Introduction: Theology and Eros after Nygren

 Introduction: Theology and Eros after Nygren VIRGINIA BURRUS What does theology have to say about the place of eroticism in the salvific transformation of human subjects, even of the cosmos itself ? How, in turn, does eros infuse theological practice and transfigure doctrinal tropes? Veering off the well-worn path of sexual moralizing, this volume explores what is still largely uncharted territory in the realm of theological erotics even as it also deliberately disrupts the disciplinary boundaries of theology. Indeed, it invites and performs a mutual seduction of disciplines—theology, philosophy, scripture, history—at multiple sites charged by desires at once bodily, spiritual, intellectual, and political. It seeks new openings for the emergence of desire, love, and pleasure, while also challenging common understandings of these terms. It engages risk at the point where the hope for salvation paradoxically endangers the safety of subjects—in particular, of theological subjects—by opening them to those transgressions of eros in which boundaries, once exceeded, become places of emerging possibility. In other words, it takes discipline (in multiple senses) to its limits in a stretch toward transcendence. But what kind of transcendence is imagined or hoped for? The essays gathered here offer a variety of answers to this question. To reach toward a theology of eros is already to question the binary opposition of divine love and human desire momentously inscribed by Anders Nygren in his magisterial tome Agape and Eros, initially penned in the s and reissued in revised form in . For Nygren, the essentially Christian concept of love, or agape, originally had no more to do with xiv 兩             the essentially Platonic or Greek concept of desire, or eros, than it did, in his view, with the essentially Jewish concept of law. ‘‘There cannot actually be any doubt,’’ he writes, ‘‘that Eros and Agape belong originally to two entirely separate spiritual worlds, between which no direct communication is possible.’’1 Observing that Platonic eros is always already a sublimation of what he names ‘‘vulgar Eros,’’ he insists that there ‘‘is no way, not even that of sublimation, which leads over from Eros to Agape.’’2 Neither is more sublime than the other, and neither can be derived from the other; rather the two are born rivals, reflecting fundamentally different orientations. Eros is human-centered, manifesting as an acquisitive desire or longing that charts an upward path toward God as its most worthy object and transformative telos. In contrast, agape is God-centered, emerging as a plenitudinous overflow or sacrificial gift that descends on humans and renders them both worthy of love and capable of loving others selflessly. If the concept of eros leaves little room for imagining God as an active lover, argues Nygren, the concept of agape precludes the notion that humans can love God in the same way that God loves humans. ‘‘In relation to God, man is never spontaneous; he is not an independent centre of activity. His giving of himself to God is never more than a response. At its best and highest, it is but a reflex of God’s love, by which it is ‘motivated.’ . . . [I]t lacks all the essential marks of Agape.’’ Then is it eros? No, it is faith, insists Nygren, ‘‘a love of which the keynote is receptivity.’’3 Curiously, most Christians have failed to observe the distinctions that are so clear to Nygren. As he puts it: ‘‘The idea of Agape can be compared to a small stream which, even in the history of Christianity, flows along an extremely narrow channel and sometimes seems to lose itself entirely in its surroundings; but Eros is a broad river that overflows its banks, carrying everything away with it, so that it is not easy even in thought to dam it up and make it flow in an orderly course.’’4 In fact, much of Nygren’s study, like the history it relates, is in danger of being overwhelmed by the floods of eros. Between the Pauline and Johannine literatures of the New Testament and the reformation of Martin Luther, ancient and medieval writers forge ‘‘syntheses’’ of agape and eros in which eros almost inevitably sweeps agape up into its all-too-powerful currents, argues Nygren. This is nowhere more evident than in those             兩 xv theologians whose works betray ascetic or mystical tendencies. The third-century Alexandrian Origen and the fourth-century Cappadocian Gregory of Nyssa are prime examples of such erotic excess in the history of Christian thought. However, it is Augustine’s theology of caritas, together with Pseudo-Dionysius’s Neoplatonic erotics, that Nygren credits with ultimate responsibility for medieval Christianity’s thoroughgoing lapse into a synthetic, and thus counterfeit, theology of love. If, with Luther, ‘‘the specifically Christian idea of love breaks through again and shatters the artfully contrived synthesis,’’5 the work of reformation is never finished. Nygren continues Luther’s legacy, as he understands it, resisting the confluence of agape and eros with his own prodigious scholarly labors. Yet a reader of Nygren’s historical study might well wonder whether agape, now as before, does not require an overflow of eros in order to reopen its congested channels or, to shift metaphors, to shatter its repressive defenses. Is the posited distinction between agape and eros, as well as between carnal and sublimated eros, not itself in need of interrogation? Nygren’s critique of synthetic theologies of love