On the achievement of an erotic relationship
By Mark Vernon on Monday, November 28 2011, 08:22 - Personal observations - Permalink
Just finished the manuscript for God: All That Matters, part of a new series from Hodder, coming out next year.
I took the chance to do some new reading, and was particularly glad to engage with Christos Yannaras, the Eastern Orthodox theologian and author of, On the Absence and Unknowability of God. I'd often read that Eastern Orthodoxy is the direct inheritor of ancient Platonism. I believe it now. If you want to know what it felt like to follow Plato, a Greek orthodox liturgy is perhaps the best place to go.
It would radically transform the heady debates about God that do the rounds in the analytic world. Stop asking what you believe. Start asking what you love. Yannaras writes that to understand the divine is 'the achievement and gift of an erotic relationship', eros being the yearning and desire for what we lack, and an achievement because this passion is often a painful affair. It requires stepping outside of yourself, a frightening thought for the children of Descartes, whose sense of identity has become very focused on the desire for self-control and self-determination.
'God… is revealed as a personal energy of erotic longing for each of his creatures', Yannaras continues. My sense is that it's like the felt knowing that exists between a mother and her child, rather than say the factual knowledge that a scientist gains of the world, fascinating though that is. God is understood not when a proposition is proven but when an eye of the soul is opened, as Plato put it, which I think can be roughly translated as, like being in love. William Countryman makes the point accessible in his book, Love Human and Divine:
‘[Love] can bring us into communion not only with God and with one another, but with every element in creation, from rocks to seraphim. Whether your connection with rocks takes the forms of a collector’s enthusiasm, a scientific delight in geology, an experience of mysticism in the natural world, or a sculptor’s intimacy with marble is secondary... they all proceed from the same erotic power of relating.’
Comments
I think I mentioned this the last time I commented here (I was obviously affected) but I highly recommend Barthes' A Lover's Discourse.
He describes being 'in love' in a very similar way, and in a very philosophical way (just without the God bit).
What the children of Descartes don't realise is that a desire for self-control (any desire, in fact) will take them to a new identity, rather than the one they think they would be happy with. Hence the escalating desires and demands. They are forever stepping outside of themselves, and this refers to the acquisition of a new ipad or the embarking upon a new affair or career.
So the question is how (and, more importantly, whether) the longing for the divine is different from the longing for the same old temporal and phenomenal stuff that did not satisfy us in the past. How to differentiate God from our ideas about gods?
Thanks both for comments. Not quite sure what you meant about desire, Sam Vega, though of course the difference between idols/'gods' and God is that the divine is neither phenomenal nor temporal, if that means just another being amongst beings. Divine difference is one of Yannaras' main themes - the rough division in Orthodoxy being that God cannot be known in God's essence, though can be in God's energies, the primary one, if that's a correct way to put it, being love. I suspect that's quite analogous to loving another human being too - never quite know them as a person (never quite know oneself as a person!), though know them in what happens with them.
I'm also inclined to think that dropping the God bit, quiet riot girl, is not just like dropping a bit of the colourful language around love, if that's kinda what you take Barthes to be doing. Odd though it may seem, I suspect that human-to-human love, if I can put it like that, needs a kind of excess, because in love two people awaken something in each other that they cannot ultimately satisfy with each other, lovely though love most certainly is. Lovers may seek the satisfaction of that excess in having children, as a sign of how their love overflows. Lacan would say that the excess of human love floats on a kind of emptiness born of the necessary delusions of language. Augustine would say that all love finally points to the divine as the only final goal of loving that can satisfy love's excessiveness. I'm inclined to agree with him.
Yes Barthes is more Lacanian in outlook but he acknowledges the pessimism involved in that. And, sorry to give the 'ending' away, he also acknowledges that the only way to 'get out of' or 'beyond' the constraints of human/human love is via -in the example he uses - Zenlike philosophy, eg of Buddhism.
"When an eye of the soul is opened"! Works for love, literature, and politics.