{"title":"Anders Nygren’s Agape and Eros, Irenaeus, and the Essence of Christianity","authors":"J. Kaufman","doi":"10.23865/noasp.133.ch02","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.23865/noasp.133.ch02","url":null,"abstract":"In Anders Nygren’s seminal study of the Christian concept of love, Eros och Agape, the second century bishop and theologian Irenaeus of Lyons is given an important role in the development of the “Christian idea of love”. In this chapter, I will critically discuss certain aspects of Nygren’s and his colleague Gustaf Aulen’s treatment of Irenaeus. Nygren and Aulen presuppose that one can delineate “pure” concepts or ideas or motifs in history (such as “Christian love”), they maintain that it makes sense to speak of the “essence” of Christianity as a given, and they find their normative basis in the genius of Luther, against which they can evaluate the genuineness of any given conception of Christianity. This is of course both provincial and anachronistic. A critical reading of Nygren’s and Aulen’s understanding of Irenaeus and the concept of Christian love raises important questions concerning objectivity, normativity and givenness. I argue in this chapter that there are no stable given “ideas” or “motifs” that can be “identified” or “discovered” or “described” objectively. I believe it is possible, however, to give accounts that will be recognizable and plausible to others who are familiar with the fragmentary sources upon which our accounts are based. At best, we can together construct plausible understandings of a concept such as Christian love, or of a thinker such as Irenaeus, or of something as broad and multifaceted as Christianity – without purporting to have found the true “essence” of the thing we are studying.","PeriodicalId":425519,"journal":{"name":"Love – Ancient Perspectives","volume":"43 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1900-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126540486","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Love in Dionysius the Areopagite and St Maximus the Confessor","authors":"A. Louth","doi":"10.23865/noasp.133.ch07","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.23865/noasp.133.ch07","url":null,"abstract":"Love (erōs, agapē) is a fundamental category in the sixth-century Dionysius the Areopagite and the seventh-century Maximus the Confessor, the latter being confessedly dependant on the former, and both formative for the later Byzantine tradition. Both are indebted to earlier thinkers, both pagan thinkers such as Plato, Plotinus, and Proclus, and Christian thinkers such as Origen and the Cappadocian Fathers. Dionysius’s teaching on love presents a fundamentally metaphysical account, with cosmic entailments. He assimilates the two Greek words for love, erōs and agapē, seeing them both as manifestations of beauty and responses to beauty, and using them more or less interchangeably for the ecstatic love of God for the cosmos and the love that underlies the creatures’ return to union, to the One. Maximus shares Dionysius’s sense of love as metaphysical and cosmic, but his teaching is much more practical, and presents love as something that can be attained by the Christian or monk, though it requires genuine ascetic struggle. He makes more of a distinction between erōs and agapē than Dionysius, seeing erōs as perfecting the soul’s desire, while agapē perfects the soul’s thumos, psychic energy. Maximus’s understanding of the interrelated psychological makeup of the soul, influenced by Evagrius, though with its own characteristic emphases, also underlies his sense of what is meant by the restoration of the cosmos.","PeriodicalId":425519,"journal":{"name":"Love – Ancient Perspectives","volume":"29 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1900-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127896591","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Negative Theology and Love in Marguerite Porete’s The Mirror of Simple Souls","authors":"D. Carabine","doi":"10.23865/noasp.133.ch08","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.23865/noasp.133.ch08","url":null,"abstract":"In this paper I examine Marguerite Porete’s The Mirror of Simple Souls as an illustration of how the two concepts: love and negative theology can be brought together in an unusual spiritual journey. The thesis I develop is that both have the same impetus: a going out of oneself. Love is extasis because it is the going out into the heart of an other; extasis is the central moment in a negative theology when the soul no longer knows either the self or God but is in the same place as, or is united to, God. Following a brief exposition of negative theology, I explain how Porete portrays the soul become what she truly is by falling out of herself under the impetus of love. When the soul is liberated from will and reason her divine lover can be and love in her. In Porete’s falling into the ocean of the Divine, she is made no thing so that her divine lover can be all. Her self-annihilation is the portal to her deification when she is finally changed into God. The continuous hominification of God and divinization of humanity is the eternal process of Love loving Love’s self. Porete focuses on the self rather than on purifying God concepts; it is a relentless stripping the self of all that is creaturely to make the soul an empty dwelling place for Love to reside. Thus, Porete’s is a radical negative theology: she never “knows” God even when she becomes Love’s dwelling place.","PeriodicalId":425519,"journal":{"name":"Love – Ancient Perspectives","volume":"71 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1900-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115883321","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Relations of Love in Texts Read by Early Christians","authors":"T. Vegge","doi":"10.23865/noasp.133.ch03","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.23865/noasp.133.ch03","url":null,"abstract":"Religious texts talk about love. The present paper comments on a few texts read by early Christians. There are several texts in the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible (the Septuagint), and in the New Testament, where the specific Jewish-Christian word agapē, translated “love”, occurs. The texts were originally used in contexts where relations between humans followed norms that are not immediately recognizable to us, and words describing relations refer to experiences, emotions and ideas partly foreign to late modern readers. In the Gospel of John love is envisaged in hierarchical relations. God is the supreme. John’s Jesus calls him the Father. Jesus has kept his Father’s commandments, and Jesus passes the commandment to love on to