Love in Greek

I asked Stewart if he would write a little bit about the Greek words for love and how they are used. His remarks are below. Thanks Stewart.

Love in Greek

Well, this is something I might know about, though not in N.T. context in detail. Eros and agape are famous, the former sexual love (between and among humans of either gender) and the latter, love between God and Man.

Agape seems a relatively late word in Greek. Much less common than all-purpose philia. Doesn't appear in Homer, for example. Before Christianity it seems to have been a fairly bland word governing any kind of non-sexual love but not used much. The Christians found it lying around and gave it special meaning.
   Footnote: In Mod. Greek agape has won out over all the other words but with no connection to religion. S'agapo is I love you, and with a few other words like phenggari (moon) forms 66% of the vocab of pop songs.

In ancient Greece, only a few zealots like Euripides' Hippolytos loved a particular god or goddess. Mortals usually feared their gods and had no expectation that any god would care about them, let alone love them. Worship was a commercial arrangement in which you gave or promised something to the god and only then expected a return.

Christianity was a hard sell to sophisticated pagans. Also a hard sell were some Christian moral teachings about loving and forgiving enemies. (I always forgive my enemies, said Oscar Wilde: Nothing annoys them so much.) A key tenet of pagan morality was: Do good to your friends and bad to your enemies. That Jesus and Paul specifically reject this counsel must have made them seem naïve.

There are miscellaneous other words used for love: stergo (verb) usually applies to children and parents. Pothos is 'yearning' and often describes what we might call ?desire? in an athlete. Alexander was described as having a pothos.

Now we come to oft-misunderstood Platonic Love. This kind of love does not rule out physical sexuality, but sex is only the lowest rung on an anagogical ladder. You fall in love with one (or more) beautiful body and then transfer your love to what all beautiful bodies share, namely beauty or The Good, Plato's God, more or less. When you make love in the lower, physical realm the result is children, which is fine and gives you a kind of immortality. Even better, though, is the spiritual and philosophical realm where the product is not beautiful children but beautiful ideas, which yield true immortality.
   All this, as you may recall, is in Socrates' speech at the end of Plato's Symposium.

Socrates' various maxims and paradoxes often blend well with Christianity: That no one does evil knowingly or willingly means that I will never do bad to my enemy. It is better to live in a good city than a bad one, so if I
do bad to my enemy I will hurt myself because I will live in a bad city.

Post scriptum: Romantic Love. This love thrives on impediments and even seeks them out. The true goal is not union in this world but in the next. So death is the perfect ending for Romeo and Juliet, ditto the Liebestod of Tristan and Isolde. But also pop songs like Teen Angel. The key may be in Denis de Rougement's Love in the Western World. He blames the Cathars, a medieval Christian sect that followed Plato in celebrating the immortal soul and denigrating the corrupt body.

Hope this is interesting.

Stewart