Beyond Eros and Agape

It is widely known that the ancient Greek language distinguished three main kinds of love. With the exception of one sustained discussion that I consider carefully, friendship receives scarcely a handful of references in its own right in Works of Love , for it is usually lumped together with erotic (or romantic) love – “and friendship” is the phrase used to conjoin philia to eros as a kind of afterthought, and this occurs dozens of times in Kierkegaard’s tremendous yet maddening 1847 text. Incessantly, the flaws of philia are declared in Works of Love to be exactly the same as the flaws of eros. For the most part, that leaves no room for a consideration of friendship itself. My chapter seeks to remedy this neglect, turning to Kierkegaard’s example of Jesus’s love for Peter.