Rediscovering Holy Eros

Summary

Podcast Summary: Ascend - The Great Books Podcast

Episode: Rediscovering Holy Eros

Hosts: Deacon Harrison Garlick and Adam Minihan
Date: July 29, 2026

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Overview

In this episode, Deacon Harrison Garlick embarks on a thorough exploration of “holy Eros” — the tradition of erotic love as not merely sexual, but as a primal yearning inscribed in the human heart, leading toward beauty, happiness, and ultimately, God. Drawing on sources from ancient Greece to the New Testament, and synthesizing thinkers from Plato and Homer to Pope Benedict XVI and Dante, Garlick offers a rich, nuanced understanding of Eros that transcends the narrow puritanical or purely sexual definitions common today. His journey reflects both personal spiritual insight and an invitation for listeners to reclaim this tradition to deepen both intellectual and spiritual lives.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Defining Eros and Its Tradition

[02:50–08:30]

• Eros is introduced as the primal desire to satiate in beauty and achieve happiness—a force underpinning all human longing, not just sexual or romantic.
• Modern misunderstanding: Eros is mostly viewed through puritanical (suspicious, repressive) or pornographic (pure indulgence) lenses.
• Tradition in the West: Eros is central not just in ancient pagan thought but deeply entwined with Christian spirituality, as highlighted by Pope Benedict XVI in Deus Caritas Est.
• Notable quote:

  “Your erotic appetite—this infinite desire in you for beauty—was enkindled in you by Beauty itself, to lead you back to Him.” — Harrison Garlick [09:15]

2. Eros in Ancient Greek Thought

[09:30–21:10]

• Homer’s Iliad and Hesiod’s Theogony: Eros is a cosmic force, primordial like sleep and death. Love is personified as a divine principle that overwhelms gods and mortals—highlighting both its generative and destructive powers.
• Aristotle’s Metaphysics: The "unmoved mover" draws all things through love; the universe's dynamism is erotic at its core.
• Tragic eros: Seen in Greek drama (e.g., Sophocles’ Antigone), Eros can “wrench the minds of the righteous into outrage … and swerve them into ruin.”
• Notable quote:

  “Without eros, the universe would be sterile and stagnant—its fecundity is what grants movement and life to the cosmos.” — Harrison Garlick [20:50]

3. Plato’s Synthesis and the Ladder of Love

[21:12–47:10]

• Plato’s Symposium: Through the priestess Diotima, Plato presents eros as a desire for the good and beautiful, culminating in perpetual happiness. Humans don't want to be happy “sometimes,” but eternally—eros is thus infinite and restless unless it finds an infinite beauty.
• Ladder of Love: Eros begins in physical attraction, ascends through appreciation of souls, honor, pursuits, knowledge, and ultimately reaches the universal, eternal “Beauty itself.”
• Anthropological claim: The soul’s erotic drive is mapped onto the structure of the Platonic tripartite soul—appetites (pleasure, body), thumos (honor, excellence), nous (truth, philosophy).
• Notable quote:

  “If you are skilled in erotics, then you understand how to discipline your soul according to its loves and how to ascend to higher beauties.” — Harrison Garlick [43:00]

• Debate: Is Diotima’s speech Plato’s own view? Through the poetic dialectic of the dialogue, Plato’s message is subtle—anthropological, not merely philosophical.

4. Eros in the Old Testament

[47:11–1:03:10]

• Old Testament imagery: Though the Greek word "eros" appears rarely, the concept is embodied in the marriage covenant between God and Israel—seen vividly in prophets and the Song of Songs.
• Marriage as the end of erotic longing: The union of man and woman becomes a primary analogy for God’s covenant love for humanity.
• Adultery and idolatry: Israel’s idolatry is “spiritual adultery”—restlessness and disorder result from unfaithfulness; rest is found only in returning to God.
• Comparison with Plato: Both traditions identify eros with a longing for a lost wholeness.
• Notable quote:

  “It is in the image of Adam and Eve, and the two becoming one flesh, that eros becomes the answer to man’s loneliness, his existential yearning.” — Harrison Garlick [1:01:35]

5. Distinctions: Pagan vs. Biblical Eros

[1:03:15–1:08:40]

• Marriage vs. the impersonal ideal: In the Old Testament, marriage is the goal of eros, while Plato’s ultimate object is Beauty itself, an impersonal idea. In the Bible, the final end is a personal God (who is Beauty Itself).
• Eros becomes thoroughly relational: God is not just the object of eros, but a lover who returns and initiates love.

6. Eros in the New Testament

[1:08:40–1:22:35]

• Christ and the Church: The New Testament perfects Old Testament erotic imagery—Christ as bridegroom, the Church as bride. The union becomes even more intimate: eucharistic communion is portrayed as “one flesh” with Christ.
• Agape vs. Eros: Though the word “eros” is never used in the New Testament (agape is preferred), eros as a concept (“need love”) remains central, harmonized with agape (“gift love”).

7. The Relationship Between Eros and Agape

[1:22:40–1:32:10]

• Three models:
  • Opposition model: (Common in some Protestant thought) Agape and eros are mutually exclusive.
  • Indistinguishability model: Terms are too intertwined for clean separation—usage of “eros” and “agape” overlaps in Christian tradition.
  • Harmony model: (Garlick’s and Benedict’s view) Eros and agape are two harmonious movements—the soul’s ascent (eros) and God’s gift (agape).
• Notable quote:

  “Eros is the ascent of the soul to God. Agape is the descent of the soul from God... Eros fills your soul and agape pours it into others.” — Harrison Garlick [1:29:00]

8. Eros, Grace, and the Christian Life

[1:32:15–1:41:20]

• Grace transforms eros: By grace, the natural erotic longing is lifted—eros participates in the divine life, ascending perpetually in new ways.
• Bridal mysticism: Saints like Bernard of Clairvaux, Catherine of Siena, and John of the Cross use erotic, nuptial imagery to describe mystical union with God.
• Examples: Gregory of Nyssa’s “climbing the ladder” or Moses climbing Sinai; Dante’s Beatrice; St. Augustine’s “our hearts are restless until they rest in thee.”

9. Eros and the Greatest Commandments

[1:41:22–1:43:10]

• Self-love (eros) as ethical standard: The command to “love your neighbor as yourself” relies on a healthy, rightly ordered eros.
• Eros and agape in action: The ascent to God results in the capacity to pour out love upon others.

10. Recovering Holy Eros

[1:43:15–end (~1:47:00)]

• Invitation: Reclaim an understanding of eros that moves from all finite beauties to the infinite, to see all beauty as an icon of God that draws us closer to Him.
• Practical implications: Understanding eros reshapes spiritual life, marriage, and even vocation; it’s central to understanding the human condition.
• Notable quote:

  “To recover holy eros is to recover the very mystery at the heart of the human condition.” — Harrison Garlick [1:44:55]

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Memorable Quotes & Moments (with Timestamps)

• On the centrality of eros:

  “The question of the human condition is very much the question of erotics.” — Harrison Garlick [05:35]

• On eros and restlessness:

  “Your infinite erotic appetite has found an infinite beauty—or in other words, your eros has finally found a beauty that it cannot exhaust.” — [45:15]

• On Christian eros:

  “It’s God who ultimately satisfies your natural love... you have to know Him in a personal way; a conceptual way, or an intellectual way, will not be fulfilling.” — [1:07:00]

• On grace and eros:

  “The natural erotic ascent is lifted up into a supernatural ascent that both heals eros of its disorders and assists in the ascent beyond human nature.” — [1:36:40]

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Notable Segment Timestamps

• Defining holy eros / primary claim: [02:50–08:30]
• Homer, Hesiod, and Aristotle on eros: [09:30–19:00]
• Plato’s ladder of love and anthropology: [21:12–47:10]
• Eros in the Old Testament (Covenant, Marriage, Prophets): [47:11–1:03:10]
• Comparison between Plato and the Old Testament: [1:03:15–1:08:40]
• Eros in the New Testament & Christ as Bridegroom: [1:08:40–1:22:35]
• Eros, agape, and the structure of Christian love: [1:22:40–1:32:10]
• Eros and grace; bridal mysticism: [1:32:15–1:41:20]
• Eros and the Great Commandments: [1:41:22–1:43:10]
• Final call to rediscover holy eros: [1:43:15–end]

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Tone and Style

Garlick’s tone is reflective, scholarly, and personal—anchored in deep study but always mindful of practical and spiritual relevance. He assumes the posture of a guide, inviting first-time and seasoned readers alike to participate in the life-long ascent toward the true, the good, and the beautiful.

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Final Takeaway

To “ascend” is, at its heart, to recognize and reclaim eros as the restless, primal longing in each person—a longing that finds its true rest only in God, the “ancient beauty ever new.” This rediscovery is foundational not just for intellectual clarity, but for deep, transformative Christianity and an integrated life.

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For further exploration, listeners are encouraged to read Plato’s dialogues (especially the Symposium), the Song of Songs, and the writings of St. Augustine, Gregory of Nyssa, Dante, and Pope Benedict XVI as discussed throughout the episode. The hosts announce upcoming episodes will explore Plato’s dialogues, starting with Hipparchus.

