Erotic Love In God

[Cole]

I would agree with this. I have always experienced God as a type of erotic love. Christ is agape. But I also see eros. It has within it elements of mystery, beauty, wonder, and passion. It’s kind of like when you first fall in love. It’s a bond between Christ and His bride. According to the Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga:

Sexual eros points to something deeper in a second way. As we have just seen, it is a sign or type of a deeper reality, a kind of love for God of which we now just have hints and intimations. It is also a sign, symbol, or type of God’s love—not just of the love God’s children will someday have for him but of the love he also has for them. As we noted above (p. 312), Scripture regularly compares God’s love for his people and Christ’s love for his church to the love of a groom for his new bride. Now a widely shared traditional view of God has been that he is impassible, without desire or feeling or passion, unable to feel sorrow at the sad condition of his world and the suffering of his children, and equally unable to feel joy, delight, longing, or yearning. The reason for so thinking, roughly, is that in the tradition originating in Greek philosophy, passions were thought of (naturally enough) as passive, something that happens to you, something you undergo, rather than something you actively do. You are subject to anger, love, joy, and all the rest. God, however, is pure act; he doesn’t ‘undergo’ anything at all; he acts, and is never merely passive; and he isn’t subject to anything. As far as eros is concerned, furthermore, there is an additional reason for thinking that it isn’t part of God’s life: longing and yearning signify need and incompleteness. One who yearns for something doesn’t yet have it, and needs it, or at any rate thinks he needs it; God is of course paradigmatically complete and needs nothing beyond himself. How, then, could he be subject to eros? God’s love, according to this tradition, is exclusively agape, benevolence, a completely other-regarding, magnanimous love in which there is mercy but no element of desire. God loves us, but there is nothing we can do for him; he wishes nothing from us.

On this particular point I think we must take leave of the tradition; this is one of those places where it has paid too much attention to Greek philosophy and too little to the Bible. I believe God can and does suffer; his capacity for suffering exceeds ours in the same measure that his knowledge exceeds ours. Christ’s suffering was no charade; he was prepared to endure the agonies of the cross and of hell itself (“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”). God the Father was prepared to endure the anguish of seeing his Son, the second person of the trinity, consigned to the bitterly cruel and shameful death of the cross. And isn’t the same true for other passions? “There is more rejoicing in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who do not need to repent” (Luke 15:7); is God himself to be excluded from this rejoicing?

Similarly for eros: “As a bridegroom rejoices over his bride, so will your God rejoice over you” (Isaiah 62:5). The bridegroom rejoicing over his bride doesn’t love her with a merely agapeic love. He isn’t like her benevolent elder brother (although Christ is also said to be our elder brother). He desires and longs for something outside himself, namely union with his beloved. The church is the bride of Christ, not his little sister. He is not her benevolent elder brother, but her husband, lover. These scriptural images imply that God isn’t impassive, and that his love for us is not exclusively agapeic. They suggest that God’s love for his people involves an erotic element of desire: he desires the right kind of response from us, and union with us, just as we desire union with him.

[Cole]

What is to be made of this erotic love of God, this yearning, longing, desire, and its apparent fulfillment in some kind of ardent union between “the devotee and the deity”? This phenomenon comes in all grades of intensity: there is the full-blown, breathtaking, overpowering scenario de Sales points to, but also the much quieter and more restrained movement of the heart toward God on the part of one who gives thanks for a glorious June morning, or who for one brief moment sees the glory and beauty of the Christian story and feels a pang of attraction deeper than gratitude; and there is every degree between these two.

[Sobornost]

I have a few quotations for you about Divine Eros Cole -

‘You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you’.

‘I was not yet in love, yet I loved to love…I sought what I might love, in love with loving’.

‘Late have I loved you, O Beauty ever ancient and ever new! Late have I loved you! And, behold, you were within me, and I out of myself, and there I searched for you’.

Funnily enough they come from St Augustine’s Confessions. Even He had his good days Good thread Cole

[Cole]

Yes. I think Augustine got it from the Bible though. The terrible things Augustine did were based on his views of remedial punishment. The Protestant and Catholic practices of torturing people and the inquisitions and burning people at the stake were done because they thought by doing these things they would purge the souls of people. They were supposedly doing these things out of love. I think we have come a long way since then. But I still believe in remedial justice.

