Eros and the Seventh Sacrament – home life, sex and gender

For that life in the outside world – away from the gathering of the community – compassion is the key to recovering our integrity and experiencing the full potential of life.

This ideal is made practical in the ordinary business of the day: the way we treat our friends, colleagues and neighbours, including strangers and even enemies. Perhaps most intimately and intensely, it is made practical in the way we organise our home lives.

For the vast majority, it is in our home lives that we experience and express love and compassion most intimately and intensely in all their dimensions. There are other ways of living, and other ways of expressing and experiencing love, but for the vast majority the love shared within the home is the most immediate and intense.

The first encyclical of Pope Benedict XVI, published in 2005, is a fifteen-thousand word meditation on the wonder of love and its central place in the Christian tradition. It opens with these words from the first letter of Saint John: ‘God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them’.²⁹⁷ These words ‘express with remarkable clarity the heart of the Christian faith: the Christian image of God, and the resulting image of humankind and its destiny’.²⁹⁸

There follows a consideration of ‘the vast semantic range of the word love. We speak of love of country, love of one’s profession, love between friends, love of work, love between parents and children, love between family members, love of neighbour and love of God’ – but one form of love is going to be highlighted as the epitome of all loves for the purposes of this meditation. It is not a specific love within the history of the faith, or within the structures of the church. To quote directly, ‘Amid this multiplicity of meanings, one in particular stands out: love between man and woman, where body and soul are inseparably joined and human beings glimpse an apparently irresistible promise of happiness. This would seem to be the very epitome of love; all other kinds of love immediately seem to fade in comparison.’²⁹⁹

Western religion has been – and continues to be – unhealthily obsessed with sexuality. The worldwide communion of anglican churches, with historic links to the Church of England, is tearing itself apart over homosexuality. The churches interfere with the legislative processes of national governments almost exclusively where sexuality is involved, concerned with abortion, contraception, reproductive technology, sex education, and any change to marriage or partnership law. In the popular consciousness, the church is obsessed with the sins of others, and by sin means sexuality. Eros has been placed in a class of its own, separate from the other loves and in need of special supervision and control. In Benedict’s encyclical, eros is once again placed in a class of its own, but now as the best of all loves: the epitome of love and the origin of all love both human and divine, not only mysterious and gratuitous like the love of God,³⁰⁰ but ‘rising in ecstasy towards the divine’, and ‘leading us beyond ourselves’³⁰¹ with its ‘fascination for the great promise of happiness in drawing near to the other’.³⁰²

Nothing could better epitomise an incarnational or sacramental faith than the embodiment, the physical expression, of its own highest ideal – and this is what eros provides. Eros with integrity, uniting body and soul, is the most intense experience of our highest ideal, the greatest human fulfilment and joy. Eros without integrity is then the most bewildering and painful of disintegrations, whether experienced as soul without body – as in the classically painful experience of romantic pining – or as body without soul: the body abused and cheapened, the false exaltation of the body turning in a moment to the hatred of the body. In the full flourishing of humankind, ‘body and soul are intimately united’, experiencing and expressing our highest ideal in harmony.³⁰³

The Old Testament book The Song of Songs or Song of Solomon is a poetic exchange between two lovers. Early in the text, the word for love is a Hebrew plural, dodim. As the song continues, the plural dodim is replaced by the singular ahaba. This is the progress of eros: it begins plural, ‘indeterminate and searching’, and moves on to ‘a real discovery of the other’, including concern and care for the other. ‘No longer is it self-seeking, a sinking in the intoxication of happiness; instead it seeks the good of the beloved, and it is ready, and even willing, for sacrifice.’ The plurality and passion of dodim – identified with eros – is the energy that necessarily lies behind the emergence of ahaba, the prized New Testament Greek concept of agape love (pronounced with three syllables – a·ga·pay).³⁰⁴

This is the story of godly love. God loves us and cares for us, body and soul. That love is plural, indiscriminate and gratuitous: dodim and eros. It then becomes focussed on specific individuals and situations: it becomes agape. At the same time, infinite resources of new and indeterminate dodim and eros are available as the energy for the next round of focussed agape, and the next one and the next.³⁰⁵

The Old Testament account of God’s relationship with Israel can be understood in these terms: it is the story of one focussed love within God’s wider indiscriminate love for all humankind. The New Testament then bears witness to that universal love, and begins another story of the focussed expression of that love, this time in the followers of Jesus of Nazareth.

Jesus’s summary of the law – ‘love God and love neighbour’³⁰⁶ – can also be understood in this way. To love God, the ground of all being and the sum of all that is good, is to offer an unlimited and indiscriminate love. To love the neighbour is to focus that love on specific individuals and situations.

The breadth of our own experience of God can also be understood in this way: in our worshipping communities and in our private prayer we can be caught up, body and soul, in the infinite, eternal and indiscriminate dodim and eros of God, where we are ‘sinking in the intoxication of happiness’; we also experience the agape of God’s presence in the specific narratives of our own lives and the lives of those around us.