rests, of course, not only on his conviction that synthesis, or syncretism, is a bad thing, but also on his assumption that agape and eros can be located as originally separate and pure cultural essences, identifiable by their fundamentally definitive motifs. That most theologians, by his own account, have not historically perceived them thus might in itself inspire continued reassessments of the relation between carnal and spiritual, passive and active, ascending and descending, creaturely and divine love. The essays in this volume join the voices of other contemporary scholars in pursuing a theology of eros after Nygren, even as they also share Nygren’s articulated commitments to both a historical-contextual and a philosophically rigorous analysis of concepts of love and desire. Plato’s Symposium has historically constituted a fertile matrix for dialogue and debate about physical and sublimated eros, as well as about the relation of Platonic eroticism to Christian love. By distancing Christian thought from Platonic theories of sublimation, Nygren denies any possible link between human sexuality and Christian love. Indeed, his argument implies that embodied sexuality (‘‘vulgar Eros’’) is the originary site of a subsequently sublimated desire (‘‘heavenly Eros’’) arising xvi 兩             from a lack that is filled, eradicated, or simply superseded by the prior, unearned, and indeed unexpected gift of divine Agape. The essays in part  reopen the debate by restaging Plato’s symposium on love, performing contesting readings of an ancient text that itself already encompasses a multiplicity of voices. Here Daniel Boyarin directly engages Nygren’s work, exposing a slippage in his interpretation of the Symposium. Nygren, argues Boyarin, falsely conflates the concept of a ‘‘heavenly eros’’ continuous with physical sexuality, as described in Pausanius’s speech, with the more strictly asceticized eroticism attributed to the prophetess Diotima and ultimately affirmed by Plato. This is a distinction overlooked by others as well, not least Michel Foucault. On Boyarin’s reading, Platonic love as defined by Diotima draws close to Christian love as interpreted by the ascetics of later antiquity. Evading the particular binary of agape and eros (or, in Nygren’s terms, synthesizing them), both Platonic and Christian asceticisms participate nonetheless in a problematically elitist politics of philosophical truth positioned in opposition to the democratic politics of rhetoric or debate, Boyarin argues. At this point, Mark Jordan takes up the challenge offered by Boyarin. Where Boyarin sees in Diotima’s speech a displacement of the heavenly (but still also carnal) eroticism advocated by Pausanias, Jordan perceives in the highly ironized and powerfully seductive exchange between Alcibiades and Socrates with which the Symposium concludes an unsettling of the certainties of all of the prior speeches—not least Diotima’s cited doctrine of radical sublimation. If the Symposium is both less ascetic and less didactic on Jordan’s reading than on Boyarin’s, it both is and is not thereby less continuous with the erotic theories and practices of the Christians of a later antiquity: Jordan closes with a consideration of Augustine’s Confessions, referring forward to Karmen MacKendrick’s reading of that text later in this volume. In the final essay of part , Mario Costa returns us to Diotima’s speech, discovering an eroticism that lends itself easily to an explicitly Christian development, though Costa’s interests (in distinction from Boyarin’s) lie with the relevance of Diotima’s doctrine for current theological arguments regarding the inadequacy of purely lack-based theories of desire—arguments that are, of course, resonant (though not simply conflatable) with Nygren’s opposition of agape to eros. In dialogue with philosophical theologian             兩 xvii Jean-Luc Marion, Costa discovers in Plato’s text a concept of eros that is not simply identified with lack or death but encompasses also the agapic emphasis on resourcefulness or plenitude, in an inherently relational construal of divine-human desire in which eros itself arrives, and is returned, as a gift. Costa’s essay should also be read in company with the philosophically or cosmologically framed essays of part . The essays in part  extend the symposiastic conversation, continuing to complicate the distinctions between the sexual and the sublimated by layering other distinctions on them—heterosexual and homosexual, twosexed and intersexed, normative and queer—through engagement with the erotic pieties of ancient and medieval as well as contemporary Christians. As resonances between premodern and postmodern texts and practices are explored, questions are implicitly raised about the transhistorical and transcultural analysis of eroticism or sexuality. If the queer of contemporary discourse depends upon resistance to the hegemony of the normal, how does it intersect with other cultures that appeal not to norms but to nature and furthermore acknowledge a natural fluidity of gendered and eroticized identities? Is queerness necessarily linked to resistance or transgression? Such questions are relevant not only to the essays in this section but also to many others in the volume that work in an explicitly transhistorical register. Here Diana Swancutt ‘‘outs’’ the unsettlingly androgynous and queerly erotic body of Christ harbored within the Pauline corpus, thereby implicitly challenging Nygren’s representation of the apostle Paul as