[Sobornost]

Whatever Cole - I’ve always loved those bits from the Confession’s. For me he was at his best when not writing systematic theology.

The thing about burning people to death for what they believe is a complex one. I’ve studied the history of religious persecution and witch trials quite a lot. I think the inquisition may have sometimes thought it was burning the body to save the soul - but a more common reason was to burn someone who was a contagion potentially leading Christians astray by their wrong beliefs (and to give them a foretaste of their damnation in with the bargain). Augustine himself justified persecution meaning fines and imprisonment - but I think even he would have been deeply appalled at what he’d started off.

Anyway back to Eros Agape - and don’t forget Philia (friendship )

[anon12438761]

Agape and Eros - the classic study. “Nygren’s work has been described as 'probably the most influential Protestant account of love in the twentieth century”
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eros_and_Agape

If you are the studying type, you will love the work - this is scholarship at a high level, without much of the technical apparatus that would slow it down. It is a rich feast that opens up Greek, Early Church, medieval, gnostic, and other theologies.

[Cole]

Hey Dave. Thanks. I’ll look into it.

[Cole]

Dave,

I go along with C.S. Lewis on the issue of seeking happiness.

If you asked twenty good men today what they thought the highest of the virtues, nineteen of them would reply, unselfishness. But if you asked almost any of the great Christians of old he would have replied, Love. You see what has happened? A negative term has been substituted for a positive, and this is of more than philological importance. The negative ideal of Unselfishness carries with it the suggestion not primarily of securing good things for others, but of going without them ourselves, as if our abstinence and not their happiness was the important point. I do not think this is the Christian virtue of Love. The New Testament has lots to say about self-denial, but not about self-denial as an end in itself. We are told to deny ourselves and to take up our crosses in order that we may follow Christ; and nearly every description of what we shall ultimately find if we do so contains an appeal to desire. If there lurks in most modern minds the notion that to desire our own good and earnestly to hope for the enjoyment of it is a bad thing, I submit that this notion has crept in from Kant and the Stoics and is no part of the Christian faith. Indeed, if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased. - C.S. Lewis, The Weight Of Glory, 1-2.

But the most obvious fact about praise—whether of God or any thing—strangely escaped me. I thought of it in terms of compliment, approval, or the giving of honor. I had never noticed that all enjoyment spontaneously overflows into praise unless (sometimes even if) shyness or the fear of boring others is deliberately brought in to check it. The world rings with praise—lovers praising their mistresses, readers their favorite poet, walkers praising the countryside, players praising their favorite game—praise of weather, wines, dishes, actors, motors, horses, colleges, countries, historical personages, children, flowers, mountains, rare stamps, rare beetles, even sometimes politicians or scholars. I had not noticed how the humblest, and at the same time most balanced and capacious, minds praised most, while the cranks, misfits and mal-contents praised least. I had not noticed either that just as men spontaneously praise whatever they value, so they spontaneously urge us to join them in praising it: “Isn’t she lovely? Wasn’t it glorious? Don’t you think that magnificent?” The Psalmists in telling everyone to praise God are doing what all men do when they speak of what they care about. My whole, more general, difficulty about the praise of God depended on my absurdly denying to us, as regards the supremely Valuable, what we delight to do, what indeed we can’t help doing, about everything else we value. I think we delight to praise what we enjoy because the praise not merely expresses but completes the enjoyment; it is its appointed consummation. It is not out of compliment that lovers keep on telling one another how beautiful they are; the delight is incomplete till it is expressed. - C.S. Lewis Reflections on the Psalms, pp. 93-95

[Cole]

The thing about burning people to death for they believe is a complex one

Dick,

You may want to talk to Derek Flood who has studied this issue with great detail about “medicinal punishment”

[Sobornost]

I have been talking to Derek via a thread recently. I have enormous respect for Derek Cole

[Cole]

That’s who I got my information from.

[Sobornost]

Well he’s partly right about the inquisition. Augustine certainly did promote persecution of Donatists by fines and imprisonment calling it - the ‘benign asperity of persecution’. However I’ve seen much primary source evidence of religious killing in early modern Europe also being done to stem contagion rather than for the remedial ‘salvation’ of those killed. We can both be right on this one I think - I hope

[anon12438761]

It was CS Lewis who stated that God could be and should be loved with everything BUT sensuous love.