Transcript

[A]

Today on Ascend, the Great Books podcast, we are taking up the question of erotics. We're going to look at holy Eros, rediscovering a holy Eros, a defense of erotic love in the Christian tradition. You might be listening to this and saying, what? Can I even listen to this episode? What does this even mean? Eros, erotic love? I've never heard of that term ever used outside of, say, like, a sexual context. Well, you might be surprised to know that Eros has an incredibly rich tradition inside of Western civilization, one that Pope Benedict XVI tried to resurrect and defend in. In his encyclical Deus Caritas est. And so we're going to give kind of a slow, methodical walkthrough of looking at the beauty of Eros in Plato, in the Old Testament, in the New Testament, in the writings of the saints in the medievals, like Dante, and even some modern thinkers, and trying to kind of give you a beautiful lattice work upon which your understanding of Eros can grow and become fecund. To be quite honest, one of the reasons that I want to share this with you is that this is something that actually comes out of my own labors. This is something that comes out of my own spiritual life. That when I kind of got my first glimpse of this concept, it answered so many questions for me, answered so many questions about the restlessness of the soul, the unsettledness of the soul, why we're constantly craving more. Why does the human condition always want more? And so this conversation that we're going to have today is something that I think is deeply tethered to becoming more Christlike, something that's deeply tethered to theosis, to becoming more Godlike, something that's been incredibly beneficial for my own spiritual life. And so we're going to take a look at Eros as a primal love, the primal desire to satiate in beauty and be happy and see how this erotic love inside the soul moves us from lesser beauties to greater beauties until we finally come to rest and satiate in the divine beauty itself. It's a wonderful tradition. It's a beautiful tradition. It's one that I think if you take seriously, it helps you understand the human condition. The question of what is man? The question of the human condition is very much the question of erotics. And so, yeah, I hope you join us today for what is a wonderful conversation, a wonderful dive into holy Eros, recovering this beautiful tradition inside both pagan and Christian thought. As an aside, as a reminder, next week we will be discussing Plato's Hipparchus. We start our study of four strange dialogues. So go read the Hipparchus this week and we're going to discuss it with a good group of men next Tuesday. So this week read the parkus and then we'll have three other short dialogues after that. But this week join us for a wonderful deep dive into the question of erotics rediscovering holy Eros. Welcome to Ascend the Great Books podcast. My name is Deacon Erin Garlick. I live in rural Oklahoma with my wife and five children, serve as a deacon at Holy Family Cathedral and Chancellor and General Counsel the Roman Catholic Diocese of Tulsa. My free time though, I like to help people read the great books and that's the purpose here. On Ascend the Great Books podcast. We can be like a weekly small group helping you to read the most influential texts in Western civilization. We have just finished an amazing 12 week study of the Odyssey. All those videos are posted, all the podcasts are posted. Go check it out. If you haven't read the Odyssey with us already. Moving forward next week we're actually going to start a short, strange little dialogue called the Hipparchus. So go check that out and read it with us and discuss it next week. And then after that we're going to discuss Plato's dialogue, the lovers, that's on August 11th. And then on August 18th we'll be discussing Hippeis Minor. And then the week after that, August 25th, we'll be discussing Ion, which is actually subtitled on the Iliad. A very interesting comparison between philosophers and the poets. And actually all four of these are actually really good tilling of the soil of your own intellect for studying Plato's Republic. And so after these four dialogues, we're going to get into some short stories. We're going to read some Flannery o', Connor, some Robert E. Howard, all that starts in quote, unquote, short story September. And then we are starting Plato's Republic on October 6th. We have a wonderful episode on book one. The Kick Us off with Dr. Alex Preu. I've been working on this for over a year. We have over 30 episodes that we're going to bring you. I'm incredibly excited. If you support us on Patreon, go check out our collection on Plato, where I actually already posted as a sneak peek for all of our supporters, Dr. Alex Preux, introduction to book one of Plato's Republic. It's a fantastic conversation. The reason I actually posted it for you all is because I wanted to go back and revisit it and listen to it again, even though I recorded it over a year ago. So we have some really great stuff coming down the pike. But today, today we're going to do a little topical episode. We're going to take an article from our sister company, the Ascent, which is a substack. It's actually a top 100 substack on faith and spirituality. It publishes a short free article every Tuesday on some type of spiritual principle, pulling from scripture, but also from the great books. And then every Friday it posts a in depth article that has a preview for everyone, but it's only available in its entirety to our supporters. And so recently, over on the Ascent, we've talked about why Eve chose Satan over her own husband, whether Penelope is actually a hero in the Odyssey, how to be powerful as God is powerful, the spiritual harm of democracy, whether Achilles regretted his life of glory, how gratitude or piety can save the west, exploring a politics of gratitude. And also looked at some really interesting kind of fun subjects like Did Jesus speak Greek? And how to start reading the Bible. So if you're interested in two short spiritual articles per week rooted in Christian spirituality, but also the great books, go check out our sister company, the Ascent substack. It's a joy to write over there. I enjoy exploring those themes, even though it's actually Ascend, the podcast that really is the main train and driver of my own intellectual life, as I am reading each week to do the podcast to Create guides, the Create articles, which are all available on our own Patreon page. And so again, you can visit everything for ascend on X, YouTube, Facebook, Patreon and Instagram. And we appreciate all of your support. So what are we doing today? We are going to look at an article that is several years in the making. We are going to discuss Eros, the love of Eros. And the article is entitled Reclaiming a Holy An Introduction to Spirituality, Eros, Ascent, and God as Beauty Itself. And this is something that I think has deeply animated a lot of my own spiritual life. It's something that I want to share with you, something that I want to focus on. For those of you who have been reading Plato with us, and even to Homer, to a certain extent, you've kind of heard us speak about Eros. You've heard us speak about an erotic appetite, which isn't reducible, as many people think, to an appetite for sex, even though that's typically how it's used and how it's first experienced, but also an erotic appetite for glory, for truth, and ultimately actually for God. And we'll actually see how God, divine beauty itself, is the author, the originator of our erotic appetites, and actually the only thing that can actually satiate our Eros. And so to explore this, we have to dive into Plato, of course, but also then look at images in the Old Testament, the New Testament, a lot of the early church fathers, and even how this has continued up into the church today. And so this is something I'm incredibly excited to share with you. It's kind of a deep study, and I apologize a little bit that I am slightly under the weather and my voice is giving out. So please forgive me if I end up having more recourse to the article than I probably should. Okay, let's dive in. Okay, so what is Eros? So Eros is the primal desire to satiate in beauty and be happy. Yet many Christians, many people view Eros through either a pornographic or puritan lens. But the question of the human condition, the question really of who we are as a people, our main anthropological question, who are we? What does it mean to be human? In a lot of ways, is actually the question of Eros, the question of erotics. It is the primordial force of the familial, the political, and the divine. These may seem like large claims, but they're claims that we're certainly going to explore. Is the call Eros, our erotic appetites, is actually a call to ascend, to move from lesser beauties to higher beauties until the soul satiates in that for which it was made, beauty itself. Because ultimately, Eros, the love of Eros, is the question of your restless heart. It is the question of what it means to be happy and find true rest, existential rest. It's in understanding eros, it's in understanding erotics that you come to find the spiritual path to excellence, happiness and bliss. This, and if it hasn't clicked on you already, I'm just going to make this explicit, as I really share my own heart on this, is that it is this concept that gives the name to both the podcast and the substack, so Ascend, the Great Books podcast and our sister company, the Ascent on substack, both draw their name from an understanding of proper erotics inside of Western civilization. And what it truly means to ascend to the divine. And that path, which is so often marred by our current problems of seeing erotics as either puritan or pornographic, is hidden by a lot of people. So today, I hope what I can show you is the beauty that is the path of Eros. And hopefully it can reflect something back to you of your own heart and your own ascent to God. Okay, so where do we start? Well, let's work a little bit on what Eros actually means in our definition. And so you have this primal desire to satiate in beauty and to be happy. And beauty here is very much used as a synonym of the good. You want to feel fulfilled, whole and at rest, and you want to attain what is beautiful. You want to possess it, and you also want to delight in it. And it's this resounding primordial yearning in the human heart that is called Eros. These erotics are a very primordial force within side of the human heart. And so, you know, a few things just so you don't think this is, you know, cool ideas that Deacon Garlic came up with last week. You know, CS Lewis calls Eros a need, love that finds satisfaction in the beloved. Joseph Pieper, the famous Catholic philosopher, says Eros is the desire for full existence, for existential exaltation, for happiness and bliss. I mean, you ultimately, you want someone to look upon you and say, it is good that you exist. How wonderful you are. Pulling from a very different tradition, Leo Strauss describes Eros as a love for the symbiternal possession of the good. And Alan Bloom says, Eros is the clearest and most powerful inclination towards a lost wholeness. And Pope Benedict XVI defends Eros as an ecstasy of the soul, an upward movement toward the divine. I just want to give you a quick insider look here from the Catholic perspective that I think is very interesting is that Pope Benedict xvi, one of his encyclicals was called Deus Caritas Est. And at the beginning of that encyclical, he wrote a defense of Eros, that Eros was not simply just a deformed pagan love that Christianity had conquered, but it actually was a reflection of man's natural love. What's really interesting to me is that passage moved me deeply, particularly after I started to study Plato and became very interested in the question of erotics. But for the large part, Pope Benedict gave that defense of Eros, and it fell very