Can we say therefore; not eros, but agape? not amour, but caritas? It is not as simple as that. Both words mean "love." It is true that theologians have been at great pains to distinguish between eros - love as desire in the Greek sense - and agape - love that gives, in Jesus' sense. In this regard they were able to conclude from the quite remarkable lexical evidence that the noun agape scarcely appears in Greek secular literature and that the verb agapan ("to love") only marginally. On the other hand, the word eros does not appear at all in the New Testament and only twice in the Greek Old Testament - in a negative sense, in the Book of Proverbs. Evidently the word had been compromised in Greek usage with morbid eroticism and purely instinctive sexuality, manifested also in the pagan cults.
Obviously there is a distinction between desirous love, seeking only its own and self-giving love, seeking the advantage of the other; the distinction, that is, between selfish love and the true love which Jesus had in mind. Nevertheless, the distinction between selfish love and true love is not identical with the distinction between "eros" and "agape"'; as if only agape and not also eros could be true love. Could not someone desire another person and yet be able at the same time to give himself? And, on the other hand, is not a person who gives himself also permitted to desire the other? Is there to be nothing loveable, nothing worth loving, in either lover or beloved? Does not the God of the Old Testament - for instance - desire his people Israel passionately, "jealously" as the prophets say, like a man who loves his faithless wife? Is not God's covenant with his people thus represented in symbols of eros as marriage and the people's desertion as adultery? Was not the song of Songs, a collection of sensual love songs, admitted to the Old Testament canon? And has not God's love in the New Testament very human features/ the love of a father who wants his prodigal son back?
Hans Kung: On Being Christian continued
I'm going to take some time with this issue because it is extremely difficult to make distinctions and the problems of consistently avoiding the negative aspects of sexual or obsessively possessive love as you are involved with sexual love is as complex as avoiding the pathological rejection of people and even hating them while disapproving of their sexuality or their performance of sex. It's not simply a matter of finding moderation or balance, though those are certainly involved with it. For a gay man in modern America, with the prescribed character of gay sex that is, in fact, heavily associated with some of the most negative aspects of sex as desire. That is a view of gay sex held by, I dare say, most straight people, those who approve of equality and those who oppose it. It is also a view of gay sex which is common among gay men, though there are probably a higher percentage of gay men who are more aware of the problematic nature of that view of their lives than the general population is. I will not speak for Lesbians, bisexuals or transexuals on that count except to say that I think, from my experience, Lesbians seem to have a better conception of the issues.
I think that the problem of that distinction has grown, enormously, in the period in which the internet has made pornography and the inevitable advocacy for the most selfish and pathological aspects of sex far more influential in peoples' thinking and their lives. It does what Kung suspected the sex cults and temple prostitution did to the concept in ancient Greece, it is today's "morbid eroticism and purely instinctive sexuality." Though I think it's more cultivated than instinctual. Pornography inevitably has that effect, I also dare to say, encouraging bad and then worse behavior, not only that destructive of the one who is inevitably used by the dominant party but of the one who dominates. That is not only a thematic feature of pornography, it is, when living people are involved, a medical and biological fact.
But it is certainly also true that there is LGBTQ sex which is selfless, which is responsible and caring and restorative and which is a model of human relationships in line with the Golden Rule, with the relevant parables and sayings, the prophesies and laws, just as much so as straight sex can be. But not if it copies the empty selfishness of movies and TV shows and pornography. I don't think even so-called "erotic fiction" is very helpful for that. Most of what I saw, even when it was responsible and not a mode for transmitting permission to be selfish.
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