the poster child of an agapically asexual theology while also explicitly challenging more contemporary invocations of Paul that support the oppressive politics of heterosexism. Considering a figure far less familiar to most readers than Paul, Derek Krueger uncovers in the writings of the Byzantine monk Symeon the New Theologian evidence of a startlingly rich homoerotic imaginary that foregrounds the male monastic body as the site of erotic transformation or deification; his essay glances back toward Jordon’s as he detects possible echoes in Symeon’s work of the teasingly cloaked erotic exchange between Alcibiades and Socrates with which Plato’s Symposium concludes. Amy Hollywood, in turn, explores the fascinatingly fluid, culturally transgressive erotic subjectivities emerging in xviii 兩             the recorded visions of female medieval mystics Mechthild of Magdeburg, Hadewijch, and Marguerite Porete, who represent themselves, respectively, as a bride of Christ, a knight errant in love, and a female Soul seeking erotic union with a feminized divinity. Other essays in this section raise the question of whether the focus on the sexed or the sexual is too exclusive for an eroticism construed as broadly and productively transgressive of difference. Marcella AlthausReid’s provocative exploration of Latin American ‘‘feetishism’’—centered around theological readings of the work of Brazilian poet Glauco Matosso—considers how the erotic traverses and transfigures, queers and subverts, differences framed in terms of colonialism and nationality, class and race, as well as sexuality and gender. Perching at the edge of secularized eschatological fantasies already morphing queerly into realities both ominous and promising, Sheila Briggs explores new economies of pleasure that emerge in the ongoing transformations of ‘‘digital’’ bodies at once glorious and grotesque. In Christian as well as Jewish tradition, the erotic is frequently attended by the suffering of pain or violent coercion, an interest that unites the essays in part  while also linking them with the prior essays by AlthausReid and Hollywood in particular. At this point, other fault lines in Nygren’s typology become apparent. He wishes to keep separate the active human subject of desire that characterizes his eros type and the receptive or passive human subject of faith that characterizes his agape type. Yet it would seem that to be a subject at all is both to act and to be subjected to constraint, in discursive and political contexts where agency is never absolute. To be an erotic subject is, perhaps, to begin to transfigure—even to pervert—the submission that inheres in subjection. Where submission is actively courted, chosen, or willed, the complication of agency is intensified to the point of crisis, jamming and repeatedly reversing the distinctions between subject and object, domination and submission, power and resistance. As Yvonne Sherwood demonstrates, the very structures of narrativity or (divine) emplotment, whether biblical or postbiblical, convey this predicament of subjectivity while also opening up possibilities for an erotic transformation of submission that limits omnipotence, whether human or divine. Behind the crucifixion of Christ looms the binding of Isaac, and in front of it proliferate innumerable inscriptions of mimetic             兩 xix self-sacrifice or self-emptying, where pain and pleasure, loss and gain, mournfulness and joy converge and mingle. Especially in the painful disciplines of asceticism and the prayerful fantasies of mysticism, there emerges a sublimely sadomasochistic eroticism played out on a charged field of divine-human seduction that promises to take subjects to their limits and beyond, opening them in and to the cut of love. My own essay places the late ancient ascetic theorist Evagrius of Pontus in dialogue with philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy in such a way as to uncover prayer as the site of the advent of a love that cuts across, breaks, or shatters the subject. In the masochistic erotics of ancient asceticism, there is disclosed the collapsing of the binary of activity and passivity that anchors Nygren’s dualism of agape and eros. Folding back on Jordan’s anticipatory reading of Augustine’s confessional erotics, Karmen MacKendrick in turn exposes the power of the divine seduction that lies at the heart of Augustine’s complex theories of love and subjectivity, desire and submission, thereby not only interrogating current critiques of seduction but also illumining the striking coherence of the North African Church Father’s thought, where Nygren saw merely ‘‘synthesis’’ and inconsistency. Both Evagrius and Augustine represent late ancient legacies that leave a strong imprint on medieval Christianity, especially its more mystical versions—as Nygren notes, albeit with marked disapproval. We are thus brought back again to Hollywood’s essay on the thought worlds of medieval Christian mystics, even as we are also directed forward toward Elliot Wolfson’s treatment in part  of the erotic suffering that attends exegetical practice in the understanding of medieval kabbalists. The intense yearning for erotic dissolution, which by definition puts ‘‘selves’’ at risk, is here engaged more appreciatively than it was by Nygren, to say the least. Yet it must be acknowledged that more sinister dangers likewise threaten. A productive perversity can itself be perverted, and neither the extremes of oppression (including domestic abuse and political