flat in the Catholic Church. It really didn't pick up any types of studies. I don't really know any movements or any philosophers that really picked that up. And so one of the reasons that I enjoy the subject is actually first and foremost because of how much it's helped me in my own spiritual life. And therefore it's beautiful and good, and I want to share it with you. But two, I think there was an insight there that Pope Benedict 16th gave in a very short address that really is worth contemplating and for Christians to take quite seriously. So how can we rediscover this ancient beauty? How can we recover a lost grammar of erosion? It's not easy, particularly because there's a lot of presuppositions and assumptions that work against us to have a good understanding of erotics and what that actually means for the human condition and for your love of God. So this might sound like a lot, but I'm actually going to sketch real fast, just like the titles of where we're actually going in this podcast, in this kind of deep dive into the erotic. So one, we're going to look at erotics in Homer and in pre Plato. Two, Plato and the problem of Eros. Three, Plato and the ladder of love. Four, what Plato believes about Eros. Five, Eros in the Old Testament. Six, Old Testament erotics and Plato. Seven, Eros in the New Testament. Eight, the Agape of St. Paul, a different type of love. And the Eros of Plato. Are those competitive? Are they in harmony with one another? Eros as an ascent to God, Eros and Christian grace. Where does grace play into this Agape as a descent from God? Then 12, Eros and the greatest Commandments. How does Eros play into Christ's commands in our ethical lives as Christians? And then 13, the Ascension, Eros and your new beginning, the new spiritual life. Okay, so that's a lot. That's a big claim in a lot of ways. We're just going to scratch the surface today. But my goal is to give you a lattice work upon which your understanding of Eros can grow and become fecund. Okay, so one, let's dive into erotics in Homer and in pre Plato. So in Homer's Iliad, an antecedent to Eros is actually seen in Hera's praising of erotic love. So love there in the Greek, in the Iliad, is not Eros. It's a different type of love. It's definitely a sexual love, but love there is personified as a God. And if you might recall in the Iliad, this love, which is personified as a kind of cosmic God, a primordial God. So again, not one of the gods of Mount Olympus, but in the Greek understanding, there are older, more ancient gods, and this is the God of love. And Homer tells us through the mouth of Hera that it's love who may overwhelm all the gods, immortal men. Hera wears Aphrodite's band which the world lies in its weaving and uses it to seduce Zeus. And Homer tells us the king of gods and men is conquered by the strong assaults of love. So if you know anything about Greek mythology, Zeus is stronger than all of the other Olympian gods combined. And so to have something that can come in and conquer Zeus is a huge claim. And so this primordial God, this ancient God, love, can come in and conquer Zeus through the vehicle of Hera, wearing this sash from Aphrodite, the goddess of love, this Olympian goddess of love, which is distinct from love itself, personified as a person. But what we should notice here is one that erotic love here is presented as a personified cosmic force, similar to sleep and death and dream, that affects both mortals and immortals alike. Remember Hera's praise that the whole world lies in the weaving of Aphrodite's band, of this band of love. That's a good segue to Hesiod's theogony. Hesiod was a contemporary, a younger contemporary of Homer, and in his theogony, which we have a whole episode on, Eros is presented as one of the four primordial gods, alongside Chaos, Earth or Gaia, and Abyss or Tartarus. Though Eros has no offspring of its own. Eros role in the primal cosmos is fecundity to be the generative force within existence. So we don't see Eros itself having children. But if you think of it this way, there's an expansion of the world in Hesiod of these four primordial gods, and it's from them then the Titans are going to come, and then from the Titans you're going to have the Olympian gods and all these things, and then the demigods, and then you have the Iliad and the Odyssey. So this is like the beginning. The theogony is telling us about the genealogy of the gods themselves. So love does not seem to be fecund in and of itself, but it's what causes this generative force inside the cosmos. It causes other things to come together in love and then be able to be fecund, to have offspring. So, for instance, we have Uranus and Gaia come together to generate the Titans. Kronos and Rhea will generate the Olympian gods. And obviously the Olympian gods will generate other gods or demigods. In other words, without erosion, the universe would be sterile and stagnant, because the fecundity of Eros grants life and movement to the cosmos. In fact, Aristotle will later praise Hesiod for his insight that Eros animates existence. And think of this. I want you to take this seriously. In his Metaphysics, Aristotle takes up the question, how does the unmoved mover move all things if the unmoved mover does not move? So how does the unmoved mover, which we would associate with God? How does the unmoved mover move all things if the unmoved mover does not move? And for those who know, the unmoved mover cannot move, because the unmoved mover, as much as Aristotle, means that as God is perfect, he has fully actualized all of his potential. And movement denotes potential. It denotes change. And something that's perfect cannot change. So how do you have something that's perfect at the center of all of creation, the center of all being that is in constant movement, but it itself has no movement. What's really interesting here is how does Aristotle answer this? The answer is love. The answer is Eros. It is love that animates the cosmos, which is really fascinating because we, I think, a lot of times associate that as a Christian claim. But here we have it presented us poetically in Hesiod and then explicitly or philosophically in Aristotle. All things desire to return to the divine origin according to their telos, or their purpose or their end. Everything in the universe has a love about it, a certain erotic appetite to return back to God. In other words, the erotic desire between man and woman that breathes life is also at work in all of creation. Eros, whether a God or a force, is one of attraction, satiation, fecundity, and existence. The many become one and the one becomes many. Eros is always fecund. Eros, however, also has a destructive quality. And this is something that we also have to take seriously. It can't just simply be an unbiased praise of the erotic. The erotic, certainly, as most of us know and most of our narratives are about, can bring destruction and death and chaos. And the ancient Greeks understood this well. In Antigone by Sophocles, which we've also discussed on the podcast, the chorus sings of the madness that accompanies Eros. It is Eros who is, quote, never conquered in battle, who neither men nor gods can escape. Like Zeus in the Iliad, the chorus says of Eros, whoever feels your grip is driven mad. You wrench the minds of the righteous into outrage, and you swerve them into ruin. For example, in the play, which is a fantastic example, you have Haman, which is the son of Creon. And Haman presents as a very rational, calm, collected character, which is kind of odd in a tragedy because everyone is supposed to be a little bit insane and play these kind of exaggerated parts. But Eros gets a hold of Haman and he moves from that calm, collected, rational character to a character of mania, of madness, and ultimately of suicide. You can also think of Romeo and Juliet as well. And so in a lot of ways, we have to be careful, because Eros, this desire for beauty, particularly in the sexual context, can overcome reason. The desire for beauty to love and be loved brings bliss and ecstasy and elation. It's what C.S. lewis associated with our phrase, to quote fall in love, is that there's always a little madness, a little mania that associates our erotic desires and our desire to want to satiate them, particularly in the beloved. It's really notable overall. Not that this is indicative of all mania that runs with Eros, but at least in the play Antigone, the irrationality and madness that accompanies the erotic appetite in Antigone is still somehow bent towards the order of the cosmos, is still somehow bent towards justice, which is an interesting claim because keep in mind, we're still tracking that. Eros seems to be both a love that's in our soul, but also somehow a cosmic force. And again, we're just in Homer and the pre Platonic. So in a broad sketch, Eros prior to Plato is seen as a primordial force of attraction, of satiation of madness and fruitfulness, one that moves the cosmos, the gods, and mankind. It is this multifaceted, enriched tradition that is inherited by Plato. So two Plato and the Problem of Eros. So the. The architectonic text on Eros is Plato's Symposium. Without question, it sets the spiritual template for ascending to the divine for both middle and late Platonism. And also it's imprinted onto early Christianity. And those effects go far into the Middle Ages as well. Socrates in the Symposium states that it's Diotima, a foreign priestess, that taught me erotics. In Socrates's recollection, Diotima tells the younger Socrates. So this is Socrates having a flashback. He's remembering something that happened when he was young. He claims this young priestess taught him erotics. Okay, so like, really quick, like, what's the setting for the Symposium? So in the Symposium, which we haven't covered on the podcast yet, we're gonna do it after we do Plato's Republic, you have Agathon, who is a poet, has won a great contest, and they're hosting a symposium this particular festival at his home. And they're Drinking and doing all kinds of things. And so in the. In the night that we join them of the narrative of the Symposium, they decide that what they're going to do is they're going to all these men that are theirs, they're going to go around in the circle and they're going to give speeches in praise of Eros, in praise of the erotic. And in that context, they're speaking about a God, Eros, who they find to be not praised enough. And so, of course, there's many different speeches that are given. They're all very meritorious and worthy of consideration. Not to say that they're all correct, but they all make you ask the right questions. But of course, when it comes to Socrates, he can't simply give a speech, he has to tell stories, he has to have a dialogue, and these kind of things. And so one of the things that's really interesting is that he starts off by telling us that when he was younger, he learned of erotics from a foreign priestess named Diotima. And this is really interesting. If you know how to read Plato, you know that every little detail counts. The drama is part of the pedagogy. And so this is a dialogue of all Athenian men trying to praise Eros. And we find out that it's one, a woman, and two, a foreign woman who taught Socrates what true erotics actually are. And so we should pay attention to this. So in Socrates's recollection, Dao Tima tells the younger Socrates that those who are happy are those who possess good things and beautiful things. Man is desirous to possess beautiful things and be happy for its own sake and not for the sake of anything else. Happiness, to use a more Aristotelian phrase, is the final end of man. It's not done for the sake of anything else. It's done for its own sake. This desire in man, which is common to all human beings, is called Eros, as eros is the whole desire of good things and being happy. And so this is Diotima, what Socrates recounts Diotima taught him in the Symposium. Yet there's