Even the processes of contemporary dating and mating follow this same pattern of development from the general to the specific. The potency of sexual attraction is at first plural, indiscriminate and gratuitous, indeterminate and searching. It is focussed not on any individual but on some imagined ideal, perhaps represented by an unattainable distant individual or type who momentarily represents that ideal. There is even a sense of this powerful experience being shared, in the adolescent years, by fellow teenagers who are lost in the same hormonal fog. This unfocussed eros energy has value: it has an appreciation of beauty and potential, and a desire to connect with ‘the other’. It is also the raw energy behind the focussed love that may follow. Out of that cloud of unfocussed energy emerge couples who have begun to focus their eros energy on each other as specific individuals. By the age of thirty, the vast majority have organised themselves into cohabiting heterosexual pairs. Eros has become agape: unfocussed eros energy has been invested in specific individuals and situations.

Whilst ‘the love between man and woman’ stands out within ‘the vast semantic range of the word love’, other intimate human loves can also be understood within the same model, with a transformation from the general to the specific, and embracing both body and soul. From before a child is born until its birth and beyond, parents offer an unfocussed and absolute love for whatever their child may become; as the child grows, that love becomes specific for the particularities of the individual child. Likewise, from birth, the child will reach out indiscriminately to any human form that is a comforting presence, but quickly identifies the mother, then other key carers, as specific individuals within the diversity of humankind: later there is a special place for brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles, cousins, nephews and nieces; for friends, neighbours and colleagues; for spouse and children.³⁰⁷ This eros and agape love is fundamental to what it means to be human, present right at the heart of the complex fabric of our lives.³⁰⁸ It is the single reality of love, emerging with different dimensions appropriate to different situations; it is complete in each case when it gives dignity to both body and soul.³⁰⁹

Within the contemporary process of dating and mating, a key moment for an emerging couple is moving in together or setting up home together, which marks the beginning of a status known in contemporary English as ‘living together’. The contemporary social consensus is that all emerging couplings up until this moment are temporary trial couplings. These temporary trial couplings now often continue from the teenage years well into the next decade; they are therefore less likely to be known as boyfriend-girlfriend relationships and more likely to be referred to using the more adult and less gender-weighted descriptions whereby two people are said to be ‘seeing’ or ‘going out with’ each other, or somebody is said to be ‘with’ somebody as opposed to being ‘single’.

What these couplings have in common – both the temporary trial couplings and the special status of living together – is the universal assumption that they are exclusive. In our contemporary culture people are not expected to be participating in two couplings – even explicitly temporary trial couplings – simultaneously. There may be misunderstandings about when two people are to be deemed to be ‘seeing’ or ‘going out with’ each other, or deemed to be no longer ‘seeing’ or ‘with’ each other, but the complexities are only around the terms of those definitions: the assumption of exclusivity is universal.

It is less clear at what point contemporary society can safely assume a mutual commitment to permanence in a coupling. This is significant not only for friends and relatives of the couple, but also – more acutely – for the two people themselves. Living together is now regarded as a major statement about intended permanence, as it represents a new level of personal investment in the relationship for each party. In polite society, the ‘partner’ in such a relationship is cautiously treated as equivalent to a spouse. Despite this, marriage – or formal engagement to be married – is still regarded more comfortably as the point at which permanence can be assumed: the point at which two individuals have consented together to emerge as a permanent couple from the temporary trials of the preceding period. It is the point at which, for these two individuals at least, eros is no longer plural, indiscriminate, indeterminate and searching, but focussed within the couple, by each on the other.

298 Encyclical letter Deus Caritas Est (God is Love), published 25 December 2005 in Latin, a month later in English translation. The English translation is available online at the Vatican website. The encyclical has its own paragraph numbering scheme. These opening quotations are from the opening lines of paragraph 1.
http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/encyclicals/documents/hf_ben-xvi_enc_20051225_deus-caritas-est_en.html

303 Deus Caritas Est paragraph 5. Head versus Heart by the present author (O Books, 2005) is about the integration of head (for logic and reason), heart (for emotions and dreams) and body (or ‘gut’ as in ‘gut instinct’ and ‘gut reaction’) as the three essential parts of what it is to be fully human. The role of the body is celebrated in the introduction to the gut zone on page 24. ‘It is in our human flesh and blood that we live out our lives. It is in the body, the physical human form, that we recognize and meet each other, communicate with one another, and organize all of our human endeavours. It is in our incarnation – our embodiment – that we come to birth and live out the fullness of our lives. Ultimately every meeting of hearts and minds is mediated through our human flesh and blood: our five senses, and our words and deeds.’

306 Matthew 22:34-40, Mark 12:28-31 and Luke 10:25-28

307 The emergence of friendship follows the same pattern, beginning with general public politeness and civility, moving on to shorter- or longer-term acquaintanceship, then friendship, and even companionship.

Eros and the Seventh Sacrament– home life, sex and gender

Welcoming Eros

Eros and the Seventh Sacrament
– home life, sex and gender