'Certain of Aristotle's ideas concerning the poet's relation to real happening, as set forth in the Poetics, follow from this attitude. He states very clearly that reality must not be represented as it comes to us, in its apparent disorder and disunity, and his view in this matter was taken as a norm for centuries to come. To his mind the disorder and disunity of actual happening do not stem from the inadequacy of the eyes that look upon it, but are present in happening itself, so that the poet must create a happening superior to actual happening and tragedy must present a correction of actual events,' Erich Auerbach, Dante: Poet of the Secular World, p. 8.
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Commenting on one of Barth's more witless passages, R. E. Allen offers this in his commentary on Plato's Symposium:
'The noun αγάπη is in fact a late back-formation, first found in the Septuagint, from the verb αγαπάω, which in classical Greek means to delight in, to greet with affection, thus making its application to sexual intercourse in the Septuagint intelligible; it becomes the ordinary word for love in New Greek. Barth is quite right in claiming that έρως and έραν, in ordinary classical Greek usually used of sexual love, do not occur in the New Testament; this is a dialect shift characteristic of New Greek. Barth's inference from it, that "the reader is not even to be reminded of this other love," is inadequate even as an argument from silence,' p. 96.
Jean-Luc Marion has much to say in the notes to In The Self's Place: The Approach of Saint Augustine about the supposed distinction between έρως and αγάπη, with particularly scathing comments reserved for Anders Nygren. I don't have the book with me on this trip, so I can't offer anything specific. I do seem to recall that Marion used the word 'barbaric'. You should, dear reader, pick up Marion's book for yourself. In any case, Anders Nygren is among the most boring of boring theologians.
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As you can see, my friends, the obsession with Plato continues to grow unabated.
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