a problem with arrows. Man, as Dao Timah observes, does not wish to be happy some of the time, but all of the time. And this is. I can't stress how important this is. Your erotic appetite is infinite. You want to be happy all of the time. There's never a time you sit around and say, I want to be unhappy. All of your decisions are oriented towards you becoming happy, whether in the short term or the long term. Your erotic Appetite is always desirous of some good to attain some beauty in which to satiate. As Dao Tema teaches, Eros is of the good being one's own, always good and beauty, at least for these purposes, are convertible. So if we talk about desiring the beauty or desiring the good, for these purposes, we mean the same. And so Eros may seem at first to be a curse, but. And why would it be a curse? Well, because you have an endless pattern of dissatisfaction as a soul consumes one good after another in a pursuit of unachievable rest. So if your erotic appetite is actually infinite, that it's never going to be satiated in this reality, which is only filled with finite beauties. So if your erotic appetite desires infinite happiness, which comes from possessing things that are beautiful and satiating in them, you live in a world in which beauty is only finite. And what does this mean? You have to move from one beautiful thing to the next beautiful thing to the next beautiful thing to remain happy, to satiate this primordial desire that you have in your heart to be happy. And this very quickly can be perceived as a curse, where the infinite erotic desire in your heart basically damns you to an endless pursuit of the final. But Eros only brings restlessness for those who are unskilled in erotics. It is here that Diotima helps Socrates be initiated into these erotics. Well, and how does she do this? She introduces him to the famous ladder of love. So let's go into point three, or section three, Plato and the ladder of love. So Dao Tema presents Eros as a love of ascent, a love that moves the soul upward. So true erotics ascend from lower beauties to higher beauties until the soul rests in the answer to its restlessness. The erotic includes sexuality, but again, it's not reducible to it. Eros awakes in the lover due to the beauty of the body of the beloved. So this is Daotima recounting how Eros awakes in the soul. So it awakes, typically for most of us, in the beauty of the beloved, we fall in love with someone. Think of yourself as a young person, the first time you, quote, unquote, fell in love, that you felt that mania, that you wanted to be with someone. These are all sparked by the beauty of the beloved. But those skilled in erotics must realize that beauty exists in other bodies as well. Next, the lover must ascend to the beauty of the soul, for he must believe that the beauty in the souls is more honorable than that of the body is what Dao Tema teaches, it is virtue, as Socrates states elsewhere, that is the beauty of the soul. So what is Dao Tima telling us here and telling Socrates, who's then telling us that this erotic appetite, you have to be happy, sparks within you first because of the body, of the beauty of the beloved. Hence the reason that your erotic appetite is always associated with sexuality. But what Tawatima is telling us is that that draw towards the beauty of the beloved has to take a rational step back and realize this beauty is also present in other people and other bodies. And also we see that even in the beauty of the beloved itself. Part of the maturation of the erotic appetite is to realize that there's also a beauty of the soul. And sometimes used more of a modern parlance, we would say, you know, that we see someone who's beautiful, but are they beautiful on the inside? Or I'm coming to know them as a person, who are they? Not just as a body, but as a person. There's an analogous movement of the soul for Diotima, climbing the ladder of love, that as we mature in our own erotic appetites, we also start to take into account the beauty of the soul itself. But here's the thing that's not just in the beloved. You start to see that there are beauties in other things as well, even outside of the beloved. And so, as she states, you know, if you're truly educated in erotics, you must be compelled to behold the beautiful in pursuits and laws against which the beauty of the body is somewhat trivial. What does she mean? It's a very foreign concept for us. But what she's talking about is that there's a certain beauty in glory, a certain beauty in honor, a certain beauty in excellence, of being an excellent human. When I look and the movement kind of goes like this, when I look into the beauty of the soul, of the beloved, and I see, then I move past the body into the soul, and I see that it's a beautiful soul as well. You can look at the fact that that beautiful soul somewhat serves as a mirror, which then says, is my soul beautiful? And this is a natural reaction. So if you see someone who has a beautiful body as a young person, beauty tends to judge. Beauty tends to be a standard. So if a young man sees a beautiful woman across the room, one of the things that he's going to think of immediately is, am I beautiful enough? Am I handsome enough? To approach her, her beauty is reflective, a mirror to his. And that same dynamic is also working in the soul. So when, when the erotics can mature past the beauty of the body into the beauty of the soul, the beauty of the soul of the beloved becomes a mirror back to the lover of Is my soul beautiful? And how does your soul become beautiful virtue? Well, the virtuous soul that has excellence likes to do excellent things. And this is where erotic starts to expand past simply the body of the beloved or the soul of the beloved, into then pursuits of other beauties like glory, honor, chaos, etc. And even ascends, as Dao Tima tells us, the soul further ascends to the beauty of knowledge, coming to love the sciences and then even philosophy. Okay, so now, as Dao Tima explains these, how the soul ascends upward. You might notice, if you've been studying Plato with us, that her movement from the body of the beloved to things like laws in the polis, to sciences and philosophy is a broad mapping. It broadly parallels the Platonic tripart soul. And what do I mean by that? The Platonic soul. Broadly speaking, we could argue to what degree Plato actually holds to this. But pedagogically, for this conversation, the soul has three parts. The lowest part is the appetitive part, and it loves pleasure. And this is reflected in the love of the beloved and the love of the body, and particularly in say, sexuality. Then you have a second part, which is the thematic, the spirited part of the soul. And this loves different types of beauties. This loves the beauty of honor, the beauty of glory, the beauty of human excellence. And then on top of that you have the intellect or sometimes the nous n o u s. And this loves truth. It loves the beauty of truth. And so what you have to see then is that the so called ladder of love is the soul becoming skilled in erotics of the higher parts of the soul. It's moving from the baser beauties of sex and physical beauty to the more thematic beauties of nobility, of human excellence, to the intellectual beauties of philosophy. The ladder of love in is in a certain way a mapping of the tripart soul in you, or in other ways. The ladder of love is an anthropological claim. It's a claim of how humans move from less mature to more mature beauties in their own erotic appetites, in what makes them happy in this life. The problem here, of course, is that Eros endures, though the highest beauties or the higher beauties on the ladder of love are more satisfying than the lower beauties. Man's erotic appetite remains infinite, an endless desire to satiate in beauty and be happy. The higher beauties of the ladder of love may be more satisfying and bring more rest than the lower beauties, but they don't quench the endless erotic thirst of the human heart. And so there's a way to look at it where the higher beauties of the soul, like the beauties that are loved by the thematic, the beauties that are loved by the intellect, bring greater rest and are less exhaustible than, say, the love of the beloved. But at the same time, they still remain finite. They can't give your erotic appetite the true existential rest that it actually craves. So even if it can stop it from just moving to one thing, to one thing, to one thing over and over again. And you see this by the way. You see humans who do this, particularly in the appetitive. All they're doing in their life is they're moving from one pleasure to the next pleasure to the next, consuming, wanting more, more and more and more. Their erotic appetite is very much a curse. But those who can ascend and see things like human nobility and philosophy and wisdom as things that actually satiate the soul are not nearly as restless at the same time, that restlessness is not exhausted. It still endures. And that is a problem. It's a problem in the condition of man. And what's interesting is, is that we still don't turn to Christianity to understand this. We still can remain within the observations on the human condition made by Plato. Because in the Symposium, Diotimus speaks of the perfect end of erotics, for whose sake alone all prior labors were undertaken. So what does she mean by that? She means that there's actually something at the top of the ladder of love. There's something that, even though you have the appetitive beauties and the thematic beauties and intellectual beauties, and your eros is consuming these, all of these beauties are lesser beauties that are actually for the sake of some greater beauty, some perfect beauty that corresponds more perfectly with your erotic appetite. And so she says that philosophy is not the end of erotics, but the object of philosophy is, at least naturally speaking. The Otima describes a beauty that is both eternal and universal. It has no beginning or no end. It is the beauty, the single form of beauty, that all other beautiful things participate in. What does she mean? At the top of the ladder of love is this eternal, universal beauty, the beauty itself to which all other beauties are but steps of an ascent. Those who ascend the ladder of love see the divine beauty itself. And those who can but glimpse this beauty cultivate true virtue and the potential to become dear to God. In short, the divine beauty itself is the natural object of man's erotic desire, as it allows the infinite eros to satiate upon the infinite beauty for which it was made. This is a huge claim, so let's pause and make sure we understand this. We have claimed that if you look upon the human condition, that our desire, this erotic, primal desire in you, to have beauty, to possess it, delight in it and be happy, is infinite. You always want this. It's always driving you in all the decisions that you make. We see very quickly how this can become a curse. So how is it not a curse if it's a natural love that's part of the human condition? Well, what Dao Tema says, even from a pagan observation of nature, is that there's a divine beauty itself. And that divine beauty itself is eternal, it's universal, it's inexhaustible. And why is that important? Because what it means is your infinite erotic appetite has found an infinite beauty. Or in other words, your Eros has finally found a beauty that it cannot exhaust. And what does that mean? It means that it can bring rest. It can bring rest in a way that no other beauty in this life can. Whether it's an appetitive or a thematic or an intellectual good, all of them are finite. Only this divine beauty itself is infinite. And only this infinite beauty starts to bring rest. And it's for this infinite beauty that all the other beauties in your life exist. Every other beauty in your life that you have enjoyed is actually participating in this divine beauty itself. It is the universal. Everything