Eroticism is one thing. Possessiveness is another thing altogether. Any admixture of the latter utterly corrupts the former. “Possessive eroticism” is an oxymoron.
In this post, I will attempt to explain the great — indeed, defining — difference between the two, the erotic and the possessive. I may not use those exact terms in what follows, but if you as readers give the matter due thought as you read, you will discern the relevance of what I do say to that distinction.
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In Jesus, the power of God is the power of love, of bearing fruit in another’s life. Judge them by their fruits [see Matthew 7:16-20]. That is, so far as they are fruitful they share in the power of God and the life of God. He who abides in me is the one who bears much fruit [see John 15:5]. This bearing fruit in the lives of others constitutes the essential identity and being of men in the kingdom of God. I am what I generate in another. My giving is my being. Thus arises the conflict between Jesus and the world, between the kingdom of God and the kingdom of evil. For in this world, identity consists in being able to draw a circle around some bit of reality and possess that bit of reality as your own and no one else’s.[1]
Arthur C. McGill was born in Canada in 1926 but became a Congregational Christian minister as well as an academic theologian and philosopher in the United States, where he died in 1980. It was only after his death that appreciation and fame for his work deepened greatly and spread widely.
The passage above is from a sermon McGill entitled “The Ascension,” which he delivered at St. John’s College in Cambridge, England on May 18, 1969. In that passage McGill points to the unbridgeable gap that separates the being of the human being who has come to dwell in “the kingdom of God” from the being of the same human being who has fallen into “the kingdom of evil.”
In one line of what I’ve quoted above from McGill, he cites verse 5 of chapter 15 in the New Testament Gospel according to John. In the New International Version and various other translations that verse reads as follows: "I am the vine; you are the branches. Whoever remains in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing."
To expand upon what is at issue in that verse and to end this first section of today’s post I will offer another translation of something also attributed to John. This time, however, it comes from one of his “letters” rather than from his “Gospel”:
And so we know and rely on the love God has for us. God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in him. In this way, love is made complete among us so that we will have confidence on the day of judgment, because in this world we are like him. There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love. — 1 John 4:16-18 (NIV)
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In the ancient Greek language used by such philosophers as Plato and Aristotle who lived during the same broad era that koine (“common” Greek) was widely spoken in the lands of the Near East and used in the writing of the Christian “New Testament,” there were four different terms that are typically translated by “love.” Those four are eros, philia, storge, and agape.
Besides “love,” each of those four classical Greek terms has other common translations. Eros is commonly taken to mean “to be in love with, to desire passionately.” Philia is taken to mean “friendship or affection for.” Storge is regarded as the sort of “familial love” that parents have for their children, children for their parents, or siblings for one another. Finally, agape is taken to be “disinterested or selfless unconditional regard for.”
Commonly in occidental or “Western” literature, those are taken to be four distinct and typically incompatible sorts of love. Most pointedly, in such literature it is common to distinguish sharply between eros and the other three.
In most interpretation of Christian thought and scripture, for example, a sharp distinction is drawn between eros and agape. The former is taken to be anything but “disinterested.” Rather, is almost always equated with a love that is deeply “interested” — what is more, interested precisely in a sexual way.
That, however, is at best an arbitrary limitation. It is itself no more than a sexually fixated interpretation of the truly erotic. In truth, eros is far more than that.
The Eros Farnese, a Pompeiian marble statue thought to be a copy of the colossal Eros of Thespiae by Praxiteles, Attic sculptor of the 4th century BCE
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In his dialogue The Symposium Plato depicts a banquet at which occurs a friendly exchange of extemporary addresses between a number of noted Athenians, including Plato’s great teacher, Socrates. The Greek general and statesman Alcibiades and the famous comic playwright Aristophanes both speak before Socrates, who delivers the final oration. The topic agreed upon for all the speaches is the nature of “love” in the sense of eros.
Anyone who has not read Plato’s Symposium should read it. Anyone who has read it should read it again. Anything worth reading, after all, is worth reading over and over again and again, as time and the spirit move one.
Anyone who reads or rereads The Symposium will read how, in Plato’s rendering of Socrates’ speech, the latter attributes what he has to say about love to the woman philosopher Diotima of Mantinea. It was she, Socrates asserts, who taught him the true nature of Eros, the god of love — most especially about the nature of the gift of love that Eros shoots into humans with his arrows from his bow.
Diotima agrees that eros is indeed a desirous striving after the beloved. What is more, says Diotima as Socrates presents her, what eros loves and stives desirously for is the beautiful.[2] More specifically, eros is that love which desires, she says, “to beget in the beautiful.”
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I have added the emphasis to the word beget in what I have just cited at the end of the preceding section, because the crux of what I really have to say in this post myself is that the “begetting” at issue in eros may indeed be the bringing forth of physical children — as it is whenever that begetting involves sexual union — but it does not have to be so. There are, it is important to know, many, many other ways of begetting besides sexual acts, and many, many other types of what is begotten besides the children brought forth through such sexual union.
What it is that eros desires to beget in the beauty to which it finds itself compellingly attracted might also be no more and no less than thought for example.
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In truth, it is in just such non-sexual cases that eros stands revealed in its relationship to philia, that “friendship towards” or “affection for” whomever or whatever one affectionately befriends. That is precisely why and how there can be, and with great frequency are, many “erotic friendships” to borrow from my title for today’s post.
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May that thought itself beget ever more thought in you, my dearest readers and friends — toward all of whom I feel the greatest erotic attraction!
[1] Arthur C. McGill, Theological Fascinations: Volume One, a collection of sermons by McGill edited by David Cain (Eugene: Oregon: Cascade Books, a division of Wipf & Stock Publishers, 2007), p. 119.
[2] I will leave it to readers to read—or read again—the account of beauty in the Symposium. I also invite those same readers or re-readers to consider carefully what I say about beauty in my post “Dread and Astonishment,” which I posted on this site on a little less than one year ago, on April 22, 2024.