In 2011, the Anglican Theological Review published arguments for and against same-sex marriage. “A Theology of Marriage including Same-Sex Couples: A View from the Liberals,” co-written by Deirdre Good, Cynthia Kittredge, Eugene Rogers, and Willis Jenkins, presents a rationale for same-sex marriage that is surprisingly traditional, grounded in scripture and doctrine, understood and interpreted “in the company of patristic interpreters as well as in the company of readers long silenced by the tradition.” Part of the liberal view explores the relationship between eros and caritas, and how the marriage vows, which “mark marriage as an arduous form of training in virtue,” teach us to love and “offer a means by which God may turn eros into charity.”
As someone for whom eros is both a modality of intimate communion and manifest expression of divine love, the idea that it would need to be transformed into something less sensual, more socially acceptable, seems an arbitrary sanitization that positions eros as untamed and dangerous, in need of redemption by sexless ideals of Christian charity. Admittedly, my aversion to scrubbing eros of its rawness likely comes from my own understanding of the word, which might differ from that of traditional Christian theology, and which is inherently tied to the ways in which I’ve known the divine more deeply through expansive, mystical, erotic experiences that engaged my every sense in the coolness of rivers and grazing touch of mountain breezes.
We know through the body; we sense through our skin and parts and cells and perceive through nerves and fibers and tissue – seismic shocks of color and sound reverberating through our beings in the abstract, or the specific, deep, and warming awareness of divine love washing over our grief, fear, or loneliness. Each of these teaches us about the nature of the universe and of love, about bodies and subjectivity, and (by extension) about God and God’s action in the cosmos. My experience of eros – of the sensual explosion of erotic energy that makes me tremble, lays gooseflesh across every inch of me, and takes my breath as it rises inside my chest and belly – is not limited to sexuality, but comes through nature, art, song, movement, and touch. It is my primary way of experiencing divine love, and needs no purification. Continue reading “Eros, Caritas, and Relationship by Chris Ash”
Feminism and Religion 