else is the particular. Everything else is exhaustible, it is inexhaustible. Everything else is subject to time and decay. It is eternal. And so Socrates ends his recollection of Daotema's lesson by stating that one could not easily get a better co worker with human nature than Eros. Socrates, for his part, asserts that every real man must honor Eros, as I myself honor erotics and train myself exceptionally in them. In other words, if you are skilled in erotics, then you understand how to discipline your soul according to its loves, and how to ascend to higher beauties and how to love the eternal idea of beauty. And again, I do want to stress the distinction here that Dao Tima, at least as far as Plato shows us in the Symposium, is not speaking immediately of God. Socrates will speak of the God, a monotheistic God, but Socrates, at least explicitly, never really allows us to understand the relationship between the God and the eternal ideas, these metaphysical universals that are actually more real than the particulars that we engage with here. And so at least what we get in the Symposium is a divine beauty itself, which is the idea of beauty, the metaphysically real universal of beauty itself. Now, there's probably many things there that you want to say, but isn't that God? Well, we have to ask ourselves, you know, can this natural understanding of spiritual ascent that we see in Plato's Symposium be adopted into Christianity? In other words, is Plato observing something about the human condition that is true, that is a true reflection upon how God has made man? Because while Plato is bereft of divine revelation, he is not bereft of the reason that God gave him, of the intellect that God gave him, or his capacity to observe the creation that God made, and so do not. We should not be quick to dismiss the pagans and their observation of reality. But maybe as a caveat, before we jump immediately to the question of Christianity, we could stop and ask whether Diotima's lesson in erotics is actually even what Plato believes. So let's jump into Section 4, what Plato believes about Eros. Plato never actually directly states his beliefs. He teaches through the dialogue of his characters and the details of his dramas. Moreover, the lessons of his dialogues are often tailored to Socrates's interlocutors. So the rhetoric, in other words, the dialogues are all recording a certain conversation. And what's said in those conversations between Socrates and whatever interlocutor he's discussing things with is always tailored to that particular interlocutor. Just like if you were sitting at a coffee shop and someone asked you a question about Jesus or a question about God, how you would answer them is. Is probably going to be tailored to the person sitting in front of you because you understand their desires, their interests, et cetera. How you emphasize certain things is always tailored to the person you're speaking of. And what's interesting is that Plato's dialogues, even though in written form, carry the same natural element of a human conversation, but can be very confusing to people who are used to reading philosophy. That simply is, I am a philosopher, and this is what I mean. Plato does not fall into that category. He's very indirect. You know, in many of the dialogues, he actually offers no positive teaching, at least explicitly, and simply tears down common false understandings of an idea. In other words, you could argue that simply because Dao Tima teaches something about Eros does not necessarily mean that Plato believes it to be true. He could be offering that teaching for various other pedagogical reasons. Yet Dao Tema's dialogue with the young Socrates does make universal claims about the human condition and the erotic, that eros is common to all and a co worker with human nature. And Dao Tima makes foundational anthropological claims about who man is and what man desires. Claims that a nascent west took seriously. It's notable that when Leo Strauss. I realize if you don't know who Leo Strauss is, that's fine for those who do, you know that every time he's brought up, it's pretty much a blood on the floor conversation about what he truly meant. But it is notable, I think, that when Leo Strauss gave his 1959 course on Plato's political philosophy, he actually elected to teach on the Symposium and not the more overtly political dialogues of the Republic, the statesman or the laws. Why? Well, he actually gives us two reasons. And again, what are we exploring right now? Again, just as an aside, what is it that we're exploring? Should we take seriously the anthropological claims of the Symposium? Or in other words, is Plato, through the mouth of Socrates, through the mouth of Diotima, actually trying to make claims upon the human condition of what man is universally speaking? Or in other words, is the Symposium and its conversation about erotics actually a conversation about the human condition or human nature? So first, the Symposium shows the victory of philosophy. So the Symposium could be seen as a contest for supremacy regarding wisdom between poetry and philosophy. Quoting Strauss, the general setting for the Symposium is a festive drinking ritual to celebrate the victory achieved by the young Athenian playwright Agathon. As we discussed earlier, he's the host of the Symposium. Moreover, it's notable, the chief comic Athenian playwright, right, the chief comedian is present as well. Aristophanes. We read his. We discussed his plays the Clouds and also the Frogs on the podcast. And while Plato discusses poetry more in the Republic and in his laws than in the Symposium, it's only in the latter, the Symposium, where the poets, both tragic and comic, are assembled to compete against Socrates, against philosophy. So what does this mean? It means that for those who are familiar with reading Plato, there is a contest between poetry and philosophy. Which which one is the better teacher of mankind? Which one can better teach the polis? I think the answer is actually a poetic philosophy that we actually see in Plato himself, as we see implied in the Republic. And so what Strauss's claim here is is that we know there's this debate, this argument between poetry and philosophy, which one is the better teacher of mankind, but it's only in the Symposium, in which philosophy embodied by Socrates and then comedy embodied by Aristophanes and then tragedy embodied by Agathon are actually all together to compete with one another. And what do they compete about? They compete about Eros, and that should be taken seriously. In fact, Strauss actually claims that one may read the Symposium as quote the Platonic reply to Aristophanes and to the poets altogether. And his reply is about the human condition in the war between who teaches man the best. Again, you have to take this seriously. Overall, Strauss holds that in the Symposium, philosophy defeats poetry in the contest for supremacy Regarding wisdom. It means also that the right kind of philosophy is more truly poetic than poetry in the common sense of the term. To wit, the Symposium reveals the best course and man pursuing wisdom. It's the poetic philosophy of Plato and to the degree that's attributable to Socrates. 2nd and more Germane to our current exploration of Eros. The Symposium is about the nature of man. Strauss holds that there may be something natural which transcends the political dignity in which it gives politics its guidance. For example, natural law or natural right. What's he saying there? There might be something that's a universal, that's common to all man, that can actually inform our politics. If we better understand the human condition, we will better understand politics. He states, quote, the foundation of the political is somehow nature, and nature may be understood in different ways. And it's somehow the contention of Plato that the nature of man and in a way, the nature of the whole, is Eros. In sum, the subject of the Symposium is the foundation of the political, the natural. In other words, in the Symposium there is a truth about the nature of man and it is best discovered via the poetic philosophy of Plato. In shifting from Strauss explicitly, while Dao Tema's Ladder of Love is not exhaustive of the Symposium's teaching on erotics, you have to go back and how you really read the Symposium is you read it through. Once you understand the teaching of the Ladder of Love, you understand what Socrates sets forth, and then you have the reread it on all the prior speeches and use that as a barometer of where they are wrong or right, then see other insights into Eros. It's a beautifully rich dialogue. I can't wait to cover it on the podcast. But while you know in that Diotima's Letter of Love is not exhaustive of all the teachings of erotics in the Symposium, the Symposium does appear to be, and was historically received to be a claim of Anthropology, a universal claim about the nature of man and his desires. To the degree that Diotima's speech and all the speeches of the Symposium are indicative or at least image, the true Platonic notion of the condition of man is a matter of debate. But it is in the poetic dialectic of the drama that Plato hides his teachings. Yet the Platonic writings on Eros are only part of the West's erotic inheritance. The Hebrews had their own notion of the erotic and its role in imaging the spiritual. In fact, the primary image in the Bible of God's love for humanity is that of the erotic. So let's look at section 5. Eros in the Old Testament. So in the Greek SEPTUAGINT, so around 250 BC or so, the Old Testament canon, the word Eros is actually only used twice in the entire Greek Old Testament. Yet what is sparse in word count is fundamental in concept. And I cannot stress this enough because there tend to be a lot of very flat arguments here. You can have a concept that is attached to a word in one culture and that word not be present in another culture, but the concept still be present. So it's not sufficient enough to say the Septuagint doesn't use Eros. The New Testament doesn't use Eros. Therefore there is no Eros in the Bible. That is a very flat reading that precludes the understanding that different words can express the same concept. So when we jump from the Greek to the Hebrew, it is good as we are here to first look and say, well, is that word here? And was that word used when it was translated into Greek? But that's not exhaustive of the journey. The journey then has that second leg which is but is the concept of the erotic present. And that's where studying the erotics of the Old Testament is actually incredibly rewarding because the erotic, particularly marital arrows, the erotic of marriage is the primary image of God's love for mankind in the Old Testament. And so what do I mean by this? You know, quickly sketching this out. You know, God's covenant with Israel at Mount Sinai is a marriage ritual. God is the husband, Israel is the bride. In his defense of Eros, Pope Benedict observes that the prophets described God's passion for his people using boldly erotic images. In Ezekiel, God looks upon Israel as a young woman arrived in maidenhood. He tells her, your breasts were formed and your hair had grown, yet you were naked and bare. And when I passed you by, I looked upon you and behold, you were of the age of love. God takes her as his own and enters into covenant with her, bathes her and clothes her as his bride. And by the way, I'll link it in the show notes this article, but I have all the Bible verses and parentheticals here for those who want to look at the citations. And even furthermore, when Israel commits idolatry, God condemns her for adultery. She plays the role of the harlot, offering her beauty to her lustful neighbors. God betrays himself as an angry, jealous husband of an unfaithful wife. The harlotries of God's people bring only restlessness and disorder. It's only by satiating in God that there is rest and happiness. It's love