Eros Crucified

Abstract

What is the relation between sex, death, and the divine? This question, which is of vital importance to Plato and which Freud tacitly takes up by turning to the Symposium at the end of Beyond the Pleasure Principle, can be seen as standing at the foundation of philosophy, theology, and psychoanalysis. It ought not to surprise us, then, to observe the vibrant conversation going on between Continental philosophers, theologians, and psychoanalysts today. This attempt to untangle and analyze the intersection where the “Heavenly Powers” of sex and death converge with the divine is that which allows Julia Kristeva to state, during a recent interview with Richard Kearney, that of all “the human sciences and the social sciences, the only rational approaches to human beings, psychoanalysis . . . come[s] closest . . . to the experience of faith.” It is that which enables Lacan to assert that “Saint Augustine . . . foreshadowed psychoanalysis” and to insist that psychoanalysts ought to “become versed in Augustine.” It is that which compels thinkers like Emmanuel Falque—who advise philosophers of religion to speak first and foremost about “finitude, the consciousness and horizon of death” —to write books on Freud and philosophy. And it is that which drives the work being undertaken today. The purpose of this dissertation is to approach once more the dark mystery of Eros and Thanatos which, to paraphrase Dostoevsky, forever struggle with God on the battlefield of the human heart. In order to broach this topic, I will attempt to establish a connection between carnal, bodily love and man’s relation to the divine. To do so, I will rely upon and further develop what Paul Ricoeur has called “the nuptial metaphor”—the recurring biblical motif that portrays God’s relation to man as a kind of love affair, neither reductively sexual nor legalistically marital, but passionate, romantic, protective, desirous, even jealous. Such an understanding of the connection between sexuality and spirituality is not without precedent. Consider, for example, the statement by Ignatius of Antioch from which this work derives its title—“my Eros has been crucified”—which Pseudo Dionysius reads as a supreme affirmation of divine desire. John Panteleimon Manoussakis, commenting on this link between the carnal and the spiritual, writes, “The desire for God is not independent from the desire for the other human . . . One who has not felt the latter rarely and with difficulty would seek the former.” I would add that, as Jean-Luc Marion argues in The Erotic Phenomenon, one who has felt the latter has perhaps already experienced the former, if only in a veiled way. Thus, where Freud reads the desire for God as a sublimation of the sex drives, I would suggest the opposite: erotic desire often reveals a deeper, more fundamental longing—a longing for the divine. And yet, Freud might counter, one must consider not only Eros but Thanatos. How does the desire for death factor into this religiously-inflected reading of the drives? That human sexuality implies both perversion and perfection, that it brings together man’s baseness and his beatitude, is one of the most important insights offered by Freudian drive theory. As Freud himself notes, “The highest and the lowest are always closest to each other in the sphere of sexuality.” But why this is the case remains for Freud a great mystery. Here, I would suggest, is where philosophy of religion can make an important contribution. Relying on the works of philosophers such as Manoussakis, Kearney, and Marion, theologians, in particular Hans Urs von Balthasar, and psychoanalysts such as Freud and Lacan, this work aims to both provide a possible answer to this fundamental question and to foster further dialogue between thinkers whose fields were born of similar concerns.