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Christianity and Eros: Essays on the Theme of Sexual Love
Essays on the theme of sexual love. In spite of the fact that marriage is recognized as a sacrament by the Church, the attitude of Christian thought towards the sexual relationship and its spiritualizing potentialities has been in practice singularly limited and negative. In this book the author does not provide a systematic theology of sexual love but indicates some of the considerations and principles that must be taken into account before such a theology can be adequately formulated.
- GenresTheologyChristianityLove
94 pages, Paperback
Published June 1, 1995
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About the author
Philip Sherrard
61 books35 followersPhilip Sherrard was educated at Cambridge and London and taught at the universities of both Oxford and London, but he made Greece his permanent home. A pioneer of modern Greek studies and translator, with Edmund Keeley, of Greece's major modern poets, he wrote many books on Greek, philosophical and literary themes. He was also the translator and editor (with G.E.H. Palmer and Bishop Kallistos Ware) of the Philokalia, a collection of texts in five volumes by the spiritual masters of the Orthodox Christian tradition.
A profound, commited and imaginative thinker, his theological and metaphysical writings embrace a wide range of subjects, from the study of the spiritualizing potential of sexual love to the restoration of a sacred cosmology which he saw as the only way to escape from the spiritual and ecological dereliction of the modern world.
A profound, commited and imaginative thinker, his theological and metaphysical writings embrace a wide range of subjects, from the study of the spiritualizing potential of sexual love to the restoration of a sacred cosmology which he saw as the only way to escape from the spiritual and ecological dereliction of the modern world.
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
February 4, 2024
a beautiful, challenging, enriching, and inspiring portrait of eros, its divine origin and sacred nature, and how it uniquely transforms our souls through love. everyone must read this!!!
June 24, 2024
I'm baffled that a book can simultaneously disdain Christianity, be prudish, and be misogynistic all at once.
The book presents an emaciated selection of Christian thought on sex, uncharitably engaging a handful of theologians and extrapolating their views across the vast history of Christianity. Little effort is made to anchor arguments within, or engage with, Christian Scripture, which would suffice if the book aimed just to engage Christianity as a social phenomenon, but falls flat as the author is willing to selectively read significance into a handful of prooftexts for his ideas, e.g. the significance the author reads into Genesis 1. The book's efforts to engage philosophical thought are equally arbitrary and narrow, yet the scope the book intends is vast, leaving an unsatisfactory feeling.
As for the author's conception of sexuality, well it's bizarre. There's a lack of distinction drawn between romantic and sexual love--as well the other types of love traditionally conceived in Western thought--with the effect that the author's conception of love feels hyper-sexualised. Yet persistently the author decries the vulgarity of the "genital act", even going so far as to suggest it hinders true sexual love. It feels incoherent until the last chapter. Only then does the author take pains to describe his vision of sexual love and the final conception is so wrapped up in dogmatic metaphysics unmoored from the Western intellectual tradition, and so thinly argued for (primarily argumentation by assertion), that the result has the same relation to love and sex that Star Wars has to General Relativity.
To top it all off, the central conceit is that masculinity is substance to fill and femininity is void to be filled and the whole thing is blatantly dated and misogynistic. There's a tower of other superstitious mumbo jumbo masqueraded as profound thought and it's very tiring. Apparently, it's near impossible to achieve spiritual enlightenment without marriage and only a chosen few marriages are real marriages anyway.
A very tiring, silly escapade overall. Please do not read!
The book presents an emaciated selection of Christian thought on sex, uncharitably engaging a handful of theologians and extrapolating their views across the vast history of Christianity. Little effort is made to anchor arguments within, or engage with, Christian Scripture, which would suffice if the book aimed just to engage Christianity as a social phenomenon, but falls flat as the author is willing to selectively read significance into a handful of prooftexts for his ideas, e.g. the significance the author reads into Genesis 1. The book's efforts to engage philosophical thought are equally arbitrary and narrow, yet the scope the book intends is vast, leaving an unsatisfactory feeling.
As for the author's conception of sexuality, well it's bizarre. There's a lack of distinction drawn between romantic and sexual love--as well the other types of love traditionally conceived in Western thought--with the effect that the author's conception of love feels hyper-sexualised. Yet persistently the author decries the vulgarity of the "genital act", even going so far as to suggest it hinders true sexual love. It feels incoherent until the last chapter. Only then does the author take pains to describe his vision of sexual love and the final conception is so wrapped up in dogmatic metaphysics unmoored from the Western intellectual tradition, and so thinly argued for (primarily argumentation by assertion), that the result has the same relation to love and sex that Star Wars has to General Relativity.
To top it all off, the central conceit is that masculinity is substance to fill and femininity is void to be filled and the whole thing is blatantly dated and misogynistic. There's a tower of other superstitious mumbo jumbo masqueraded as profound thought and it's very tiring. Apparently, it's near impossible to achieve spiritual enlightenment without marriage and only a chosen few marriages are real marriages anyway.
A very tiring, silly escapade overall. Please do not read!