within the marital covenant. Okay, so just as a summary, what have we just said in the Old Testament? When you think about what is the primary analogy between God and his people, Israel? It is definitely a marriage covenant. Sinai is that marriage covenant. It is a wedding. They come together as husband and wife. And this is made explicitly, as I mentioned, and as Pope Benedict commented on, throughout the prophets as well. This is the running analogy throughout salvation history in the Old Testament is the erotic image of husband and wife. And at times using that erotic imagery explicitly, as we see in Jeremiah. I've always found that really fascinating that in the concept of that marital love, that idolatry is then condemned and expressed as a type of adultery, that in your heart you are committing adultery against God, your proper husband. And of course, you can't really talk about Eros in the Old Testament without thinking of the Song of Songs, where erotic images in the literal sense serve as an image of God's love for his people in the allegorical sense. And again, Song of Songs is a good kind of test about how you read scripture. So again, we always read scripture according to the four senses. There's the literal first, then allegorical, then the moral, then the anagogical. We have a whole podcast going through how to read scripture, like Aquinas and Dante, if you're unfamiliar with how you approach this, because a lot of people are deeply uncomfortable with the erotics in the Song of Songs, and they immediately want to jump to the allegorical. Well, it's. It's between God and Israel. It's between Christ and his church. Those can all very much be true. But it's also a literal love poem with very sexual images in it between a husband and a wife. And again, we get messed up because we on the road, we either drive off on one side into Puritanism or another side into pornography. It's very difficult for us to receive erotics as an image of God's love or a proper image of spirituality. But this is deeply ingrained into the Christian imagination. It's deeply ingrained into Scripture. And as we kind of contemplate this, you know, recall that Plato presents Eros as a love of ascent, an erotic awakening by the body of the beloved that can lead to the higher beauties of nobility and wisdom until it satiates the divine beauty itself. Similarly, the Old Testament presents the erotic as an image of the divine, where the arrows between husband and wife images a divine reality, the relationship between God and his chosen people. And to act contrary to this relationship is spiritual adultery. So there's some striking similarities between how Plato speaks about Eros and how the Old Testament speaks about Eros in the relationship between the human and the divine. But let's look at Section 6, which is the Old Testament erotics and Plato. So let's kind of make this more clear. Let's explore it a little bit. So Plato presents an Eros as an anthropological claim, as a claim on the condition of man. It's a love, a primordial love kneaded into the heart of humanity that desires beauty, satisfaction and happiness. Eros, as Bloom observes, is the clearest and most powerful inclination towards a lost wholeness. So the question here I would ask is, does the Old Testament ever show us such an existential desire in humanity? Does the Old Testament ever show us that there is a desire for a lost wholeness within side of man and to. The answer to that is certainly yes. As Pope Benedict XVI observes, the first narrative on the human condition in Scripture tethers the concepts of the erotic and existential wholeness. What is more explicitly taught in Plato through the words and images of his dialogue is actually presented to us in the images of the Bible in Genesis. They're both very poetic and they're both teaching us in different ways, but they're both making similar claims upon the human condition. And so where do we see this tethering in Scripture between erotics and lost wholeness? Well, we see it in Adam. Adam is alone amongst the animals. And in response, God creates woman from man. And Adam states, this at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh, and she shall be called woman because she was taken out of man. Notably, the two become one in marriage. A man leaves his father and mother and cleaves to his wife, and they become one flesh. According to Pope Benedict 16th, this shows that Eros quote is somehow rooted in man's Very nature. End quote. Like Hesiod, Eros binds together many into one, and this union brings forth the many. Again, that was very poetic. So what does that mean? It means that man and woman come together. The many, they come together as one, as one flesh, and then out of the one comes many, the fecundity, the children, the offspring. What we saw somewhat darkly in Hesiod's theogony of the generative role of Eros is then also present in Genesis in the image of Adam and Eve, as Eve is presented immediately in the context of marriage and the two becoming one flesh and then producing more flesh or more offspring. Again, Eros is always fecund. No matter what kind of eros it is, there is always a fecundity when your erotic desire is satiated. So though Plato's Eros and the role of the erotic in the Old Testament are similar, there are two notable preliminary distinctions. So how are they different? First, the Old Testament holds marriage to be the proper end of Eros. I know some of you are just waiting to scream this because if you're familiar with the Symposium, you understand that a lot of those conversations, and to a degree, even Diotimas, is characterized or limned by pederasty between homosexual relationships between an older man and a younger man. That's like, somewhat contextualized also in a mentor relationship. It was incredibly culturally common at the time that Plato was writing in Socrates is Living. And that's kind of an entire discussion in of itself. And here we've mainly looked at the principles. But one of the things we have to take seriously then, when we shift over to Hebrew erotics, if we want to use that term, the erotic images that we receive in the Old Testament is that they are immediately contextualized within marriage. And so Pope Benedict 16th comments. From the standpoint of creation, Eros directs man towards marriage to a bond which is unique and definitive. Thus and only thus does it fulfill its deepest purpose. Corresponding to the image of a monotheistic God is monogamous marriage. Marriage based on exclusive and definitive love becomes the icon of the relationship between God and his people, and vice versa. God's way of loving becomes the measure of human love. End quote. So here we see that marriage is the end of the erotic, the love between husband and wife. And this marital eros images a heavenly Eros, the love between God and his bride, his chosen people. Though Diotima does speak of the eros of male and female regarding offspring, marriage is not presented to the degree and at the strength that it is in the Old Testament, sometimes as a caricature. They'll say that the Greeks often speak of friendship and the Hebrews often speak of marriage. But what is only slightly spoken of between husband and wife in the fecundity of offspring and erotics by Diotima in the ladder of love, particularly when she speaks of the fecundity of Eros and its immortality, is a dominant theme in the Old Testament, where it's very clear that the natural end of your appetitive erotics, your desire for things that are pleasurable, the zenith is marriage of husband and wife. And again, I would argue that that lesson is subtly present in Diotima, but it's shown to us in a much greater sense with inside of the Old Testament. So, second, what's the second way that there's a distinction, or at least a preliminary way, there's a distinction between what we see in Plato and what we see in the Old Testament is the final end of Eros is not an idea, but a person. The impersonal divine beauty itself atop the ladder of love, as Deotima teaches, is actually the personal God. And that God is beauty itself. As Dionysius declares, he is an ancient beauty, ever new. As St. Augustine praises him, Dao Tima's divine beauty itself is perfected in God. The all beauty. The erotic in the Old Testament becomes thoroughly relational, as God is not only the object of your Eros, but also loves you in return and articulates his love in erotic images. Moreover, you are responding to his love, and he loved you before the foundations of the earth were laid. Now, please understand, what this is trying to say is that at the top of the pagan understanding of erotics in the Symposium, at least the best that they got was that it was a divine beauty itself, the idea of beauty. But the idea of beauty is not a God. The divine beauty itself is not a personal God. Christianity, though, and particularly even in the images of the Old Testament, with the marital images between Israel and God, presents the final end of Eros as a personal God, that God is beauty itself. As we see in the later Neoplatonic thinkers, what that means is, and as I mentioned, it permeates the entire erotic ascent of the soul in the context of relationship, that the relationship to the divine beauty itself is not simply one that's philosophical or intellectual, but it's relational, that you both know the divine beauty itself and he knows you back. For the divine beauty itself is God. And this is an incredibly important point, because what it means then is that it is God that ultimately satisfies your natural love. It's God that ultimately brings rest to your heart. And you have to know him in a personal way, a conceptual way, or an intellectual way will not be fulfilling. And I think that's one of the reasons or one of the lessons that we get in the Old Testament. But what about the New Testament? Now we're continue to explore these ideas, but we need more material. We need to continue. So what about the New Testament? Well, you can read the Bible according to a simple principle. The Old Testament foreshadows the New, and the New Testament perfects the Old. And again, this is an incredibly important principle, even when you're dealing with the four senses that we mentioned earlier. So as such, one would expect the erotic images in the Old Testament to be perfected in the New Testament because those old images would be foreshadowing something. And we would see them received in the New Testament and perfected in some way. And of course, this is just the case. This is exactly what happens. In fact, despite the spiritual harlotries of Israel, God promises his chosen people an everlasting covenant, and he fulfills this promise with Jesus Christ. So let's look at point number seven, eros in the New Testament. So as the Old Testament uses marital eros to image the spiritual union of God and humanity, so too does the New Testament. It takes up the exact same image. So St. Paul teaches that the husband is the head of the wife, as Christ is the head of the church. His body, as the church is subject to Christ, so let wives be subject to everything to their husbands. That's Ephesians 5. In other words, Christ is the groom and the church is the bride. Just like we saw in the Old Testament there was God in Israel. We see now a perfection of this picture. They become one flesh, with Christ as the head and the Church as the body. You, as a member of the Church, receive His body and become one with him in the Holy Eucharist. As Jesus said, he who eats my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me, and I in him. Though both Testaments speak of God's union with man in marital terms, the New Testament offers a new reality of intimacy to be wedded to the Godhead through the body of Christ, the church. You, as a member of the body of Christ, participate in the divine life of God. And this participation is called grace. Grace is the divine life in us. It's our participation in the divine life. And