There is one love, but there are many kinds of love. We know this. We love many people and many things, and we are loved by many, in different ways
by Luigino Bruni
Published in Il Messaggero di Sant'Antonio on November 4, 2026
The Gospel of John uses both the word philia and agape to speak of love, both in the relationship between Jesus and Lazarus (chapter 11) and in that between Jesus and Peter (chapter 21). This coexistence of philia and agape is very important. In the resurrection of Lazarus, it is beautiful to find, at the culmination of Jesus’ miracles, a philos: a friend. This tells us something important about what friendship is in the Gospels, in life, and probably even in Jesus himself. La philia, more so thanagape (where it is present, but less explicit), is a matter of reciprocity: Lazarus is his friend, and he is Lazarus’s friend. It is a relationship of feelings, of tears, of strong emotions, of embraces, of loyalty, of a certain “forever.”
In the Gospels, love is very close to its biblical roots, less dichotomous than the Greek Neoplatonic and Gnostic visions. Theagape of the Bible and the Gospels does not exclude philia, and vice versa, and perhaps not even certain dimensions oferos, although the evangelists never used the term given the specific meaning that eros had in the Greco-Roman world of that time.
Love is one, but there are many kinds of love. We know this. We love many people and many things; we are loved by many, in different ways. We love our parents, children, girlfriends and wives, brothers and sisters, teachers, grandparents and cousins, poets and artists—Renzo, Lucia, Edmond, Silvia, Jean Valjean, and Cosette. And we love our friends very much. Human love is not limited to human beings. It extends to animals, plants, mountains, and the sea; even to things and objects; it touches the universe and the stars; it brushes against God.
The Greek language had two main words for love: erosand philia, which, however, did not exhaust its many forms but offered a richer semantic range than ours (which, in fact, has only “love”) to express this fundamental word of life and, therefore, of relationships. A lexicon capable of distinguishing the “I love you” said to a beloved woman from the “I love you” said to a friend or a mother, while at the same time recognizing that the latter was neither inferior nor less true than the former, and that in the end they were almost the same. Christianity, then, added a third Greek word to express another nuance of the same love (already present in the Greek Septuagint preceding the New Testament) and, above all, already present in life. This third word is agape, the love that knows how to love even those who are not desirable (eros) and those who are not friends.
These are three dimensions of love that are often found together in true and meaningful relationships. Certainly in friendship, where philia is never alone, because it is philia itself that is the first to need friends. It is accompanied by desire-passion (eros) for the friend and is nourished by agape, which enables it to last forever, to rise again from our failures and our frailties. A friendship that is only philia is not warm or strong enough to keep us from being left alone on our journeys, especially on the uphill stretches and in the final stages. But it isphiliathat bindserosandagapetogether, uniting them—even Jesus needed the language ofphiliato reveal to us all the dimensions of his love.
Photo Credit: © Fabiano Fiorin / MSA Archive