Eros: body or soul? part 1

Back around New Year's, D and I started a discussion about the nature of sex: what is it really, and what does that mean for us? Partly, I suspect, D introduced the topic because our letters had gotten pretty routine -- often little more than diary entries -- and I guess I was showing some impatience. Anyway, she proposed some thoughts, I replied at great length [I know, you're shocked], and she began to answer again. Then the pressures of every day interrupted us for a while, and when we next discussed sex it was with reference to the Atlantic article on pornography that I discuss here. Anyway, here is the discussion as far as we got.
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I still wrestle with serving God at the Catholic Church while involved in an affair with you. That tension has not gone away, but I am a great deal clearer on the challenges and I am much more sensitive to the issues involved. Some of these have to do with sexuality, which is one of the subjects we have briefly touched upon. The challenge of a sacramental marriage or an affair open to the sacred is this question: To what part of the human being does erotic love belong, the body or the soul? If to the body, then what part does rational choice play in our sexual emotions, and how can they be disciplined and controlled? If to the soul, then what part does the body play in it and is carnal love really the goal of it? If carnal love is the goal, is erotic love just a bodily appetite like hunger or thirst? These questions, as you well know, are not new.

As a Christian, I am aware that love is the highest commandment; and if so, then love must be a choice and involve voluntary thoughts and decisions, not just be an animal imperative. The New Testament ideal is that love is brought forth by God and reflects his true being. The love we have for one another is both a duty and a test of virtue here on earth. Sensual longing was to play little or no role; erotic love was refashioned on the model of love we owe to God. Like the other forms of love, it is a way of living, both a joy and a burden and it points to a world beyond where no one will be married. We surround erotic love with ceremonies and rituals, and with a demand for fidelity and sacrifice. Even poetry, both in the Bible and in other religious traditions as well, seem to speak of erotic love but in fact have been interpreted as odes addressed to God.

You don’t have to be a modern reader, unmoved by the Christian vision, to understand why the Bible and the church might find sensual love problematic. Erotic love can be sinful and destructive, and loving you outside the structures of society is complicated by my desire for you. Parental love, my love for my family and friends are not forms of temptation; I could be led into sin, for example, if I were to write my child’s term paper so he would get a higher grade, but there is no carnal focus; my love for my children and my friends remains innocent. Erotic love can be vicious and degrading; perversion, like among the friends of Boyfriend 5, the priest child abuse scandal, prostitution; there is a clear need to safeguard the expression of the erotic and to distinguish the virtuous from the manipulative and selfish use of sexual desire.

I’m not sure that Christian reliance on Plato was helpful in making this distinction. Plato seems to argue that the soul must ascent from the desire for carnal union with the beloved to the act of serene contemplation of the Form of the Beautiful. Perhaps he wants to strip away all the base elements of sexual expression (all the sweat and smells Wife finds so distasteful) and carnal desire to enjoy love as some form of semi-religious veneration. If sexual desire is troubling and bound to lead us into sin, then to overcome its force and power, it becomes necessary to remove our focus from the particular to the universal, from the aging and mortal to the ever beautiful and eternal.

It’s an inspiring vision, but I find it deeply flawed. Plato holds that one emotion can exist, now as erotic desire for a human individual, now as a rational contemplation of the Forms. But this isn’t my experience and it seems illogical. What makes my erotic desire ever so powerful is my desire for you as an individual, the fully present Hosea, with the small bump on your nose and the abundant hair on your chest. That’s a very different state of mind from my contemplation of God in centering prayer. What Plato is describing is a bloodless philosophical passion that has nothing erotic about it; it is not even directed to a person. I realize this view has profoundly shaped Christian theology, but for me, it seems to separate my desire for you from my love for you, one being base and shared with animals and one being rational and spiritual. But sexual desire can and does involve the rational mind; there is nothing unintelligent about my love for you. Perhaps Plato saw no higher purpose in sexual union than pleasure, given his own homosexuality. There could not be any reproduction, so desire produced nothing meaningful beyond the momentary ecstasy. In genuine erotic love, it is the individual person, not the act itself or the Universal, which should be the focus. And it’s precisely there that our human nature, both body and soul, seem most inextricably intertwined.

I have to go; this discussion is incomplete, but it’s a beginning, and you seemed a little bored with the prosaic to the exclusion of all philosophical discussion. I hope you have a productive day at work. It is likely to be much less crazy than mine!

All my love, forever and ever… D