so you might not have ever thought about this before. You might again might Feel somewhat uncomfortable with it. But the Holy Sacrament, the Holy Eucharist. Right, the Blessed Sacrament, in a certain way, that whole relationship with Jesus Christ is all imaged inside of marriage. So just like husband and wife come together and become one flesh, so too do you and Christ come together. There's a commingling of the fleshes in the Blessed Eucharist and you become one flesh with him. Even in Holy Baptism, you are washed. Just like God washed his bride Israel before entering into covenant with her, so too in the sacraments of the New Testament, you are washed before you receive the Holy Eucharist. All of these things image one another. And if you really want to go deep into it, you should wonder next time at the Easter Vigil why your pastor takes the Easter candle and then dips it three times into the holy water font and then leaves it there before he baptizes people in it. So before, think of that imagery. So before the waters of that holy water font, the baptismal font, become fecund and start creating new creatures, new life in Jesus Christ. By baptizing all these adults entering into Easter vigil before that fecundity can happen, the Easter candle has to enter into the baptismal waters three times and then stay there. It's a beautiful but subtle imagery, but one many people witness, but don't actually understand what is actually being imaged in that scene. Okay, where else can we look? We can also look to St. John the Baptist calling Christ the bridegroom. Christ uses the bridegroom as an image of himself in parables. St. Paul speaking of the church as the betrothed to Christ. And St. John describes the wedding feast of the Lamb, Jesus Christ at the end of the age. But St. Paul never uses the word eros. So even though this marriage image is kneaded deeply into both the Old Testament New Testament, St. Paul never actually uses the word eros. In fact, the word eros is never used in the entire New Testament. Despite all of these images of marital eros, the New Testament actually uses another Greek term agape, for love. So in brief, what is the relationship between eros and agape? So here we move to point number seven, the Agape of St. Paul and the eros of Plato. So in the New Testament, St. Paul uses the Greek term agape to describe Christian love, a self sacrificial, divine love. So our question here is, how can the self love of erotic desire harmonize with a selfless love of agape? Or is eros as a need love incompatible with Christian love of self sacrifice? Of agape. What is the relationship between Eros and Agape? Because in a lot of ways they seem to be polar opposites. One is a need love, one is a give love, a self sacrificial love. Okay, so I think there's kind of three general answers to this. Not that I agree with all three, but these are some different camps, if you will. First, it's that St. Paul's Christian Agape is actually a triumph over Plato's pagan arrows, and any mixture thereof is a betrayal of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. This view is common in a lot of Protestant circles. But as Pope Benedict 16th observes, this tends to ignore the erotic reality of both the Old Testament and the New Testament and that of the theologies of historic Christianity. It also tends to ignore God as the author of nature and the nature of mankind, and thus what is natural and supernatural share the same author. In sum, this entire article, this entire podcast, is actually a rebuttal of this position. So just to make clear, what is this position? Basically, that any talk of Eros in Christianity is a corruption. Any talk of Eros in Christianity is a conflation between Plato's pagan thought in this pure biblical thought of St. Paul. What Christians have is agape, what the pagans taught with Eros. And they are competitive, they're antagonistic, they do not come together. You should be able to answer this already by this point in the podcast. That one of the problems with this is immediately twofold. One, that just where Eros isn't mentioned, where Eros is not mentioned by word, it can be shown by concept. And so simply saying eros is not used as a term is not conclusive or dispositive on the question of whether there is a spiritual reality of erotics in the text. And two, we have to take seriously that God is the author of nature. And the philosophers were observing nature to make their observations. They didn't have the Book of Divine Revelation, but they did have the Book of Nature. And we have to take that as seriously as we take God being the Creator. And just as a side note, there's a very famous book called Agape in Eros, which came out, I think in 1953 or so, which is really kind of the. The Protestant text that that says these two are completely competitive. Eros and agape are not harmonious at all. And a lot of people think that when Pope Benedict XVI was writing Deus caritas est defending Eros at the beginning of his encyclical, he's actually responding to that book. And it's that book that he's trying to knock off a pedestal in defense of Eros. Okay, but that's the first one. What's the second camp? The second camp in understanding or at least debating the relationship between eros and agape is that they're actually largely indistinguishable. So what's important here to note is that neither Plato nor St. Paul actually invented the terms eros or agape, respectively. They were already common terms that were already used for various different subjects. And What Plato and St. Paul did is they took common terms and turned them into a term of art. They turned them into a very specific term that had a very specific definition, one philosophically speaking and one theologically speaking. Then, to make it even more confusing, their adoption of those two terms were not even uniform in Christianity. Dionysius, for example, gives a defense of using the term eros in Christianity, and then almost exclusively uses it instead of agape. Furthermore, considerations must be given for how the two terms translate into Latin, as with St. Augustine. Someone like St. Augustine seems very impacted by the philosophy of erotics, particularly through the Neoplatonic schools. How's the beginning of the Confessions open? Our hearts are restless until they rest in thee. That's a deeply erotic statement. And actually the entire Confessions can be seen as the ascent of the erotic love from the appetitive, the struggle with lust, up into the divine, of the beauty ever ancient, ever new. His entire Confessions text is the text of the ascent. However, he doesn't use the term eros. Why? Because he's writing in Latin. So again, where is the word used versus where is the concept used? And then these things are not monolithic. So the second camp has legitimacy. It's basically that the various uses of eros and agape are multifaceted. And you can't just make a strict historical claim that agape has always been used like this, and eros has always been used like this. And the second approach, I mean, I want to argue the second approach is legitimate. It's a legitimate concern. However, the various uses of eros and agape do not preclude there being agape, dominative usage of both terms of both agape, both eros, and also that there is a harmony existing between these two loves in the greater Christian tradition. And so, and really, that's an introduction to the third camp, and that's the camp of this podcast, of this discussion of rediscovering holy Eros, is that eros and agape exist in harmony as two separate and distinct movements of the soul. And so Pope Benedict 16th, drawing from the Christian tradition, sees eros and agape as not only non competitive, but as a necessary spiritual harmony. So Following Pope Benedict 16th here, he sees that taking the dominative usage of eros and agape as concepts within Christianity presents a picture of the human condition in which these two loves are two different movements of the soul. Eros is the ascent of the soul to God. Agape is a descent of the soul from God. But what does this mean? What did Pope Benedict 16th mean by this? So let's look at number nine, Eros as the ascent to God. So eros is an ascent. It's a desire to satiate in beauty and be happy. If you're skilled in erotics, you climb the ladder of love towards God. Beauty itself. Eros is your natural love, enkindled in you by God to lead you back to Him. And that if you get one thing, please get this, your natural erotic appetite. That infinite desire in you, for beauty was enkindled in you by beauty itself to try and lead you back to Him. That's why you can't view your erotic appetite as a curse. Because you weren't meant to try and satiate yourself and become happy on a myriad of finite things. You were always meant to ascend and climb back to God. People are only happy when they try and stay at the realm of these lower beauties and don't ever ascend to higher beauties to go towards God. In other words, love is a good circle, as the medieval Neoplatonists teach us. For your infinite erotic appetite seeks after an infinite beauty, and this alone is God, the ancient beauty ever new. You hear the voice say that you are loved and you ascend to the divine beloved, as St. Augustine famously states. And as I mentioned earlier, our hearts are restless, O God, until they rest in Thee. So your natural Aaronic love leads your soul from lower beauties to higher beauties on the ladder of love. It is an ascent perfected by virtue. For the intellect loves truth and is perfected by prudence. The spirited loves nobility and is perfected by courage. And your repetitive loves pleasure and is perfected by temperance. But where's justice? For St. Augustine, following the Platonic tradition, justice arranges all the parts of the soul and their loves. It is the virtue of order, proportionality and harmony. It beautifies the soul. Justice is the crown of the soul. And eros is always fecund. We have said this so. Thus, when a part of the soul satiates its erotic desire in the proper Love, it produces some new beauty. The erotic desire of the intellect for truth produces wisdom. The eros of the thaumotic for nobility produces glory and honor, and the eros of the appetitive for pleasure produces children, as its highest end of sexual eros is offspring in marriage. So the Christian tradition also acknowledges how the feminine form can first spark erotic desire, but also serve as an icon of divine beauty. In addition to marital eros serving as an image of the divine. In the Old Testament, man's erotic desire for the feminine is also paralleled with man's desire for wisdom by personifying wisdom as feminine. So one of the reasons this is very natural to do is because the erotic appetite for the feminine and the appetitive parallels the erotic appetite for wisdom in the intellectual and in the masculine mind, then it makes a lot of sense, even if unconsciously, to then personify wisdom as an elusive woman, as a woman that has to be pursued. And so wisdom in the Old Testament, wisdom calls you to love her, and all that you may desire cannot compare to her. As Proverbs says, in the Platonic tradition, one should take seriously that it was a woman, Diotima, a foreign priestess that Socrates presents as the teacher of erotics in the dialogue of all Athenian men. So there Diotima is not only a teacher of erotics, but can be seen as an image of erotic desire itself. Plato will also speak of philosophy as a noble woman who is courted by poor lovers. The most famous example in all of Christendom, of course, of a woman being an icon of God's beauty is Beatrice in the Divine Comedy. Dante, the pilgrim, is willing to traverse hell and Purgatory to see her again. And at the top of Mount Purgatory, she explains her vocation. Her beauty was an image of the divine beauty, and it was intended to lead Dante back to God. Okay, so that was a summary. In the Christian understanding of Eros as this natural