Two vast antagonists : Longus and Plato -- The lover's coach and the apple fallen from Plato's tree : Ovid and Aristotle -- Eros and the Bible : romantic scriptures, ambiguous interpretations, and Gregory of Nyssa's platonic biblical allegories -- Bad news for lovers : Saint John, Saint Chrysostom Jerome, and Saint Augustine -- Knights and ladies versus the monks : chivalric romance and ascetic discipline -- A crippled attempt to salvage marriage and a popular movement against it : Thomas Aquinas and The cloud of unknowing -- The romancers strike back : Martin Luther, Sir Edmund Spenser, and the Puritans -- Radical theologian of true love : Emanuel Swedenborg -- The eternal feminine : Shelley and intellectual beauty -- The death of God, the end of love : T.S. Eliot's Tthe waste land -- Ancient echoes in modern halls : the recent erotic spirituality of Vatican II, David Matzko McCarthy, Karl Barth, and Eberhard Jungel -- A heap of broken images? : erotic love and spirituality in the post-modern age