Read
July 19, 2024The first three chapters are worth reading. But my goodness the last chapter, as another reviewer has said, was a crash landing, nothing but florid, new-age weirdness, about a closed energetic circuit between man and woman that is supposed to develop at all levels including the spiritual. It gets blatantly weird when he says the couple may find out after being married that they are different spiritual types. What the hell is a spiritual type? He doesn't tell us. Are we supposed to read Jung to find out? Or one final, ultra-cringe take is when he says the woman might instantiate the active pole in a polarity with the man, and it might fluctuate like this at different levels, where she is, say, the emotional giver and he is the receiver. No idea what this means and I am not even curious to find out.
With that out of the way, the first three chapters are worth thinking about. Sherrard's thesis is that the telos of marriage should not be reduced to reproduction, and there is a dominant, man made sub-tradition in the church which does reduce it to this purpose. I think he wants to say more than this though. I detect a critique of Western natural law altogether. He tries to point to the inconsistency of saying that the door to conception cannot be intentionally closed in the marital act, yet the church allows infertile spouses to go on joining together. Well, the way I just phrased it with 'intentionally,' it's not inconsistent. So I don't think this is a good line of critique. The couple could still hope for a miracle. However, I do sympathize with this critical take on natural law.
The telos of marriage does appear to call the participants to higher virtue, by way of a dyad that manifests both an equality in humanity and yet a difference in sex. Also his point about the divine image is insightful. God created man *and* woman in His image. I don't agree with his idea that the woman is the image of the divine nothingness *in* God, because I don't think nothingness can be located anywhere, much less inside or outside God. But it seems like something like this is true. St Gregory Palamas says the whole human person, body included, is made in the image of God. This would lend patristic support to the idea that God has some divine precedent to femininity, theologically speaking. He also does a good job in showing that the sub-tradition that leans toward the theoretical construct of a sexless/genderless human as what would have been had we not fallen, treats woman as 'adventitious,' that is, not who she is qua woman for an independent reason of manifesting the divine image in one of two physical ways, but only because man fell, as if she were the byproduct of a mistake and not originally intended. And by the way this would not introduce a division or opposition into God because the two sexes are complementary, not opposed per se.
With this more positive view laid out, we can see why he thinks Western natural law is deficient. Something about man and woman and their relationship in marriage is itself designed according to God's good pleasure, not merely a concession of economy because of a mistake. This has a traditional support in fact in Augustine and in Ambrosiaster before him in his arguments with monastic puritans like Jerome. If that's the case then the primary telos seems to be the love between the dyad. Then always skipping over this direct immediacy of love in the couple's experience or super-adding to this thoughts about conception and welcoming new life seems to be strangely shoe-horned in, contrived, rather unnatural. Obviously it is more courageous to have kids and courage is a good thing. But there is also such thing as recklessness. I would add that technology and knowledge are in themselves good things to develop. Natural law would make them into sources of unhappiness, necessarily, as every new insight about what reduces fertility rate or pauses it would have to be avoided once known - for example you'd have to have intercourse only in some specific position which maximizes the chance of pregnancy, otherwise are you saying No to God? NFP is usually admitted to be a soft "No." But pregnancies still happen during modern forms of birth control, and God can always work a miracle if He wants. So Modern birth control is also a soft 'No' from that perspective. I think that is their loophole that undermines their theory. If they want to continue in consistency, they need to reject NFP. The Orthodox however have never made a single canon on this and is not committed to this natural law position. Unfortunately this man-made tradition is imported by plenty of priests and new converts on the conservative leaning side. And I say this as someone who wants to see natural law rehabilitated.
I've said in another review I think this has eschatological implications. Because Christ said those in the kingdom will live like the angels and will no longer marry or be given in marriage. But that doesn't abolish marriages that have already been. Nor does it preclude dyads between men and women in heaven that are monogamous, since only the kind of marriage that the Sadducees presupposed is the kind Christ was targeting, not monogamy in every sense, as we already know because Christ *weds* the church and each soul then. The purpose of sex is love and union (between only a man and woman as the format of our bodies show) and not necessarily reproduction. If that is the case then it would be strange for it to then be abolished on the premise that there should no longer be reproduction, since they weren't necessarily linked. Sure I've never known anything better than chocolate, to allude to C S Lewis, and there will be something more noble and delightful to quote Chrysostom writing to the young widow. But why abolish chocolate? Even the risen Lord ate fish and honey. Remember the early days of a relationship when you held hands and walked through a grassy undeveloped part of town? Holding hands isn't necessarily the most noble and delightful activity among all options - it would admittedly be sad if things stopped there. But maybe you've left behind that stage but want to revisit it because it truly added something child-like and simple and you've lost it over time. Pardon me for a possible out-of-tune note blared against the symphony of the saints, but I just see this path open logically once we free ourselves of the strictures of Western natural law. Please show me what the in-tune note is instead and where I'm wrong, if so.
With that out of the way, the first three chapters are worth thinking about. Sherrard's thesis is that the telos of marriage should not be reduced to reproduction, and there is a dominant, man made sub-tradition in the church which does reduce it to this purpose. I think he wants to say more than this though. I detect a critique of Western natural law altogether. He tries to point to the inconsistency of saying that the door to conception cannot be intentionally closed in the marital act, yet the church allows infertile spouses to go on joining together. Well, the way I just phrased it with 'intentionally,' it's not inconsistent. So I don't think this is a good line of critique. The couple could still hope for a miracle. However, I do sympathize with this critical take on natural law.