love that causes you to ascend, it moves through the soul. It has natural fecundities. It is sparked by the love of a woman. And we also see a tradition of women serving as icons of God's beauty. And if you're interested in that, want to explore it, I've written a whole separate article on Eros, the erotic and feminine beauty, over on the Ascent. It's a fascinating concept to explore and take seriously. Okay, but most of that, as we talk about Eros, is still contained within side nature, but we're also offered grace to participate in the divine life. So what is the relationship between eros and grace. How does grace help Eros pursue God? And so this is point number 10, Eros and Christian grace. So grace, like we mentioned, is a participation of the soul and divine life. And God offers you grace through his sacraments. When Eros finds God and his religion, Christianity, the lover stands before the beloved. He washes her in the baptismal waters and offers her to become one flesh with him. In the Holy Eucharist. Your natural Eros is lifted to the supernatural. Grace opens the erotic to an intimacy otherwise unimagined by grace. The erotic desire of the human heart is enraptured in an unmerited wonder whose bliss is rivaled only by the sublime dread of the finite falling into the infinite. Your Eros satiates in the endless elation of union with the divine beloved. In other words, the natural love of Eros is baptized in grace and continues its desire for ascent within the divine life of God. The natural erotic ascent is lifted up into a supernatural ascent that both heals Eros of its disorders and assists in the ascent beyond human nature. The erotic enters God and ascends within the mystery of the divine. And so, in short, what is this saying? It's saying that your Eros is a natural love that can only ascend to God to a certain degree, the degree that, say, Plato saw where you ascend the ladder of love. You study philosophy, you see the divine beauty itself, the idea of beauty, and you see there's an infinite wonder. Okay, well, that's not the Christian end of the story. For Christians, you're actually invited then, by grace, to participate relationally with the divine beauty itself, with God. But here's the thing. When you're invited into that, that's not the end of the journey. In a lot of ways, that's just the beginning. Your erotic appetite continues to satiate on the divine, and you continue to ascend higher and higher and higher in your relationship with God, because unlike all the finite beauties of this life, he cannot be exhausted. And so your inexhaustible erotic appetite continues to ascend in God and fall into that incredible mystery that is the ancient beauty ever new. Okay, so where, though, do we see this described in Christianity? One classic example would be St. Gregory of Nyssa. In the three hundreds, he adopted the grammar of Eros and expressed its spiritual pattern of ascent in various ways. He describes the erotic imagery of the Song of Songs as an analog to the soul climbing the ladder of love toward virtue, the beloved. In his masterpiece, the life of Moses, St. Gregory speaks of Moses ascending Mount Sinai until he enters the bright darkness of God. He speaks of the wings of the soul soaring to celestial delights, or even the soul climbing a great chain that links the soul to God. The nature of eros, St. Gregory observes, is like a flame. It's always tending upward. He even portrays Christ as an archer, even like Eros, which, by the way, the Roman name for Eros is Cupid. And so Christ is even like an archer shooting the lover with an arrow of erosion to draw her towards himself. Other primary examples of this erotic pattern of spiritual ascent in Christian writings would be St. Augustine's confessions, as we discussed the writings of Dionysius, and also the famous ladder of divine ascent by St. John Climachus. In addition to the theme of ascent, another erotic motif is found in bridal mysticism. Bridal mysticism, drawing from the reality of Christ and His Church, presents the union of God in the soul within the imagery of marital arrows. So it pulls heavily from the Old Testament and the perfection of the Old Testament in the New Testament, as we saw in Ephesians 5. So the soul has an intimate longing for God that seeks to satiate in the divine and be transformed. The mystics pull from the Song of Songs in Ephesians to show how the soul is like a beloved yearning to return to her lover. And when the soul does rest in God, it is an ecstatic experience. Some fundamental texts on bridal mysticism would include the Sermon of the Song of songs in the 1100s by Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, the dialogue in the 1300s by Saint Catherine of Siena, and the Living Flame of love in the 1500s by St. John of Cross. Eros is your natural love that desires to satiate in God beauty itself. And when it is offered the divine grace, it allows the soul to ascend to a higher, more intimate union with God, an opportunity made available only through Jesus Christ. Now, we haven't lost our question, though. This is Eros. What is Eros? An ascent. And then it's Eros with grace. And now we're ready to answer, but what is Eros alongside agape? If this is all Eros and our relationship with God that continues to call us higher and higher into relationship with him, then what's agape? Well, let's look. Section 11. Agape as the descent from God. The Latin word for agape is keritos, or in English it's charity. It's the mother of all virtues, the highest amongst faith and hope, the three theological virtues. Agape is not natural. Agape is a supernatural gift given to Those who have met God and entered into the divine life, into grace. Eros and agape are two different movements of love. Eros fills your soul and agape pours it into others. Eros is a need love, while agape is a give love. Eros is a self love, while agape is a selfless love. Eros helps you find God. Agape allows you to give God's love to others. Eros and Agape cannot be competitive as they have the same author, God. So Plato's Symposium captures the natural erotic power to satiate in beauty and be happy. But it's actually Jacob's ladder that better captures the full movement of love, the natural and the supernatural. In his dream at Bethel, this is in Genesis. The patriarch sees angels ascending and descending a ladder between heaven and Earth. Pope Benedict 16th, drawing from the early Church fathers, sees this as an allegory of the two loves of mankind, the ascent of Eros and the descent of agape. Eros is the need to be satiated and agape is the need to be self sacrificial. You can see a similar spiritual pattern in Moses ascending Mount Sinai to God and then descending to serve Israel or Christ ascending Mount Tabor and then descending into his passion. Eros is the call to ascend and agape is the call to descend. The love the soul receives from God is given to others. What is freely received is freely given. Eros receives. Agape gives two beautiful movements of the soul, non competitive, in harmony with one another, drawing you deeper into God's love and then allowing you to be diffusive of God's love to all around you. And on that point let's look at 12 Eros and the greatest commandments. Jesus teaches that the greatest commandment is to love God. And the second is you shall love your neighbor as yourself. You should note well that your self love your Eros is the moral standard for how you love your neighbor. In other words, the erotic is central to the Christian ethic. The soul comes to love God and in that love knows itself. It is only in that true and holy erosion, a self that loves itself as God loves it, that the neighbor is loved well by being loved as yourself. Self love is not a selfish love. It is a call for the soul to climb the ladder of love and become more beautiful as Christ is beautiful, and then sharing that beauty with others. And sometimes this is very surprising to people that eros plays a central role in the Christian ethic. So let's look at Our final section, section 13. Ascend Eros as Your new beginning. So Eros is a primary desire to satiate in beauty and be happy. The restlessness of the human heart rests in the divine beauty. The erotic is not reducible to sexuality, as Eros is the soul's natural call to ascend from lesser beauties to greater beauties, an ascent guided by virtue. It is the natural ascendancy that can be baptized and taken up into divine wonders unimagined. The Christian tradition rightly holds Eros and agape not as competitives, but as two harmonious movements of love, A perfection of Plato's ladder and the love of Jacob's ladder. Eros reveals the spiritual path of ascent in becoming godlike, more Christlike, the image of the invisible God. To recover holy Eros is therefore to recover the very mystery at the heart of the human condition. And this is what you're invited to today, to see all the beauty around you as an icon of God's beauty. Whether it's the beauty of your beloved, the beauty of nobility, honor, glory, fame, and human excellence, or maybe it's the beauty in philosophy or the beauty in wisdom, all of these are icons. They're all pointing you towards God, beauty itself. All of these things are an invitation to love that which your natural love naturally craves, that your infinite erotic appetite would satiate in the infinite beauty itself. It's only there that you find rest and happiness. And so you are called to climb the ladder of love, to take your erotics seriously for the sake of your soul, for the sake of your marriage, for the sake of your neighbor, and for the sake of your own existence as a creature given the gift of erotic love, to lead you back to the one who gave it to you, God. And so this is. This is but a quick sketch, a quick latticework upon which your intellect can start to grab and grow in the understanding, in the richness that is the tradition of Eros in Western culture. It's something that very much led me to love Plato and take Plato seriously, something that's really driving my own intellectual pursuits here on Ascend, the Great Books podcast, and something that I'm very much looking forward to exploring as we move into the Republic, into the Symposium, into the Timaeus, and into, say, even Aristotle and the Neoplatonics, into scripture, the Romans, etc. There is something here about the human condition that we have to take quite seriously. And if you can understand Eros, you're going to understand something about humanity. And if you can understand that, it's going to inform every intellectual pursuit that you have it's going to inform your relationships. It's going to form your relationship with God. It is very much worth your time and attention for those who are trying to take this life seriously. And so I'll end it there. I will. I promise you I will stop talking, even though I could go on for much longer. But I appreciate those putting up with me. I'm a little under the weather, but next week we do start our study of these Platonic dialogues. So four short, strange, beautiful, wonderful, little short dialogues that will help prepare you for a lot of the conversations in Plato's Republic. And so the first one we're going to start reading is Hipparchus. So go ahead, start reading that. We'll discuss it next week. Some of these are very short guys. I'm talking about eight, 10 pages. They are short. Not saying they're easy, but they are short. And so we'll discuss them on a podcast each week with a different group of people. Dr. Grabowski is going to come and guide us through these. I'm very much looking forward to it. And then we'll get into Short Story September and then into Players Republic. And that will guide our studies for almost a year. And I'm very much looking forward to it. Very much looking to ascending with all of you to what is true, good and beautiful. So go check us out on X, YouTube, Facebook and Patreon, and we will see you guys next week. Next week. Thank you.