[Cole]

Dave,

The Bible says (as Plantinga has shown) that we are loved as the Bride Of Christ. It’s a mixture of all of them. Agape, eros, phileo, affection. That’s the way I experience Christ. I’ve always experienced Christ that way. The point in quoting Lewis is the show that there is nothing wrong with seeking joy or pleasure in God. Christ sought joy in His sufferings. It’s how He endured the cross. It was by the joy set before Him that He endured the cross. The joy of purifying His bride. When a man takes his wife out for dinner with joy because he loves her and then pays the bill and she says thank you. It’s not arrogant when he says - it’s my pleasure. Seeking joy in doing good for your spouse breaks arrogance.

[Sobornost]

It was CS Lewis who stated that God could be and should be loved with everything BUT sensuous love.

Hi Dave

‘Taste and see that God is good’. I’m not quite sure what C.S. Lewis meant by this Dave but he was quite affirming of the body in his own way (His ‘The Four Loves’ couldn’t get a publisher in America at first because it was through too explicit in its sexual references). Obviously in the sense that God is Spirit we cannot love God sensually. Btu we can, I think, love God through the sacrament of his creation sensually. That’s part of liturgy and sacrament in Christina tradition and in Christian art. And the sensual as a road to the divine informs the theology of icons and indeed the theology of Incarnation that underpins this and – in a sense – all Christian Art. I guess the proper enjoyment of this world including the delight we have in friends, and the delight we have in our beloved is also something we can offer to God in sacramental thanksgiving.

Hi Cole

The idea of Eros is a nuanced one. The philosophy of Eros first crops up in Plato’s symposium where Socrates argues that sexual love rather than a road to delusion can be a road to the divine if we see through the physical and spiritual beauty of our beloved to the Divine Form and source of Beauty. This became Christianised in the poetry of Dante and the Friends of Love who saw in their angelic girls a reminder of the grace of God –

When she kills with her glances she brings life
As thought she bringing life were Jesus
The Smooth surface of her legs is like the Torah in brightness
And I follow and tread in as if I were Moses

Well it all sounds a bit weird today. But at the time this romantic theology rescued women from the status of gateways to Satan in much of the Western Christian imagination.

[Cole]

Dick,

I disagree. It comes from the Bible.

O God, you are my God; I will seek you eagerly. My heart thirsts for you, my body longs for you - Psalms 63:1

And as Plantinga points out:

Of course expressions of this eros are not found only in the Psalms. In Isaiah, we read, “I will rejoice over Jerusalem and take delight in my people” (65:19); “As a bridegroom rejoices over his bride, so will your God rejoice over you” (62:5b). This implies, I take it, not merely that God will rejoice over his people the way a bridegroom rejoices over his bride, but that the bride will return this love; when things go properly, God’s people love him the way a bride loves her new husband, with a similar sort of erotic desire.

It’s also what I experience when I experience Christ.

[Cole]

Again, I agree with Plantinga here:

Accordingly, the eros in our lives is a sign or a symbol of God’s erotic love as well. Human erotic love is a sign of something deeper, something so deep that it is uncreated, an original and permanent and necessarily present feature of the universe. Eros undoubtedly characterizes many creatures other than human beings; no doubt much of the living universe shares this characteristic. More important, all of us creatures with eros reflect and partake in this profound divine property. So the most fundamental reality here is the love displayed by and in God: love within the trinity. This love is erotic. It is a matter of perceiving and desiring and enjoying union with something valuable, in this case, Someone of supreme value. And God’s love for us is manifested in his generously inviting us into this charmed circle (though not, of course, to ontological equality), thus satisfying the deepest longings of our souls. Within this circle, there is mercy, self-sacrifice, overflowing agape; there is also that longing and delight, that yearning and joy that make up eros.

[Sobornost]

You are right Cole - of course Eros is in the bible too It also came from the Greeks and sort of married with Christianity when it came to the ideal of romantic love. The Song of Songs kissed with Plato’s Symposium in the Church Fathers

[Cindy_Skillman]

Cole, are you quoting from Warranted Christian Belief? I searched part of one of your quotes and that’s what I came up with. I just wanted to say that I found that book HERE, where it can be downloaded as a free PDF or plain text document (or read on-line). Just in case anyone else would like to check it out too. Thanks for a great topic!

[Cole]

Hey Cindy!

Yes, I’m sorry. I should have listed the reference.