Religious Eroticism What Is "Religious

Religious Eroticism What is "religious eroticism," and how is it based on or independent of human sexuality? The phrase 'Platonic Love' has entered the common English language to mean non-sexual love. But in its original philosophical context, Platonic love is not simply nonsexual love. Instead, love as conceptualized by Socrates in Plato's "Symposium" is a kind of love that transcends the physical, sexual form and constraints of both the lover and the beloved.

Plato believed that all earthly forms were inferior reflections of the forms 'real' existences in the eternal, heavenly world of ideas -- and the same with the ideal of love. Love on earth was inferior to religious love for Plato, although one must experience physical love first, to access religious or holy love.

On earth, we humans are forced because of the constraints of human bodies and perceptions to enjoy love in a physical form, but if we enter into our first encounters with physical congress with the proper mindset, we may enjoy love its highest incarnation, a kind of Platonic religious eroticism that gives insight far beyond the physical.

Thus, according to Socrates' advisor the lady Diotima, first we fall in love with the individual, physical body, then with the soul, and finally love in a more general sense is realized -- through loving one body and then one being, all humans may eventually learn to love all bodies and beings, and thus experience love in its most all-encompassing, transcendent and divine form.

As Socrates waxes profound upon Diotima's advice, however, Alcibiades breaks into the dialogue, in a drunken stupor (after all, the "Symposium" is set at someone's house, during a drinking party). Alcibiades complains that Socrates denied him physical satisfaction the last time the two men were together. Alcibiades makes the argument that as physical beings in a physical world, the body cannot be denied and discarded as a way of accessing the divine. As we are living and dwelling upon earth, in bodies, we must function as bodily beings.

Alcibiades' stress that even religious eroticism must have bodily form, for Alcibiades does love Socrates' soul as well as Socrates' body is stridently countered in De Rougemont's writings. De Rougemont advanced the idea that the ideal modern marriage is doomed to frustration because it confuses the erotic and agapic (or non-physical, Platonic) impulses. For Socrates, religious eroticism begins with the mundane, and must begin with the mundane, but then must transcend the physical. Alcibiades stresses that even religious eroticism must have its roots in the physical.

But De Rougemont would suggest that as with the myth of "Tristan and Iseult," a Christian can not be in erotic congress with a desired body, and then eventually decide to engage in merely mental tribute to his or her beloved, with hopes of accessing God. This is why Tristan and Iseult are doomed to frustration -- they find one another pleasing, but are unable to move to a Platonic state of affection. Hence, monks are denied marriage, so they can focus only on God.

This is the fundamental difference between the Christian De Rougemont's and the Platonic Greek ideal, for De Rougemont denies the need for physical congress before erotic gratification in pure, holy form, for fear of confusing the power of earthly physicality with the agapic or friendly, nonphysical impulses of love for all of God's creation, all bodies, and all souls.

One might respond to De Rougemount, however, that a husband and wife of many years may have a different, less sexual, and more emotional relationship than a pair of erotically charged newlyweds, even if there is an original confusion between the two lovers about the difference between higher and lower forms of love. A pair of lovers might marry for physical attraction, and then discover one another's emotional attributes.

But will this lead them to a higher form of affection, in the Platonic ideal of erotic progression? A monk would suggest that modern married life is too distracting to allow a full communion with the divine, in the presence of such worldly responsibilities, and thus religious eroticism is fundamentally incompatible with even the best of earthly, married affection.

Of course, there are those such as Bataille, who would suggest the idea of the connection between eroticism and death means that even in the original, first flush of passion, there is a parallel between the divine and the ordinary, bodily erotic.

The loss of self sought by mystics and the loss of self more ordinary people seek in the distractions of love through the petite morte or little death of the orgasm are similar, although Bataille suggests that the momentary distraction of eroticism and the permanent loss of self and access to true understanding of the divine in romantic and erotic mystical language has a fundamentally different purpose, even if the experiences may be parallel in language -- they are not equally parallel in experience.

Bataille may seem equivocal in his use of the term "death," as he uses it to describe a death of the self in momentary erotic congress, and also death of secular identity when a mystic becomes erotically 'one' with God, a death that cannot be sustained in ordinary human experience. However, this parallel, like De Rougemont's is again useful to compare to the Greek mode of progression with the Christian contrast between the erotic physical and the erotic mystical/religious experiences of love and loss of identity.

The problem with this fissure between romance and religion is that it highlights Alcibiades' objection to Socrates even more intensely, namely that.