A modern framework, not a medieval one
Agape, eros and philia are Greek words that modern writers often use to sort love into types. Agape is usually described as self-giving, unconditional love, eros as desire or passionate attraction, and philia as friendship or affection between equals. The scheme is popular today, partly because the twentieth-century writer C. S. Lewis discussed related categories in his book The Four Loves. It is tidy and useful, but it is not how most medieval Europeans organized the subject.
The title’s phrase “three types of love” therefore needs care. There was no standard medieval doctrine of exactly these three. Medieval writers had their own vocabulary, mostly in Latin, and their own ways of dividing love. Some of those divisions resemble the Greek ones, and some do not.
Greek words in a Latin world
In the early Middle Ages, much of western Europe read Latin, and knowledge of Greek was limited, though it never vanished entirely. The Latin Bible, the Vulgate, used the word caritas for the Christian ideal of love, often translating the Greek agape of the New Testament. The word dilectio was also used. For desire and affection in general, writers used amor, and for friendship, amicitia.
So an educated medieval reader meeting the topic usually thought in terms of these Latin words:
- Caritas: love of God and of neighbor for God’s sake, closest to the idea of agape.
- Amor: a broad word for love, including desire, affection and attachment.
- Amicitia: friendship, including the classical ideal of friends who share virtue.
- Cupiditas: a related term, often used by Augustine for disordered love of worldly things, set against caritas.
The Greek word eros seldom appears in ordinary Latin writing of the period. It does occur in a few translated works from the Greek tradition, such as writings attributed to Pseudo-Dionysius, where it was sometimes used for a divine yearning, but this was a specialized, scholarly setting. Philia likewise survives mainly through discussions of friendship rather than as a common term.
Agape and caritas
Caritas was the most central idea. Augustine described a well-ordered love that directs desire toward God and loves other things in relation to God. Thomas Aquinas, in the thirteenth century, treated caritas as a kind of friendship between humans and God, which gave the idea of philia a place inside the highest form of love. This is a good example of how the Greek categories do not map neatly: a medieval theologian could blend what a modern list keeps apart.
Charity in this sense was a virtue, one of the three theological virtues alongside faith and hope. It was not a feeling alone but a settled disposition expressed in action, including care for the poor and sick. That connects it with the Church’s practical work in hospitals and almsgiving, which is quite different from the English word’s more narrow modern meaning.
Eros, desire and its ordering
What a modern reader would call eros appears in medieval sources under amor and similar words, usually in discussions of desire, sin and virtue. Church writers often treated sexual desire with caution. The ideal of chastity directed it into marriage or renunciation. At the same time, medieval thinkers did not regard all desire as bad. Augustine and others saw longing as part of human nature that needed correct direction. Poets used the vocabulary of desire in the songs and romances of courtly love, and mystics sometimes used erotic imagery for union with God, most famously in readings of the Song of Songs.
That last point shows another complication. Medieval commentators on the Song of Songs often read it as an allegory of Christ and the soul or the Church, so passionate language could be applied to the highest love. A strict wall between agape and eros is therefore difficult to find in medieval religious writing.
Philia and friendship
Friendship was a respected subject. Writers drew on the Roman author Cicero’s work on friendship, and in the twelfth century Aelred of Rievaulx, a Cistercian abbot, wrote a treatise on spiritual friendship that blended classical ideas with Christian ones. Monastic communities valued close bonds among members, and letters between friends often use warm language that can surprise modern readers. Feudal society also had its own forms of mutual loyalty, such as the bond between a lord and follower, which sometimes used the language of love.
Again, the Latin amicitia is the more accurate medieval term, and it carried ideas of virtue, loyalty and shared purpose.
The danger of reading back
Because the Greek triad is familiar, it is tempting to apply it to everything. Doing so can mislead in several ways:
- It suggests medieval authors used the Greek words, when mostly they did not.
- It implies three sealed categories, whereas medieval thinkers often combined them.
- It can hide the specifically medieval distinctions, such as caritas versus cupiditas, which mattered a great deal in moral teaching.
None of this means the modern framework is useless. It is a handy way to describe real differences between self-giving love, desire and friendship, and many medieval ideas do fit parts of it. The sensible approach is to treat agape, eros and philia as modern tools for comparison, and to learn the medieval terms in order to read the sources on their own terms.