God and Eros - St. Teresa of Avila and St. John of the Cross

[Mintaka]

Let’s turn this around.

Every kind of human love (friendship, paternal love, maternal love, sibling love, disinterested love of humanity, etc.) is a reflection of a part of God’s love. But a reflection isn’t the same as the real thing. We don’t love in exactly the same way as God, because we are humans. We have bodies; we have passions and feelings; we change because we live in Time.

So any kind of talk about how God loves us, particularly stuff that is based on divine revelation in the Bible or to the Church, is going to tell you something about God. But it can’t really tell all, because it’s necessarily in human language. Divine revelation tells us “enough to go on,” and more than we could have expected. But if you want to know more, you have to go beyond language into direct experience.

In this life, that would be through mystical experience – and God shows Himself differently to different people, because He knows how they need to know Him. He can be very oblique about it, from our point of view.

Of course, in Heaven and after the Resurrection, we will know exactly and directly what God’s love is like. We will still not totally comprehend Him, but we will know. He will be our light to live by.

Moving along to the next bit in the next post…

 

[tom1]

God loves us passionately, even erotically in a sense.

Wow, this actually IS disturbing. I feel that it’s blasphemous because sexual desire and eroticism is egotistical, brutal, aggressive and primal in nature. If that’s true, I think I’m going to faint even considering it.

Saint Teresa of Avila had “erotic” experiences with God.

Can you provide any source for that? What you posted has one single quote in it, and it doesn’t involve anything erotic.

 

[Mintaka]

God does not marry the individual human soul. At the beginning of life eternal, Jesus Christ will (in some way we don’t fully understand) marry the Church, We know this from many places in the New Testament, and it was foreshadowed in the Old Testament, where it was said again and again that the assembly (“ecclesia” in Greek) of Israel was God’s bride and spouse.

All the talk about Jesus or God marrying individual souls is a sort of foreshortening analogy to this – the part stands for the whole. So when nuns espouse themselves to Christ, they are acting as individual representatives of the whole Church. Similarly, when people have visions of espousal or divine love, they are seeing the love which God has for the whole Church, foreshortened into the love He has for them individually as well as for everybody collectively. This can be very intense, and there’s nothing wrong with it for them; but you don’t have to picture God’s love that way.

Because that is not the only analogy!

I’m sure you know that the Bible and Church tradition talks a LOT about God as Father. There are plenty of mystics who experienced that strongly. You get someone like St. Therese of Lisieux, who experienced God as being at least as loving and indulgent a father as her own dad was. This can be very comforting. On the other side of things, sometimes people experience Him as a stern father, when we do wrong. This can have a stiffening effect on the morals and make people grow.

There are plenty of people who experience Jesus as a brother, a teacher or a friend. Nothing wrong with that.

There are plenty of people who experience Jesus or the Holy Spirit or the Father as expressive of creative love, sharing the fun of what is created and encouraging us to create.

And of course, there’s the picture of Christ’s love expressed to us through knowing we are parts of His Body, or branches of the Vine, or sheep of His flock.

If certain kinds of imagery make you uncomfortable, don’t deny them (hard to do when they’re scriptural!) but don’t focus on them. You can be “allergic” to certain kinds of poetry without it being bad for other people, and what helps you might not help others. God made each of us different, so it’s not surprising that He would talk to us in many different ways.

 

[tom1]

God loves us passionately, even erotically in a sense.

This is the opposite of the sacrficial love that is Christ, this is blasphemy. I can’t listen to it. If it’s true, we’ve been worshipping an egotistical pleasure-maniac having fun while we sit down here in torment. Just stop it, I’m physically sick now. God, why does this happen to me, what have I done.

This is the most terrible thing I’ve ever heard. I’m getting a legit mental breakdown. I thought that some satanic ideas were the pinnacle of blasphemy but this is on another level. This wins an award

I’ve heard about spiritual wedding of st. John of the Cross before, I’ve even heard of st. Teresa of Avila regretting she never could know the height and the colour of Christs’ eyes… but I would never imagine to be able to come up with such a conclusion from those.

