In his celebrated study of Christian love, Anders Nygren identifies the emergence of heresy with the perversion of agape: “Agape loses its original meaning and is transformed into Eros; not, however, be it observed, into the sublimated ‘heavenly Eros’ of which Plato and his followers speak, but into that despised variety, ‘vulgar Eros.’”¹ The implications of this framing require unpacking. To do so, we must return to Plato’sSymposium,where the term “heavenly Eros” occurs in the discourse of Pausanias, signifying a practice of desire that begins with physical love but ultimately transcends the physical. Yet Pausanias is not the...

Benjamin Jowett, squirming still before his bowdlerized rendering of theSymposium, concedes the obvious as a condemnation: “It is impossible to deny that some of the best and greatest of the Greeks indulged in attachments, which Plato in the Laws, no less than the universal opinion of Christendom, has stigmatized as unnatural.”¹ Even the Platonic Socrates must be reproved so far as he “does not appear to regard the greatest evil of Greek life as a matter of abhorrence, but as a subject for irony, and is far from resenting the imputation of such attachments.”²

Daniel Boyarin’s rereading of the...

The central question of this essay concerns the desire for God. In taking this as my theme, I want to expand the possibilities for thinking and experiencing desire in general and the desire of God in particular. That this should be a concern for me underscores what I think are some limitations of current theories of desire. Two are particularly noteworthy.

First, the tendency to theorize desire or erotic love overwhelmingly in terms of lack and death is conditioned by, because it coincides with, the death of God and the abandonment of metaphysics. If metaphysical or ontotheological construals of desire...

In the midst of war in Iraq and a color-coded campaign against terror, American Christians are waging an intense cultural battle over the sexual dynamics of sexual difference. Responding to the legalization of same-sex marriage in Massachusetts (2004) and civil union in Vermont (2000) and Connecticut (2005), some of the nation’s largest Protestant denominations (e.g., the Southern Baptist Convention), evangelical political organizations (e.g., the Arlington Group, Focus on the Family, and the American Family Association), and the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops have devoted unparalleled resources to fighting similar threats to American moral values in other states. In 2003 the...

Symeon the New Theologian (949–1022), arguably the most important Byzantine religious thinker between John of Damascus in the eighth century and Gregory Palamas in the fourteenth, often presents salvation as a heavenly marriage.¹ Scholars have long noted Symeon’s frequent use of erotic and nuptial imagery to explore the relationship between the monk and God.² What scholars have generally failed to notice or account for is that much of this imagery is homoerotic. In contrast to more common tendencies to celebrate the consummation of male divinity with a monk’s feminized soul, Symeon emphasizes the masculinity of the monk’s body. I...

In the face of what the social historian Judith Bennett refers to as “the virtual absence of actual women from the sources of medieval lesbianisms,” a number of literary and cultural scholars have recently turned to texts by or about women to uncover homoerotic possibilities within the metaphoric structures of women’s own writings or in the practices ascribed to women or female characters within male-and female-authored literary and religious documents.¹ Karma Lochrie, for example, looks to a number of medieval devotional texts and images in which Christ’s bloody side wound becomes a locus of desire.² According to Lochrie, not only...

In 1986, Glauco Mattoso, the blind Brazilian poet and self-confessed foot fetishist,¹ wrote a book that has become almost an object of underground cult.The Loving Feetishist Handbook: Adventures and Readings from a Guy Crazy for Feetwas converted into a cartoon and renamedThe Adventures of Glaucomix, the Feetishist.Both books were very successful and even attracted international academic attention.² Glaucomix (recalling Asterix) is portrayed as a young university student and foot fetishist. In previous books and poems, Mattoso had deliberately mixed contrasting issues of marginalization and power. In these works, issues such as power and disempowerment are represented...

Bodies have always been the subjects of representation, sometimes written about in texts but more often carved in stone or painted on walls. Such images constitute a central feature of the visual culture from which most people in most historical periods have derived their knowledge of how the body is ordered in their society. As postmodern theories constantly remind us, the order of the body is also the political, social, economic, religious, and sexual order of a society. The discursive body has so devoured the flesh that the sensuality of the body is endlessly evoked only to be embalmed in...

The seductive enigma of the wordpassion—and the Christian passion to which it is tied—seems to me to lie in the way in which it allows the subject at its center to function as subject and object both at once. Derived from Latinpassioand Greekpathos, it is bound, in its first appearances in anything we would recognize as English, to passivity, suffering, affliction, and “the fact or condition of being acted upon or affected by an external agency” (OED). As if to illustrate this sense of passion as the subjection of the subject, the word was...

