Loving God in and through the self: Trinitarian love in St. Augustine

Anders Nygren argues that Augustine’s adherence to a Platonist notion of eros undermines both his own and a wider Christian account of agape. On Nygren’s reading, eros, which is self-fulfilling love that originates in the soul’s movement toward God, stands in contradistinction to agape, which is self-denying love that originates in God and condescends to us through the sacrifice of Christ. While it is true that Platonism plays an important role for Augustine, he comes to interpret love through a lens of Christian doctrines on creation, Christ, and the Trinity that leads him to reshape the Greek ideal of love. In particular, Augustine reads human upward love of God (eros) as flowing out of God’s triune downward love of creation (agape) mediated through the incarnation. Nygren contends that Augustine’s connection here between eros and agape is contradictory, but this presupposes at least a medieval, if not a modern, distinction between natural (erotic) and supernatural (agapic) love. Augustine does not draw on eros to the exclusion of agape but rather sees in eros the inclusion of agape. That is, our natural love (eros) for God is always enabled by God’s supernatural love (agape) for us.