ABSTRACT
Few serious thinkers have doubted that the conceptual field is bounded by the two terms Eros and Agape, recapitulating the confluence of cultural sources we have (selectively) revisited. The relation between these two aspects of love was first addressed in a brilliant, limpid and scholarly book written before the Second World War by an otherwise little-known bishop of the Swedish Lutheran Church.1 Modestly, but very radically, Anders Nygren suggested that Christianity had, in its twenty centuries of existence, given insufficient energy to defining the original coherence of what was, after all, its most central concept, since it had assumed that the Christian meaning of the word ‘love’ was sufficiently accessible to all from tradition, example and general current usage.