tyranny) nor the subtle seductions of consumer cultures, for example, lie altogether outside the field of the erotic. The dilemma is real: the desire for justice may seem at points to require the forcible constraint of the erotic, yet to foreclose on the inherent transgressiveness of eros is also to risk repressing the very potential for transformability xx 兩             that enables the emergence of new possibilities for justice, love, and pleasure within human community. Eroticism is not, however, confined to the human or even to the human-divine sphere of relationality. Eroticism is not perhaps confinable at all, as Nygren intuited; it appears also to lie close to the heart of creativity and thus of cosmology, an insight that Nygren, however, resists in his attempt to distance creativity from eros by aligning it strictly with the agapic. The essays in part  bring our attention to the powerful flow of eros in and through the very torrents of nature, as uncovered by Robert Corrington’s reading of Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose thought, argues Corrington, effects a radical ‘‘liquification’’ of the conventional ‘‘architectural’’ distinctions drawn between ascending desire and descending love. Catherine Keller, in turn, surfaces the productively disruptive potentiality mobilized within historically layered and highly eroticized representations of the parabiblical figure of Mary Magdalene. Keller ultimately invokes process theology, poststructuralist philosophy, and contemporary physics to point toward a new theological cosmology in which the pleromatic is transfigured as the khoric site of divine becoming and erotic creativity. Mayra Rivera also highlights intersections of the erotic, the feminine, and the cosmological in her theological revisiting of the debate of Luce Irigaray with Emmanuel Levinas, as she reaches for a fresh conceptualization of the transcendence encountered in the (divine) Other in which eros is no longer opposed to an explicitly desexualized and implicitly anti-feminine love. In the final essay of part , Grace Jantzen discovers in biblical narratives of new creation a source for envisioning divine and human creativity as an erotic overflow arising from a ‘‘passion for transformation,’’ a position that explicitly resists current theoretical tendencies—e.g., that of René Girard—to understand violence as inherent to creativity as well as desire. Janzten’s essay thereby also returns us to a critical consideration of the ambivalent relation of eros to pain, suffering, and loss highlighted in the essays of part . While Plato’s Symposium, with which we begin, has constituted a privileged site for the development of philosophical theories and practices of eros, the biblical Song of Songs, which is the focus of the final part , has allowed for a poetic unfolding of the erotic within exegetical traditions—a topic already broached in essays by Swancutt, Keller, and             兩 xxi Sherwood. As Tod Linafelt shows, the Song opens up a modality of eros, and thus perhaps also of theology, that exceeds even the complexities of narrative through an irruption of lyricism that evades linear temporality by performing a rhythmic sensuality that seduces our participation and thereby promises transformation at the most intimate level of embodied passions. Richard Kearney, in turn, both explores and supplements premodern interpretations of the Song, uncovering at the intersection of Jewish and Christian exegetical traditions an eschatologically charged eroticism that subverts the Nygrenesque binary of agape and eros, descending and ascending desire, while also inviting engagement with a wide range of contemporary philosophical, psychoanalytic, and literary expressions of sublime desire. Finally, Elliot Wolfson’s Kristevan meditations on erotic suffering as a form of hermeneutical poetics in the kabbalistic tradition turns on readings of Song : (‘‘place me as a seal on your heart’’), thus providing a fitting seal to this section, even as it also curves back toward our beginning point in the Symposium. All of the essays in this volume engage theology while refusing to be disciplined by it; their conversation, indeed, takes place for the most part at or beyond the limits of the theological discipline. Yet, for those who choose to submit more directly to this discipline, what might a distinctive theology of the erotic look like? What are its most promising resources, its most hopeful transfigurations of doctrine—not least the doctrine of God? These are the questions to which Catherine Keller returns us in her theological afterword. For now, let me suggest tentatively that if ‘‘God is eros,’’ as Pseudo-Dionysius (following Plotinus) insists in his erotic transposition of  John : and :, then perhaps eros is God. Or rather: eros is the power or process of divine self-othering through which creation is ever emerging—that which at once differentiates and joins, orders and disrupts. A God in and of between-spaces, then, and also a God always incarnating, always subjecting itself to becoming-flesh. Thus, a God who is a Christ—ever incarnating, but also ever withdrawing seductively, eluding even the grasp of words that must (according to the logic of a ‘‘negative’’ theology) be unsaid as soon as they are said. If theology gestures toward a God-who-is-eros, that gesture itself partakes of the erotic. Like prayer—or perhaps as prayer?—theology cannot grasp God but it can hope to seduce and be seduced by God. This page intentionally left blank