Love as eros
TO love God and neighbor is the greatest commandment (Mt. 22:34-40). We often think this requires heroic effort. Truth is, we only need to be erotic. Let’s talk about eros.
In Greek mythology, Eros is the god of love, the creative force that breaks old forms to make new ones. He reaches his full potential only when he is together with his brother Anteros. In Roman mythology, Anteros is rendered as passio (passion) a powerful urge or drive the satisfaction of which entails suffering. Without passio, the god Eros regresses into a chubby, mischievous, winged child with bow and arrow (Cupid).
This classical understanding of erotic love as inseparable from passion teaches us that without the willingness to sacrifice and to suffer for the sake of the beloved, love becomes an effete feeling or fatal attraction.
Unfortunately, Alfred Kinsey and self-styled sex gurus who came after him have equated erotic love with impersonal, unromantic, piston-like sexual activity which T.S. Eliot describes as the “love that we feel between the desire and the spasm.”
Thus, erotic love and the activities it spawns have become synonymous with sexual pleasure that is purely for convenience, without commitment, and without regard to its outcome. No wonder, consequence-less sex and sex-less procreation are now in vogue. People have been brainwashed to think that love and sex are trivial playthings.
Sigmund Freud attempted to rehabilitate erotic love in his 1920 book, titled Beyond the Pleasure Principle, by not equating erotic love with sexual activity and the pleasure it brings. Instead, he called eros the “life force” that conquers the death instinct. For him, the pleasure principle is self-defeating. Seeking sexual pleasure for its own sake leads to death.
In his encyclical “Deus Caritas Est” (God Is Love), Pope Benedict XVI relates this “life force” to God. The Pope describes God not as the cold and rigid prime mover of the scholastics that pushes everything into motion. Rather, He is the passionate lover who pulls or attracts everything towards Himself.
He writes: “God, the universal principle of creation is, at the same time, a lover with all the passion of a true love.” His words remind me of Mel Gibson’s movie “The Passion of the Christ,” a most literal depiction of the passionate love of an “erotic God” who willingly endures unspeakable suffering for us, his beloved.
Love as eros is the force that moves a person to go beyond himself. It draws a man and woman away from their selfish interests in order to commit themselves to each other’s welfare. It is eros that drives a person to give up his convenient lifestyle to serve others. It is eros that impels people to live and die for a cause, a belief, or an ideology.
Plato puts it accurately thus: “Eros is the yearning for self-transcendence.” Ultimately, such a yearning drives us towards God because no earthly pleasure can ever satisfy our deepest longing. St. Augustine captures this sad yet hopeful human condition in his lament: “Our hearts are restless until they rest in God.” Or, in the words of the poet Francis Thompson, true erotic love is the “shadow of God’s hand, outstretched caressingly.”