Agape (ἀγάπη) — Love of goodwill and self-giving, not dependent on the worth or merit of the one loved. The word is infrequent in classical Greek literature but becomes central in the Septuagint and the New Testament, where it names God’s love for human beings, human love for God, and love of neighbour. The Gospels sum up the law in the two commandments of love of God and neighbour (Matthew 22:37–40), Paul devotes the hymn of 1 Corinthians 13 to agape, and the First Epistle of John identifies it with the nature of God (1 John 4:8). In Latin the term was rendered as caritas or dilectio. Augustine, in The City of God and elsewhere, made caritas the principle of the moral life, and Thomas Aquinas treated it as a theological virtue in the Summa Theologiae (II-II, q. 23–27). Kierkegaard, in Works of Love (1847), analyses love of neighbour as a Christian duty. The most influential study of the contrast is that of the Swedish theologian Anders Nygren, Agape and Eros (Den kristna kärlekstanken genom tiderna, 1930–1936; English translation by Philip S. Watson, 1953): for him, eros is ascending, acquisitive love motivated by the value of its object, whereas agape is descending, spontaneous and unmotivated love, and the history of the Christian idea of love is that of its mixture and conflict with eros. The thesis has been widely criticized: thinkers such as Martin D’Arcy, in The Mind and Heart of Love (1945), argued that the two complement each other, a position taken up by Benedict XVI in the encyclical Deus caritas est (2005). See also eros, philia; Saint Augustine, Thomas Aquinas and Kierkegaard.
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