The Drama of Eros: Benedict XVI
This is the second part of our revisitation of a two part series I did on the subject of Eros.
In a previous post, I wrote about how Plato frames the drama Eros, the love of attraction, through the character of Diotima in his Symposium. We considered how, when a person is erotically attracted to something or someone, there is the promise of self-transcendence - the transformation to possess the transcendental of Beauty - that also runs into tragedy and frustrates the fulfillment of erotic desire.
At the end of that post, and also at the end of my class on Eros with the seminarians, I then said that the drama of erotic love runs the risk of becoming a closed loop. What we will consider in this post is how the loop can be opened again, so that the pursuit of the beautiful, and the self-transcendence undertaken can be completed.
To this, I drew my students to Benedict XVI’s Deus Caritas Est (regular readers may recall my past two-part coverage - found here and here - of his Introduction to Christianity). In particular, I drew the seminarians’ attention to the driving question for that encyclical: Was Friedrich Nietzsche correct in saying that Christianity killed Eros? (3) In making this a driving question on a document on God, Benedict seems to be tapping into an intuition that Plato had in his Phaedrus and Symposium, that Eros is a madness of the gods, a love that puts us in touch with the divine. Put another way, the Christian faith properly conceived should embrace Eros properly conceived.
Of particular importance to Benedict’s take on Eros were paragraphs 5, 6 and 7. In my previous post, I mentioned that part of the process of self-transcendence that accompanies Eros comes from the recognition of the transcendental of Beauty in something or someone. In my being attracted to something and someone, I recognise beauty in it or him or her. Set in Christian register, Benedict says that
…there is a certain relationship between love and the Divine: love promises infinity, eternity—a reality far greater and totally other than our everyday existence (5).
This relationship is activated, Benedict says, in the beholding of the beautiful manifested in a beautiful thing. In erotic attraction to the beautiful, says Benedict, one is led to the “discovery of the other”. The extent this discovery leads to one’s self-transcendence is the extent to which the person beholding the beautiful thing is also “moving beyond the selfish character that prevailed earlier” (6).
In order to complete this journey of discovery of the other, which is also the path to transcendence, Benedict makes clear that what is needed is a “path of ascent and purification” (7). In speaking of what is involved in this purification, Benedict speaks of two dimensions of love, the first is what might be regarded as the “ascending love” Eros, while the other is the “descending love” of Agape, which is the love of willing the Good for another. Agape is a self-sacrificial love with no ulterior motive and no expectation of return of that love through the possession of the one so loved.
Benedict notes that the contrast of descent and ascent might create an artificial dichotomy between Eros and Agape. People, especially Christians, might be tempted to then focus on the selfless love of Agape and drive out the seemingly selfish love of Eros. However, Benedict warns, doing so will dehumanise Christian love and “cut [love] off from the complex fabric of human life” (7). For man cannot live by agapic love alone, Benedict says.
Instead, Benedict says, Apape is only realised when the person who loves experiences first the love of attraction, the love of Eros. A person must who desires to witness to Beauty via selfless love, must first experience Beauty in a love that is often marked by selfishness. But, Benedict tells us:
Even if Eros is at first mainly covetous and ascending, a fascination for the great promise of happiness, in drawing near to the other, it is less and less concerned with itself, increasingly seeks the happiness of the other, is concerned more and more with the beloved, bestows itself and wants to “be there for” the other (7).
This process of the purification of Eros, can only come about in a synthetic unity between the ascending love and descending love, which we get in the perfect unity of the incarnate word, Jesus Christ. In His body, Jesus erotically demonstrates the beauty of agapic love through His life, passion, death, resurrection and ascension. The tragic drama of Eros can only come to its culmination in Jesus Christ, who then becomes the source of the perfect synthesis of Eros and Agape.
The two loves no longer become an antithesis but a seamless continuum, and it is only insofar as we “constantly drink anew from the original source” (6) that a person can undertake the journey of Eros and finally fulfill his or her desire for the beautiful thing, and attain to it for eternity.
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