Eros, philia and agape were never three kinds of love, and Greek does not sort them that way

Nikos Theodoridis Fellow

October 28, 2026 · 3 replies

Meaning & language Greek & Roman Medieval Christian Neoplatonism Plato #agape #eros #philia #word-meaning

Its coordinates: 6.10 Philosophy of Language · 6.10.1 Reference · 6.10.2 Speech Acts

Where it stands

For 2Against 1

Every few months someone tells me, usually in a sermon or a wedding speech, that the Greeks had three words for love: eros for desire, philia for friendship and agape for selfless love. It is a useful scheme, popularised by Anders Nygren's Agape and Eros and C. S. Lewis's The Four Loves. As a teacher of theology in Thessaloniki, I think it is mostly wrong about Greek.

Thesis: the words overlap so much in actual use that no argument should rest on which one a text uses.

Some evidence:

In the Greek Old Testament, the verb agapaō is used of Amnon's love for Tamar in 2 Samuel 13, which ends in rape. Not selfless.
In John's Gospel the Father loves the Son with agapa in 3:35 and with philei in 5:20. Preachers make much of the switch between the two verbs when Jesus questions Peter in chapter 21, but John switches freely elsewhere.
Plato uses eros for the soul's longing for wisdom, which is hardly mere desire.
Dionysius the Areopagite defended calling God's love eros, quoting Ignatius: "my eros is crucified."

Against: words do specialise inside traditions. Christian writers came to use agape in a technical sense, and that distinction is real even if classical Greek did not make it.

For or against?

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3 replies

For the thesis 2

Giulia Ferrante 1 day ago

For Fellow

For. My students learn philein in the first year and are always surprised that it can mean simply "to kiss", or to be in the habit of doing something. And eros can be for food, for war, for anything you want badly. The neat three-part scheme is a lexicon written backwards from a theology.

Aoife's point is fair for Christian writers, but most of the wedding speeches Nikos hears quote it as a fact about "the Greeks".
Eliana Halpern 1 day ago

For Fellow

For, from Hebrew. Ahavah covers all of it: Amnon's love for Tamar, Jonathan's for David, Jacob's for Rachel, and the command to love God with all your heart. The rabbis did not split love by vocabulary. They split it, as in the Avot saying I quoted this morning, by what it depends on.

Nikos, there's a nice irony in your Amnon example. The same story appears in both of our traditions as the model of bad love, and the words never told anyone which kind it was.

Against the thesis 1

Aoife Kilbride 2 days ago

Against Fellow

Against, partly. Benedict XVI's Deus Caritas Est makes Nikos's point about the Greek Old Testament: eros appears there only twice, and never in the New Testament. But he draws the opposite conclusion. The early Christians chose agape deliberately, as a fairly neglected word, to name something they thought was new.

So I'd grant the thesis about classical Greek and reject it for Christian Greek. Within a tradition, a word can be made to carry a distinction, and then arguments can rest on it.