis. However, he argues, this is not a truly Christian synthesis, given the origins and nature of eros. The Reformation, therefore, was hugely important because at this point Martin Luther exposed the fallacy of this synthesis, and made clear again the properly Christian agape conception of love.


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