“Happy the spirit [nous] which attains to total insensibility at prayer,” exults Evagrius of Pontus in hisChapters on Prayer(120).¹ TheChapters,like so many ancient texts, comes wrapped in the envelope of a personal letter (though we no longer know the name of Evagrius’s addressee). A response to another letter, it begins suspensefullyin medias res—in the midst of an epistolary exchange between friends and also in the midst of a charged moment for Evagrius himself. “It was so characteristic of you to get a letter to me just at a time when I was aflame with...

At the opening of Book 3 of Saint Augustine’sConfessions, the author enters into young adulthood and into the city of Carthage, where all about him famously simmers a burning cauldron of unholy loves. Yet the ultimate object of his desire, in these years when he indulges in theater and prays for chastity to come at some more convenient time, is neither theatrical nor narrowly sexual—nor is it God, who might have been the reader’s first suspicion. “I was in love with love,” Augustine writes, though he adds that he is a bit confused about what “love” might mean....

There are two high-water marks in the self-unfolding of the depths of nature within Euro-American thought. The earlier occurred in the neo-Plotinian transfiguration of our experience of infinitizing nature in the metaphorical undulations concresced in the writings of RalphWaldo Emerson. The latter emerged in the dazzling architectonic of the creator of pragmaticism and the greater triadic tradition of semiotics, Charles Sanders Peirce—overpowering the subsequent dyadic semiological trajectory inspired by Saussure. For Emerson, the astonishing and fecund power of nature naturing held forth the fitful and often explosive power of the great One, while for Peirce sheer firstness, the predyadic...

As it has done all along, the sensuous icon of Mary Magdalene flashes through popular culture, but with a curious difference now. The saint has found her voice. The recovery of certain ancient texts over the past century has made her speech possible. Some of these, such as thePistis Sophia,a lengthy third-century gnostic document, unfold such arcane mystical allegories that the speeches seem to lack all resonance with the familiar. But then an angry outburst disrupts the smooth psychopompic surface of the text. It brings us back to an all-too-familiar present—in some sense, to our own.

This...

“Eroticism is first and foremost a thirst for otherness. And the supernatural is the supreme otherness,” writes OctavioPaz in Double Flame. The supreme otherness of God—theologians call it “divine transcendence.” Eroticism thus suggests a link between human otherness and divine transcendence. In its most common versions, however, divine transcendence seems not to enhance the awareness of interhuman otherness, but rather to so relativize difference as to effectively absorb otherness into itself. Indeed, “transcendence” is assumed to be what God has and humans do not. Thus the otherness of God and the otherness of creatures, the love for God...

The Genesis story in the Hebrew Bible, with its account of a beautiful garden forfeited by a descent into sin and violence, is often taken as the paradigmatic narrative of creation for Christianity. It is not the only biblical account of creation. The prophet Isaiah, for example, describes a vision of a new creation, made by God to transform the present world of trouble, destruction and pain. He declares the proclamation of God:

For behold, I create new heavens and a new earth;

And the former things shall not be remembered or come to mind.

But be glad and rejoice...

The statement by T.S. Eliot with which I begin is not without its problems, the most obvious of them the difficulty of actually defining “poetry.” Yet it seems worth sticking with Eliot’s formulation for the time being, inasmuch as too often the fact that the Song of Songs is poetry—and not another thing—seems to be forgotten by interpreters, or at least neglected. What would it mean to consider the Song of Songs as poetry? And further, whatkindof poetry do we find in the Song of Songs? What are the “other things” that it ought not to...

The Song of Songs offers no single, stable perspective from which to view the amorous scenes unveiled on its pages. Most readers of the Song from antiquity to the present have, however, been inclined to identify with the female figure traditionally known as the Shulammite. But who is the Shulammite, and who, for that matter, is her beloved? The sustained ambiguities of identity and fluid reversals of erotic roles have made this text fertile ground for conceiving and reconceiving the mysteries of desire, in particular, the mysteries ofdivine desire—despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that God is...

I commence with a passage from Julia Kristeva’s essay “Stabat Mater” that will serve as the inspiration as we set out on our way:

FLASH—instant of time or of dream without time; inordinately swollen atoms of a bond, a vision, a shiver, a yet formless, unnamable embryo. Epiphanies. Photos of what is not yet visible and that language necessarily skims over from afar, allusively. Words that are always too distant, too abstract for this underground swarming of seconds, folding in unimaginable spaces. Writing them down is an ordeal of discourse, like love. What is loving, for a woman, the...