The telos of marriage does appear to call the participants to higher virtue, by way of a dyad that manifests both an equality in humanity and yet a difference in sex. Also his point about the divine image is insightful. God created man *and* woman in His image. I don't agree with his idea that the woman is the image of the divine nothingness *in* God, because I don't think nothingness can be located anywhere, much less inside or outside God. But it seems like something like this is true. St Gregory Palamas says the whole human person, body included, is made in the image of God. This would lend patristic support to the idea that God has some divine precedent to femininity, theologically speaking. He also does a good job in showing that the sub-tradition that leans toward the theoretical construct of a sexless/genderless human as what would have been had we not fallen, treats woman as 'adventitious,' that is, not who she is qua woman for an independent reason of manifesting the divine image in one of two physical ways, but only because man fell, as if she were the byproduct of a mistake and not originally intended. And by the way this would not introduce a division or opposition into God because the two sexes are complementary, not opposed per se.
With this more positive view laid out, we can see why he thinks Western natural law is deficient. Something about man and woman and their relationship in marriage is itself designed according to God's good pleasure, not merely a concession of economy because of a mistake. This has a traditional support in fact in Augustine and in Ambrosiaster before him in his arguments with monastic puritans like Jerome. If that's the case then the primary telos seems to be the love between the dyad. Then always skipping over this direct immediacy of love in the couple's experience or super-adding to this thoughts about conception and welcoming new life seems to be strangely shoe-horned in, contrived, rather unnatural. Obviously it is more courageous to have kids and courage is a good thing. But there is also such thing as recklessness. I would add that technology and knowledge are in themselves good things to develop. Natural law would make them into sources of unhappiness, necessarily, as every new insight about what reduces fertility rate or pauses it would have to be avoided once known - for example you'd have to have intercourse only in some specific position which maximizes the chance of pregnancy, otherwise are you saying No to God? NFP is usually admitted to be a soft "No." But pregnancies still happen during modern forms of birth control, and God can always work a miracle if He wants. So Modern birth control is also a soft 'No' from that perspective. I think that is their loophole that undermines their theory. If they want to continue in consistency, they need to reject NFP. The Orthodox however have never made a single canon on this and is not committed to this natural law position. Unfortunately this man-made tradition is imported by plenty of priests and new converts on the conservative leaning side. And I say this as someone who wants to see natural law rehabilitated.
I've said in another review I think this has eschatological implications. Because Christ said those in the kingdom will live like the angels and will no longer marry or be given in marriage. But that doesn't abolish marriages that have already been. Nor does it preclude dyads between men and women in heaven that are monogamous, since only the kind of marriage that the Sadducees presupposed is the kind Christ was targeting, not monogamy in every sense, as we already know because Christ *weds* the church and each soul then. The purpose of sex is love and union (between only a man and woman as the format of our bodies show) and not necessarily reproduction. If that is the case then it would be strange for it to then be abolished on the premise that there should no longer be reproduction, since they weren't necessarily linked. Sure I've never known anything better than chocolate, to allude to C S Lewis, and there will be something more noble and delightful to quote Chrysostom writing to the young widow. But why abolish chocolate? Even the risen Lord ate fish and honey. Remember the early days of a relationship when you held hands and walked through a grassy undeveloped part of town? Holding hands isn't necessarily the most noble and delightful activity among all options - it would admittedly be sad if things stopped there. But maybe you've left behind that stage but want to revisit it because it truly added something child-like and simple and you've lost it over time. Pardon me for a possible out-of-tune note blared against the symphony of the saints, but I just see this path open logically once we free ourselves of the strictures of Western natural law. Please show me what the in-tune note is instead and where I'm wrong, if so.
July 7, 2023
The historiography provided in the first two chapters were enlightening. However, the book falls short when Sherrard gets into his own theological explication of sexual love. The last chapter leaves a bitter new agey heteronormative taste, despite its attempt to argue against conformal Christian interpretations of love.
December 5, 2018
When time allows, will update with reviews of each essay, maybe a key quote that 'sold it' as a 5-star book.
Chapter 1: The Sexual Relationship in Christian Thought, 5 Stars
Chapter 2: The Body, Beauty, and Sexuality, 5 Stars
Chapter 3: Towards a Theology of Sexual Love, 3 Stars
Chapter 4: An Approach to the Sacrament of Marriage, 4 Stars
Chapter 1: The Sexual Relationship in Christian Thought, 5 Stars
Chapter 2: The Body, Beauty, and Sexuality, 5 Stars
Chapter 3: Towards a Theology of Sexual Love, 3 Stars
Chapter 4: An Approach to the Sacrament of Marriage, 4 Stars
July 27, 2012
A wonderful collection! Accessible and engaging, this book has turned my thoughts on sexuality and the sacrament of marriage COMPLETELY upside down. I suggest you read it. :)
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews