In Praise of Eros

By Gary Topping–

In religious education classes and homilies over the years, I have been taught that the Greek language recognizes at least two different types of love.  This first, usually portrayed as the higher, is agape.  This is the kind of altruistic, selfless—in fact, self-giving—love from which one expects nothing in return.  It is the type of love, to put it crudely, where you help a little old lady across the street.  It is the type of love that motivates you to put some money into the Salvation Army bucket outside the supermarket or into the poor box at church or into the outstretched hand of the panhandler on the street corner.  It is the love you feel for your grandparents or the cute little kid across the street or the neighbor’s puppy dog.  And as Mike O’Brien will point out next week, it is the type of love we often hear about in the readings at a wedding: 1 Corinthians 13, or the commitment of Ruth to her mother-in-law Naomi in the Old Testament: “Intreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee, for whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God.”  (I just have to employ the King James version here, whose antiquated language imparts just the right weight to these weighty sentiments)

The other type of love is eros.  It is sexual love, the kind of physical attraction that probably moved you to pick up the phone and ask a girl for a date.  The Bible often treats it as a lower type of love: David’s lust for Bathsheba, or the adulterous woman presented for judgment to Jesus.  I am going to argue, though, on this Valentine’s Day, that eros, or erotic love, is not necessarily a bad thing, that it has its place in any healthily ordered life, and even that it is sanctioned as a good thing in the Bible.  It may be agape love that holds a family together, but it is eros, erotic love, that makes babies and thus creates families in the first place.

There is, in fact, an entire book in the Bible, the “Song of Songs,” which is devoted to praise of erotic love.  In their introduction to the Song of Songs in my Catholic study Bible, the editors interpret is as a lengthy allegory of God’s love for his people.  Far be it for me to contradict the scholarship of the editors, and I’m sure the book can legitimately be read in the way they are encouraging.  On the other hand, it seems to me just as legitimate to read it straightforwardly as  what it appears to be on the surface: the poetry of a woman longing for her lover.  Once again, the King James version: “Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth, for thy love is better than wine.”  And “A bundle of myrrh is my well-beloved unto me; he shall lie all night betwixt my breasts.”

My possibly faulty memory does not recall a single instance during the three-year cycle of readings in the liturgy of the Mass where the Song of Songs appears.  Even if there is an exception or two, it would be safe to say that it is the least read book at Mass.  Or even at weddings.  When my wife and I were preparing for our wedding, the priest gave us a book with a generous selection of appropriate readings from which we could choose.  None of them, I’m sure I accurately recall, was from the Song of Songs.  (Actually, the priest who did our wedding was cool enough that I suspect he would have allowed such a reading if we had found an excerpt we liked; the Songs of Songs is, after all, a canonical part of Holy Scripture.)

My plea this Valentine’s Day is that we recognize that while erotic love can be abused, it is nevertheless a healthy and even scripturally sanctioned part of life.

*Gary Topping is a writer and historian living in Salt Lake City, Utah. He is the retired archivist for the Catholic Diocese of Salt Lake City and has written many books and articles.