The War of Eros and the Blessing of Desire

“By proving contraries, truth is made manifest.” (Joseph Smith)
πόλεμος πάντων μὲν πατήρ ἐστι. (Heraclitus)

I dream a lover, one I’ve never met in the flesh. I wake up, boil water, shower, have breakfast and tea. I set out in the dark on my mountain road with the windows down. We’re at the stage of summer when the heat lasts all night, subsiding by pre-dawn, touching me tentatively, gently, as I drive through the invisible banks of warmer and cooler air.

Already sensually activated by my dream, I feel the eros of my bodily experience in the moment: the caress of a summer night, the visceral curve and lean of my body as I respond to the winding road, the pleasure of speed and power, the momentary illumination of trees and houses, the washes of memory palpable as I pass trailheads I know well, and the hills where they lead. I think of the starlight on those hills as they wait for the sun they already feel coming. Do the trees and hills and hidden night creatures live in a pure eros which I now taste only when visited by a dream? Is that dream, that eros, a divine gift to awaken me not to another day of work, but to my presence on the earth?

When I refuse to receive the world from which that dream was an emissary, I might as well not be alive. Or perhaps, my “life” becomes a living death, flat, insensible. I am a blind man groping through a landscape in which I can see almost nothing. The days pass filled with things to which I am not exactly indifferent, but whose depths I can’t grasp. My heart is enclosed, entombed. I am separate from the people around me, even those I love. Their feelings evoke frustration or fatigue, rather than interest and sympathy.

In a moment, I can see the entire catastrophe of our civilization in this closure. I catch a glimpse of thousands of years of what can only be called abuse and brutality, institutionalized by the powers of state and church to crush the lives of human beings here at their source. Sometimes when I see monstrous evils, I wonder how anyone could be capable of them. Here is how: I already have the beginnings of it in myself; I already know the first steps on that path, and only the emotional, social, and material wealth that has surrounded me since I was born has prevented me from travelling down it until I reach actual atrocities. There is a continuity between the dead heart I feel in myself that manifests as indifference, and the greatest cruelties of which human beings are capable. I would not frame this as my common participation in “original sin” — I would frame it as the common subjection of humanity to the torture of being cut off from the root of life, and I mean that in the most concrete and realistic sense. This is what Reich called “the emotional plague.”

This is the war against eros. That is its strategic dimension, but its tactical execution is always via a war against sexuality. Obviously, I am not collapsing eros into sexuality, but I am pointing out that to deny the sexual dimension of eros is to deny eros in its incandescent heart. There is no “purely spiritual” eros. This is not a bald metaphysical assertion, “for the sake of argument,” but a confession of my own experience. At various times, I have spent many years working, with whatever degree of inner conflict and hesitation, to excise sexual desire from my experience of eros — or at least, if I can’t excise it, to corral and contain and suppress it, to tame it and master it. But when I have mastered it, to my dismay, I find that it was itself, in all its intractable wildness, the very wellspring of that wider and deeper eros that enflames my soul with spiritual desire, that makes the path of the heart sweet.

Eros does not respond well to being mastered. There are animals that cannot be tamed, that cannot live in captivity. Eros is like this. If I work to tame it, if I imagine that I have mastered it, I find that the very aspiration to spiritual life that put me on the path of taming it is drained and neutered. I don’t deny that the human capacity to acquiesce, to remain on a path of death, seems almost superhuman. Entire lives can be spent this way. Entire civilizations can be built this way; ours has been. I recall a saying of an ancient desert ascetic: “Don’t trust the flesh until it is in the grave.” But nowadays, I find Pascal more compelling: L’homme n’est ni ange ni bête, et le malheur veut que qui veut faire l’ange fait la bête. That is: “Man is neither angel nor beast, and the misfortune remains, that he who would make himself an angel makes himself a beast.”

But then — what to do, how to live with an ineluctably wild animal, whose presence is somehow necessary to our life in the most direct sense? (We used to have a sense of this when as tribal peoples we lived with wild animals and knew that they had medicine for us. John Moriarty recounted a story of a Kenyan tribesman visiting a western city and asking in deep surprise where the animals were, and how we managed to live without their medicine. The last wolf in Britain was killed in Scotland in 1680 — and I wonder how my folk have lived without wolf medicine, and what that has done to their souls. Perhaps this is an answer to the entire question with which I am wrestling here.)

Here is not the war against eros, but the war of eros, the war between eros and the values that eros would spurn. What values? Well — eros is the wellspring of tenderness for our mate, our children, indeed for all living things, for the earth herself; the wellspring of our sense of beauty perceived by the heart and felt in our whole body. And yet, eros is also a pillar of fire leading us through a wilderness single-mindedly, single-heartedly, furious, wild, willing to trample that tenderness and that heart-sense of beauty, for the sake of seizing what we desire. After all, only an iota separates Ἔρως from Ἔρις, the goddess of strife and confusion. Is it not so?

Our very experience of erotic communion — here I mean sexual communion specifically — reveals this. The communio oppositorum, the “communion of opposites,” which we dance in a relationship of a man and a woman, is a kind of war. Mustn’t it be? We are polar beings, on every level, from cells to souls. We are so different from one another. Perhaps a casual sexual liaison doesn’t reveal this in depth, but any attempt to build a lasting relationship certainly does.

However, a casual sexual liaison (or indeed also, sex within a committed relationship, but considered in itself) does reveal this: here at the very heart of incarnate eros, the war, the clash of opposites, Heraclitus’ “strife” that is the “father of all,” is generative — that is, the gulf of difference, while remaining, reveals itself as the source of life. Both the life felt by the sexual partners in the pleasure and fulfillment and self-giving of their embrace; the life that is transmitted to their community by their experience of that life and its flowering in their whole inward richness and their whole presence to the world; and the life that may come from that embrace in the conception of a child.

This is what I want to hold out: that the prophetic course for our civilization, and by that I mean our now unavoidably global civilization, is to abandon the war against eros — whatever its ultimate origin — and to embrace completely, consciously, with full, activated, open hearts, the war of eros. I contend that in forgetting the body and in attempting, futilely, to sever sexuality from eros, we have stopped listening to God, and the first place to listen to God now is not in a text, not in words from a pulpit, but in the body, in eros, in our sexuality. I do not know what this might entail in terms of a transformation of our sexual mores and the transformation of our entire civilization. When you meet a new lover you have no idea how you will be changed by what is about to happen to you. It is an invitation to risk and adventure. This after all is at the very heart of eros: self-abandonment, an abandonment of our certainties, an entrance into a wilderness where we rely on God; this is why religious conversion is a deeply erotic experience. Perhaps, at the end of this millennial experiment in repression and brutality, this is the place where we will finally rediscover our faith.

This post was not written using AI.