by Dave Gregory
A Trinitarian Preamble
A Trinitarian Preamble
Throughout the centuries, Christianity has essentially built a white picket fence around the Trinity; any attempts to logically deconstruct this thing of things, to wrap our minds around it, to define it or pull it apart, or analyze it by means of analogous imagery have generally resulted in some sort of heresy. I mean, the Christian imagination roots its approach to God in the epistle of John, which declares that “God is love.” No other image or word ultimately suffices, and this identification of the Trinity as being Love has some dangerous implications.
To say that God is Love posits that God is more of a verb than a noun, more of an action than a thing. The Trinity, to paraphrase Augustine, is least wrongly understood as a relationship of love between the Lover, the Beloved, and the Love between the two. In a sense, we can toss out the nomenclature of Daddy, Junior, and Spooky Ghost because the terminology of Lover, Beloved, and the Love they share and emanate approaches their truth a bit more closely.
The Trinity is a perichoresis, a “dance around”1: God pulsates, radiates, irradiates, overflows. Love can’t just sit there. Love does not exist, it insists2, it breaks into and en-graces all things.
The Four Loves3
In one of his most underrated works, The Four Loves4, C.S. Lewis discusses the classical Greek categorization of human loves. Storge, or affection, is human love rooted in familiarity; I can have affection for a family pet, my childhood home, my siblings, et cetera. Philia, or friendship, is love rooted in shared experiences or interests; it is the love that makes life vibrant, for a life without reveling in truths and beauties and goodnesses with friends is an unhappy one indeed. Eros, or romantic love, is love rooted in desire for union with another; two lovers seek union, both spiritually and physically. The final love, agape, or charity, is the apex of all the other loves: self-gift that wholly and selflessly seeks the good of the other epitomizes agapic love.
These various loves mix and mingle with one another, morphing and transforming and intensifying. I develop affection for a friend or a lover, as I can become familiar with all their quirks and eccentricities and love them more for those idiosyncrasies. A friendship that begins with shared experience can develop eros, that longing for union. Likewise, a blind date that develops romantically can also become shaped by friendship and affection with time5
.
A brief tangent: here’s the earth-shattering bombshell implication of merging Trinitarian theology with explicating the four loves: any time you or I experience and/or embody storge or philia or eros or agape, we permit God to live through us. Any of these loves forms the bridge between the human and the Divine. The demonic will attempt to distort our relationships, to poison them, for precisely this reason. Love of any sort remains prime tempting ground.
Finally, and most importantly, the three loves of affection, friendship, and romance become perfected in charity. The friend or lover (or pet owner, in the case of affection) will become -- at a certain point -- ready and willing to sacrifice without self-interest for the one they love. God is agape, the Gospels and the epistles remind us, but perhaps God’s sacrificial and agapic love for creation subsumes and includes the other loves. And if Scripture is any indicator, this is indeed the case. Metaphors abound throughout the Testaments of God’s affectionate parental love for Israel and humanity. Jesus exemplifies friendship with the disciples, roaming around Galilee and Jerusalem with them, breaking bread and sharing money. For those of us within the Judeo-Christian tradition, we tend to imagine God as parent in the Father, or as friend in Jesus, due to the prevalence of this scriptural imagery. And this is a simple matter, for we have so many examples to go by of divine affection and friendship.
However, engaging God as lover is a bit more difficult, for Scriptural parallels are a bit more uncommon6. In order to dive into this, let’s check out a couple of mystics.
Christian Mystics: Divine Intercourse and Making Out with God
Spanning every religious tradition, we can ubiquitously find mystics. These potentially dangerous outliers rattle things up by challenging the status quo of standardized religion. If we consider our own prayer lives in comparison to theirs -- not for the purposes of competitively ascertaining degrees of holiness, mind you -- what we find can be disturbing, simply due to unfamiliarity. If there’s one thing that unites mystics across traditions, it’s this: mystics (be they Jewish Kabbalists, or the whirling dervishes of Sufi Islam) primarily speak of their relationships with God through erotic imagery, metaphor, and symbolism.
