The Meaning of Mary Magdalene: Discovering the Woman at the Heart of Christianity

by Cynthia Bourgeault

It was Plato who first came up with the idea of classifying love by types, and his delineation of agape (impartial, disinterested love) from eros (desiring love) has basically laid the foundation for all such discussions for two and a half millennia since. But Plato never made the error of equating agape exclusively with divine love (given the notoriously riotous passions of the Greek divinities, that thought would probably never have occurred to him), or eros exclusively with human desiring. That particular reductionism, which has had such a pervasive influence on contemporary Christian spirituality, can be laid at the doorstep of Anders Nygren, a Swedish Protestant theologian of the 1930s whose monumental three-volume work Agape and Eros pronounced categorically that “eros is man’s way to God; agape is God’s way to man.”10 According to Nygren, eros is by its very nature filled with desire and neediness, hence impure; by contrast, God’s way of loving is free, clear, and impartial, motivated only by the goodness of the giver.