believers, those below him in the hierarchy. In the book of Deuteronomy Jewish and Christian readers could hear that the Lord had “set his heart in love” on their ancestors (Deut 10). The assertion is surrounded by several commandments, expressing what the Lord requires of those involved in the divine love relation. These formulations seem originally to have been couched in the political language of the time. How relevant can these texts be for late modern notions of divine love and human love?","PeriodicalId":425519,"journal":{"name":"Love – Ancient Perspectives","volume":"47 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1900-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132480770","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Concept of Love in Diadochus of Photiki","authors":"Henny Fiskå Hägg","doi":"10.23865/noasp.133.ch04","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.23865/noasp.133.ch04","url":null,"abstract":"All spiritual contemplation, brothers, should be guided by faith, hope and love, but above all by love (Gnostic Chapters 1).","PeriodicalId":425519,"journal":{"name":"Love – Ancient Perspectives","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1900-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131065064","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Eros and Distance: Transformation of Desire in St Gregory of Nyssa*","authors":"V. Cvetković","doi":"10.23865/noasp.133.ch06","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.23865/noasp.133.ch06","url":null,"abstract":"The paper aims to analyze the relation between the notion of love or desire (eros) for God, and the notion of distance (diastema) between God and the created beings in the works of St Gregory of Nyssa. These two notions are interrelated on different levels, because distance that separates God from the created beings is traversed out of desire for God of the latter. First, the distance as temporal interval will be investigated, which separates the present day from the Second Coming of Christ, which is elaborated by Gregory in his early work On Virginity. The focus will then be shifted to the distance between good and evil, that Gregory explicates in the works of his middle period such as On the making of man, Against Eunomius III and The Great Catechetical Oration. Finally, the distance as an inherent characteristic of created nature that never disappears will be analyzed by focusing on Gregory’s later works, such as Homilies on the Song of Songs, On perfection and The Life of Moses.","PeriodicalId":425519,"journal":{"name":"Love – Ancient Perspectives","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1900-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129034538","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"A Neo-Platonic Dialogue on the Ethics of Love*","authors":"D. Vasilakis","doi":"10.23865/noasp.133.ch05","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.23865/noasp.133.ch05","url":null,"abstract":"In his classic paper on “The Individual as an Object of Love in Plato” Gregory Vlastos denied that according to Plato’s Diotima in the Symposium a human individual can ever be the proper object of one’s erotic desire, because what one (should) be enamoured with is the Form of Beauty. For the true Platonic lover, the beauty of an individual is only the starting-point for one to understand that beauty can reside also in more abstract levels. Hence, Vlastos argues that the beloved individual is for his lover only a means to an end, so that the lover recollects and attains to true Beauty, and that this is morally objectionable. The systematic Neoplatonic philosopher Proclus (412–485 AD) had already given an answer to this accusation. I will first present the altruistic side of Eros as an ontological entity in Proclus’s metaphysical system. My guide in this will be Socrates, as well as the Platonic Demiurge from the Timaeus and Republic’s philosopher-king. It will be shown that, according to Proclus’s interpretation of various Platonic texts, Vlastos was wrong to accuse Plato of the abovementioned “instrumentality” on the erotic field. However, my paper will close with a critical engagement with Proclus too, since I discern that in his view of Platonic love another sort of instrumentality, one which is akin to Stoic ethics, arises. Vlastos was wrong, but we do not need to be wholeheartedly sympathetic to Proclus.","PeriodicalId":425519,"journal":{"name":"Love – Ancient Perspectives","volume":"25 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1900-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128876599","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Eros and Agape – a Critique of Anders Nygren","authors":"T. Tollefsen","doi":"10.23865/noasp.133.ch01","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.23865/noasp.133.ch01","url":null,"abstract":"Nygren’s book Eros och Agape was first published in Sweden in 1930/36. It was then published in English translation in 1953 under the title Agape and Eros. The author’s idea was to describe the development of the Christian concept of love through the centuries. Nygren argued that eros is the term for Platonic, self-centred love that strives for union with the divine realities, while agape, denoting the Christian concept of love, is the free, divine movement towards human beings. Agape is unselfish and is not motivated by any value in the recipient. This distinction drawn by Nygren has been so influential that it has been taken for granted in a lot of Christian contexts worldwide, even if one does not associate it with the name Nygren. In this paper his methodology and the distinction he draws are criticised. He finds in eros and agape two so-called “fundamental motifs” that, as he sees it, unfortunately merge in Christian tradition and thereby obscure the original Christian understanding of love that emerges in its purest form in St Paul and later in Luther. There are a lot of problems in Nygren’s book. He argues, for instance, that Christianity emerges from Judaism as a completely new religion, and separates the Old and the New Testament as if they had nothing in common. Agape as the divine gift to human beings excludes all human activity since God has freely and graciously chosen human persons as his slaves. In the present paper it is argued that Nygren’s methodology is unsound and that his conclusions are not even in agreement with the New Testament.","PeriodicalId":425519,"journal":{"name":"Love – Ancient Perspectives","volume":"17 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1900-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128134800","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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