Venality is the veneration of what is not venerable.
Venality betrays the venerable by bowing down before something that does no more than serve some selfish purpose, real or imagined.
Only the venerable should be venerated.
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The venerable is what is deserving of veneration. It is what calls for veneration. In turn, veneration is simply paying the venerable its due.
To venerate is to revere, that is, to manifest awe of--from Latin re-, here used as an intensifying prefix, plus vereri, “to stand in awe of, to fear, to respect.” To venerate is to admire (from ad-, “to, toward,” plus mirari, “to wonder”). Thus, to venerate is to be struck with awe and wonder by and before what is awe-inspiring, which literally means what breathes awe into us, so that we render it deference, that is, we yield to and before it, clearing way for it—as we do in ritual acts of prayer and devotion, whether recognized as such or not (I have prayed all my life, but never knew that that’s what I was doing until I was into my forties).
The question remains: Just what so fills us with awe and wonder, calling upon us to clear the way for it in such acts? That is, just what truly is venerable?
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Love is venerable. Love in all forms calls for veneration. That includes especially the sexually desirous form of love.
It is not accidental that the words venerate and venerable come eventually from verbal derivatives of the Latin venus, meaning “sexually desirable, possessing qualities that excite desire.” Of course, Venus was the ancient goddess of love, the Roman equivalent of the Greek goddess Aphrodite.
Truly to see Venus herself is to desire her.
Desire venerates her.
At least that is so if the desire is a holy desire—like the desire for the Christian God that, according to the ancient Orthodox saint Gregory of Nyssa, only grows stronger the more it finds itself gratified. One can never have enough of God, or of such a goddess as Venus.
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Concupiscence, cupidity, and covetousness all focus on the desire to possess, to take as one’s own property, to claim ownership over. However, there is nothing whatever of concupiscence, cupidity, or covetousness in holy desire. Holy desire is wholly free of all possessiveness, all desire to own as one’s property. That most definitely includes the holy sexual desire that the sight of Venus or other sexually desirable forms inevitably generates among all but the venal. Such sexual desire, too, has not a hint of any degenerate, venal desire to possess, to claim for oneself.
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Love is not only venerable. It also venerates.
Love loves; and unless it has degenerated into venality, love loves chastely, free of all possessiveness.
Plato’s Symposium is the recounting of a dinner party at which each of the guests is invited to speak in turn. Each is assigned the task of speaking in praise of love.
The Greek word at issue in the dialogue is eros, from which comes our English term erotic. The love the guests at the famous dinner party discuss is thus erotic love. That is, it is precisely the love that is defined paradigmatically as sexual desire.
Eventually, it becomes Plato’s great mentor Socrates’ turn to speak. In his address Socrates strives to give due honor to erotic love by attesting that the desire at issue in such love is not at all to desire to own, control, or have as property. It is, rather, to desire to create or engender in the beautiful.
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Erotic love is indeed desire. It is tumultuous, tempestuous desire that honors what or who invokes it, invokes it by its sheer beauty. To experience erotic desire, and to do so purely, is to love the beautiful. As with all love, erotic love strives to clear the way for what it loves to prosper. As love of the beautiful, erotic love devotes itself to clearing the way for beauty to prosper, and that means also always to blossom forth into ever more beauty.
Eros prays that beauty be, and that it become ever more, everywhere.
Beauty is venerable, and erotic desire is its veneration.
There is nothing venal in that.