Divine Eros

Solomon v. Anders Nygren

Impressive as it is, few books of twentieth century theology now seem so dated as Anders Nygren’s Agape and Eros.¹ The “and” of the title does not really function as a copula, but as a contrast; Agape or Eros would capture Nygren’s theme. According to Nygren, the two forms of love named in his title “originally have nothing whatsoever to do with each other” and “belong originally to two entirely separate spiritual worlds, between which no direct communication is possible.” Nygren’s overview recounts a history of the unfortunate entanglement and confusion of these two themes, the synthesis of Hellenistic Eros with biblical Agape, which eventually become “so thoroughly bound up and interwoven with one another that it is hardly possible for us to speak of either without our thoughts being drawn to the other.”²

Originating in mystery religions before being taken up by the Platonic tradition, the doctrine of Eros presents a love that responds to the “quality, the beauty and worth, of its object,” is “acquisitive desire and longing,” an egocentric love that impels a self-reliant upward climb into union with God. Agape, by contrast, is indiscriminate with regard to its object, embracing both evil and good, lovely and revolting. Eros is primarily human love for God, and when used of divine love treats that love as self-interested; Agape is God’s unselfish, self-sacrificial love for men. Eros arises from the desperation of human need; Agape from the calm of God’s plenitude. Eros grasps; Agape releases. Eros responds to the beauty of the beloved; Agape loves in defiance of appearances.³

One of Nygren’s chief villains is the figure we now know as pseudo-Dionysus the Areopagite. Though deceptively presenting himself as a disciple of Paul (Acts 17:34), the pseudo-Dionysus presents a Neoplatonic viewpoint “but scantily covered with an exceedingly thin Christian veneer.” Because of his alleged connection to the apostle, “the spurious works were universally regarded as genuine for a thousand years, and enjoyed almost canonical authority.”⁴ During the medieval period, theologians such as John Scotus Eriugena, Hugh of St. Victor, Roberty Grosseteste, Albert the Great, and Thomas Aquinas wrote commentaries on Dionysian works, Bonaventure found in Dionysus a theology for Franciscan piety, and Dionysian themes infiltrated biblical commentary on the Song of Songs.

Pseudo-Dionysus represents the most thoroughly erotic theology in the Western tradition. For Dionysus, God Himself can be described as Eros and Agape, the yearning love itself, as well as the object of the yearning, the Beloved sought by all that is. As eternal Eros, God is in eternal movement:

He is yearning (eros) on the move, simple, self-moved, self-acting, pre-existing in the Good, flowing out from the Good onto all that is and returning once again to the Good. In this divine yearning (eros) shows especially its unbeginning and unending nature traveling in an endless circle through the Good, from the Good, in the Good and to the Good, unerringly turning, ever on the same center, ever in the same direction, always proceeding, always remaining, always being restored to itself.⁵

Creation is an overflow of erotic ecstasy: “The very cause of the universe,” he writes, is “in the beautiful, good abundance of his benign yearning (eros)” by which God is “carried outside of himself in the loving care he has for everything.” God as the cause of all

loves all things in the superabundance of his goodness” and “because of this goodness he makes all things, brings all things to perfection, holds all things together, returns all things. The divine longing is Good seeking for the sake of the Good. That yearning which creates all the goodness of the world preexisted superabundantly within the Good and did not allow it to remain without issue. It stirred him to use the abundance of his powers in the production of the world.⁶

God is, as it were, “beguiled by goodness, by love (agape) and by yearning (eros) and is enticed away from his transcendent dwelling place and comes to abide within all things.”⁷ Redemption is equally erotic. Products of divine Eros, creatures long to return to their source. Eros is the outgoing of creation, and Eros in a creaturely form is the impulse that brings creation back to God.

It is hardly surprising that Nygren found this alarming. Pseudo-Dionysius refuses to distinguish Eros and Agape, and comes close to implying that God had to create. A yearning God is, on Nygren’s analysis, a needy God, not the sovereign God who comes to us in self-giving love. A God who makes all things out of creative yearning is a grasping and self-interested God, who loves in order to possess, who may well need us as much as we need Him.

What seemed to Nygren a tragic and dangerous synthesis looks very different today. Pseudo-Dionysus is all the rage. In a May 2008 address, Pope Benedict XVI commended Dionysius as a theologian with “new relevance” whose apophaticism reminds us that “God can only be spoken of with ‘no,’ and that it is only possible to reach him by entering into this experience of ‘no.’” As Dionysus mediated “between the Greek spirit and the Gospel,” so today he can serve as a “mediator in the modern dialogue between Christianity and the mystical theologies of Asia.”⁸ Dionysius has also become an important mediator between postmodernism and Christianity, offering a negative theology that comports well with Derrida’s deconstructionism and other varieties of post-structuralism.⁹

Alongside and interwoven with the revival of interest in Dionysius have been a revival of interest in Divine Eros. Von Balthasar found the theology of Pseudo-Dionysius “genuinely Biblical and consistent with the most authentic covenant-theology of either Testament, a theology that sees the jealous and consuming love of the divine Bridegroom doing its work in his bride in order to raise her up, invite her, and bring her home to the very same answering love.”¹⁰ Following Dante, however, Balthasar goes much further than Dionysus in integrating human desire, including especially sexual desire, into God’s love. Eros draws man to woman, in whom the lover sees the divine image, “the beloved as God sees him.” Thus human Eros is incorporated into the path of return, and is a variation on divine Eros.¹¹ David Bentley Hart condemns Nygren’s “disastrous” separation of Eros and Agape as an “utterly Kantian” perspective that tends to “evacuate the image of God of all those qualities of delight, desire, jealousy, and regard that Scripture ascribes to him.” How, he asks pointedly, “is an agape purified of eros distinguishable from hate?”¹²

These are bracing challenges to Nygren’s separation of Agape and Eros, and they raise, for my purposes, two central questions. First, does the Bible, as Hart suggests, teach that God acts erotically, that is, that He is moved by yearning and desire. I answer that question affirmatively, relying primarily on the Song of Songs. But that raises the second, systematic question: If God’s love is erotic yearning, does that imply that God is needy? Do we have to choose between a stiff but sovereign Agape and a warm but tremulous Eros? Do we have to choose between an unmoved Love and a Love that remakes God according to human need? I will answer negatively, drawing on some recent philosophical work on desire and ultimately suggesting that only a Trinitarian theology can make sense of a God both sovereign and desiring.