 

[Prodigal_Son]

This is the opposite of the sacrficial love that is Christ, this is blasphemy. I can’t listen to it. If it’s true, we’ve been worshipping an egotistical pleasure-maniac having fun while we sit down here in torment. Just stop it, I’m physically sick now.

You are misunderstanding the meaning of “erotic”. “Erotic” does not mean sexual. Please study the history of the word “eros”. It means the desire for complete unity with the beloved.

 

[tom1]

You are misunderstanding the meaning of “erotic”. “Erotic” does not mean sexual. Please study the history of the word “eros”. It means the desire for complete unity with the beloved.

I’m sorry to interpret it that way when it’s next to the word passionate…

passionate
ˈpaʃ(ə)nət/
adjective

1)having, showing, or caused by strong feelings or beliefs.
“passionate pleas for help”
synonimy: intense, impassioned, ardent, fervent, zealous, vehement, fiery, heated, feverish, emotional, heartfelt, eager, excited, animated, spirited, vigorous, strong, energetic, messianic, fanatical, frenzied, wild, fierce, consuming, violent, tumultuous, flaming, raging, burning, uncontrollable, ungovernable;

2)arising from intense feelings of sexual love.
“a passionate kiss”
synonimy: amorous, ardent, hot-blooded, red-blooded, warm-blooded, aroused, loving, on fire, sexy, sensual, erotic, lustful, sultry, torrid;

 

[Prodigal_Son]

I’m not sure what you mean. The word “passionate” is clearly an aspect of the faith, since we talk about Christ’s “passion”. However, etymologically, “passionate” does not aptly describe God in any aspect of His being EXCEPT the Passion, since “passion” is a matter of PASSIVITY. God is wholly active, and is never “overcome” by feeling. And eros has nothing to do with passion, or being overcome by feeling. It is the desire for unity with the beloved.

 

[Prodigal_Son]

Oh, I see, the quotation you responded to included the word “passionate”. Yes, I think that the notion of God’s loving us “passionately” gets the notion of passion wrong. But God does love us with His whole being, and His love is NOT merely a matter of wishing our good. It is a matter of wanting to be one with us.

 

[spina1953]

Love it seems has many meanings depending on how it is used. We say we love a certain food or a car or something else so its usage depends on the person using it to describe how they feel about something or someone. God’s love is perfect; a perfect love that can’t be matched by living beings. We can’t love God the same way God loves us. The human language can not express fully when it comes to God, Who God is, What God does etc. For the mystical it is an experience that really can’t be explained but only felt in the soul. It does in a way cause an emotional sense of being filled with a love so pure that is can’t be comprehended by the mind.

The Saints like Teresa and John of the Cross and others have tried to impart something of what they themselves felt in their relationship with God. to others either orally and by their writings. They were wanting a deeper relationship with God and they more they spend time just being in the presence of God the deeper the feeling of closeness. They also felt abandonment which leads them to rely and depend intirely on God.

For them it is an emptying of everything which might keep them from God. it is by this emptying that they are filled with God and His love which takes place in the soul. Just as two people want to be in the presence of the other and do for the other to make the other happy without wanting anything in return, so it with God asking nothing in return but God’s love so as to give God all the love one has without holding it back. its a sharing of love between God and the person.

God is a spirit not male or female, however, we as humans have called God male, why I think its authority and strength which we think or have assigned to man; man as the protector over females, just as seen in nature which we are a part of. This does not lesson the role of the female, yet through human history Women were seen as the weaker sex needing protection which man provided. Women in a sense can be called love as from them we see the softer side of strength.

The mystical experience one experience can be that way in that God becomes our strength while we being weaker, God becomes the protector, and then God becomes like the female giving love which binds us more closely to Him becoming inseparable . When one is in love its difficult to stay apart from the other, this is the effect one gets from a mystical experience that one can call in a way eros.

 

[neophyte]

Wow, this actually IS disturbing.

Yes, it is.

I feel that it’s blasphemous because sexual desire and eroticism is egotistical, brutal, aggressive and primal in nature.

You say that only because it’s our experience after the Fall. Fully Human eros has not the slightest taint of any of that.