The erotic foundations of Love

This month we are talking about love over on the Spirtual Formation and Leadership blog.

Love is a many splendored thing, so the crooners tell us. We are familiar with the Greek thoughts on the subject, three classifications: Eros, Phileo and Agape. Agape is the unconditional perfect Love of God. Phileo we know as the brotherly love, the best Peter could muster when Jesus asked if Peter loved him. Eros has a dirty, unacceptable quality in our minds equal in essence to lust. I submit that this descending valuation of love isn’t true to the God who is love, nor perfectly helpful to our spiritual formation.


Let’s take a stab at reframing these distinctions. Instead of descending into a well of depravity, lets ascend to the heights of love from a base that is imparted into our very hearts by the Creator. Rather than maligning erotic love as dirty and shameful, let us instead recognize it as the foundation of love, a needfulness placed within our souls. Erotic love is that longing from within that recognizes its need and reaches out for fulfillment. It is what Ronald Rolheiser calls The Holy Longing, the divine madness. It is a definite grace that sends us searching for something to fill that longing, that soul-ache until it find its succor in God.

Phileo builds on that longing, but also recognizes the longing of the heart of the other. It places value on the other for who that person is, and originates from that value. It is a conditional love, conditional on the value of the other person to the loving heart. Peter is perhaps not so poor a lover when he tells Jesus that he phileos him. He values Jesus for the remarkable loving being he is as the exact representation of God’s being.

Agape then builds on eros and phileo. It loves with all the longing and tenderness that values the other, but does not stem from either. It is unconditional and unending. It loves as a reflection of the character of God that is unending and undiminishing regardless of what we do. This is not, then, some ethereal love, devoid of emotion or affection. It subsumes and overwhelms the layers of love that we, as human lovers, are most familiar, transforming it into something divine and transcendent.

Viewed in this way, we can, along with mystics like Hudson Taylor, see in the Song of Solomon a beautiful love story between God and God’s bride. We can celebrate with mystics who flirt with the divine madness, the caresses of God in ecstatic union without falling into a sensualist trap that seeks to debase and deride our experiences with God. Such a trap makes God into something small and familiar devoid of mystery and majesty that God’s nature demands.