Christian mystics, in the heights of their experiences with God, describe union. This is not the language of friendship, or of affection. Erotic love literally draws mystics out of themselves into ecstasy, inebriating the mystic into silence or paralyzing them into a state of physical inertness. Let’s check out Saint Teresa of Avila, the wildly feminist 16th century Carmelite, as an example of this.
In her autobiography, Teresa describes an event wherein she is visited by an angel who bears a golden-tipped spear. The angel proceeds to plunge the spear into her heart, and she describes the sensation thus:
He appeared to me to be thrusting it at times into my heart, and to pierce my very entrails; when he drew it out, he seemed to draw them out also, and to leave me all on fire with a great love of God. The pain was so great that it made me moan; and yet so surpassing was the sweetness of this excessive pain that I could not wish to be rid of it. The soul is satisfied now with nothing less than God. The pain is not bodily, but spiritual; though the body has its share in it, even a large one. It is a caressing of love so sweet which now takes place between the soul and God, that I pray God of His goodness to make him experience it who may think that I am lying. During the days that this lasted I went about as if beside myself. I wished to see or speak with no one, but only cherish my pain, which was to me a greater bliss than all created things could give me.7
8
If you don’t know she’s talking about an angel here, this just sounds a lot like fornication, no? All this talk of piercing entrails, of filling with pain and sweetness, of bodily and spiritual ecstasy...well, you get the point.9 Teresa employs violently disturbing phrasing here, as the angel pierces her entrails and withdraws them as his spear exits. Biographers note that Teresa would have these ecstasies occasionally: she would freeze in place while going about regular activities in the cloister, rendered immobile and silent. In short, we have an example here of Teresa having some sort of intercourse with God. While this might not be intercourse as you or I may experience it (given the lack of genitalia), the totality of its description brings no other experiential parallel to mind. We cannot deny the profound physicality of this encounter.
For a bit tamer of an example, though arguably no less ostensibly scandalous, Saint BernardBenedict of Clairvaux, the great Cistercian reformer of the 12th century, wrote a series of sermons on the Song of Songs. Keep in mind that he preached to a bunch of celibate monks here, which makes it especially kinda weird. Within his orations, Bernard describes kissing the feet, the hands, and the mouth of Jesus; each progressive stage of physical and spiritual intimacy parallels progressive stages of virtue and holiness. Embedded within Sermon 8 is this gem:
Living in the Spirit of the Son, let such a soul recognize herself as a daughter of the Father, a bride or even a sister of the Son, for you will find that the soul who enjoys this privilege is called by either of these names. Nor will it cost me much to prove it, the proof is ready to hand. They are the names by which the Bridegroom addresses her: "I come into my garden, my sister, my bride." She is his sister because they have the one Father; his bride because joined in the one Spirit. For if marriage according to the flesh constitutes two in one body, why should not a spiritual union be even more efficacious in joining two in one spirit? And hence anyone who is joined to the Lord is one spirit with him. But we have witness too from the Father, how lovingly and how courteously he gives her the name of daughter, and nevertheless invites her as his daughter-in-law to the sweet caresses of his Son: "Listen, daughter, pay careful attention: forget your nation and your ancestral home, then the king will fall in love with your beauty." See then from whom this bride demands a kiss. O soul called to holiness, make sure that your attitude is respectful, for he is the Lord your God, who perhaps ought not to be kissed, but rather adored with the Father and the Holy Spirit for ever and ever. Amen.10
Drawing from the imagery of the Song’s lovers, Bernard compels his monks to kiss Jesus on the lips! Here, he speaks with erotic symbolism full-force, employing language of spiritual union, of wedding oneself to Jesus, the bridegroom. The whole thing is a bit -- dare I say it -- gender-bending? At least it obliterates typical norms, recasting the monk into the bride, the daughter-in-law of God.
Some Concluding Thoughts
I could go on for pages and pages about Teresa and Bernard, but I won’t. I’ll just leave those texts there for you to read and ponder and come to your own conclusions.
Regarding our own individual spiritualities, we can speak of being “with” God through various meanings and intents. I want to be “with” Jesus as a friend, while I companion and journey with him. I want God to be “with” me as my parent, guarding me and providing for me. But do I want to be “with” God as my lover? We tend to speak of our longing for Heaven in erotic terminology, after all: we yearn to “become one with” God, to share in that unfathomable and inexpressible joy eternal.
The mystical tradition opens up a new path for approaching relationship with God. Granted, few people will reach the heights and depths of spiritual ecstasy. However, the solid majority of us will know the realities of conjugal relations with a partner, and God can be found in “doing it” as well, if we take Hosea and Teresa and Bernard seriously. Sex offers a taste of the Divine, in all its levity and ruckus and gravitas. But to do sex right, in the realm of Catholic Social Teaching and as discussed by Pope Benedict XVI in Deus Caritas Est, this requires purification and renunciation and discipline and sacrifice and ultimately agape. Eros, when it becomes agapic self-gift, draws us into the very heart of God. In the words of Article 6 from Deus Caritas Est:
It could hardly be otherwise, since its promise looks towards its definitive goal: love looks to the eternal. Love is indeed “ecstasy”, not in the sense of a moment of intoxication, but rather as a journey, an ongoing exodus out of the closed inward-looking self towards its liberation through self-giving, and thus towards authentic self-discovery and indeed the discovery of God: “Whoever seeks to gain his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life will preserve it” (Lk 17:33), as Jesus says throughout the Gospels (cf. Mt 10:39; 16:25; Mk 8:35; Lk 9:24; Jn 12:25).11
1 This term was a bit more in vogue in patristic sources.↩
2 This is an insight of my systematic theology professor in grad school, Roland Faber. He’s a process theologian, and does a lot of work with these seemingly minute differences in theological terminology.
↩
3 This is such a brief overview of Lewis’ work, and I cannot do it justice here. Just go read it. Pretty please.↩
4 On a personal note, I first read this in high school, and it has perhaps affected my religious imagination more than any other text. Just like humanity makes way more sense in all its intricacies once you understand Myers-Briggs typologies, I can almost guarantee that reading The Four Loves will result in a whole bunch of little epiphanies.
↩
5 Hence, the shittiness of the hook-up culture: it glorifies eros, though only impartially, for left in and of its own accord, eros must become demonic. Moreover, seeking the *thing* and the *thing* only will result in emptiness, for that desire remains intrinsically self-centered, and therefore unperfected.↩
6 Really, the best example can be found in the writings of the prophet Hosea, in which God declares Himself as Israel’s scorned lover. God tells Hosea to go marry a prostitute, in order that he can understand what God has been forced to endure with unfaithful Israel. There’s talk of being a harlot, but in chapter 3, some of the most beautiful poetry in the Bible pops up. Compelled by burning love, YHWH will not forsake Israel.↩
7 Zimmerman, O.C.D., Benedict. The Autobiography of St. Teresa of Avila. Rockford: Tan Books and Publishers, 1995. p. 267.↩
8 The face of Teresa on Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s famous “Transverberation of Saint Teresa” (which sits in Rome’s Santa Maria della Vittoria) bears a remarkable similarity to Lindsay Lohan after a night of debauchery, does it not?↩
10 Saint Bernard of Clairvaux. “Sermons on the Song of Songs.” Edited by Darrell Wright, Full Text of "St Bernard's Commentary on the Song of Songs", creativecommons.org, 2008. Web. 1 August 2017.↩
11 Pope Benedict XVI. "Deus Caritas Est - Encyclical Letter, Benedict XVI." Vatican: the Holy See. Vatican Website. Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2005. Web. 1 August 2017.↩
No comments:
Post a Comment