Abstract
Feminist theologian and ethicist Margaret D. Kamitsuka has written a prismatic and lyrical study of the relationship between eros and shame in Christian attitudes towards desire. She spreads her net far and wide in selecting scriptural, philosophical, theological, mystical and literary sources to inform her quest, following the trail of eros through the texts of Western Christianity and its cultural derivatives by way of imaginative associations and resonances rather than systematic analysis. The weaving together of seemingly unrelated sources rests on the premise that “A text’s meanings echo down many corridors of time and place.” She writes: All it takes is for two texts to meet. Their juxtaposition opens up a flow of ideas, images, and connections (even unconscious drives) that disrupt settled beliefs, societal customs, and sexual morality. (Ch. 2)
Steering a path between the suspicion of erotic desire that informs traditional theologies, and its uncritical celebration in some contemporary theologies, Kamitsuka approaches eros as a powerful and chaotic drive in human relationships, revealing a truth that resists any divinising gloss. However disruptive sexual desire might be, “humans are carnal sexual beings with deeply embedded and near-universal-seeming drives. … The Christian tradition has misunderstood and maligned this fundamental, God-given aspect of human nature” (Intro.). Christianity’s emphasis on self-sacrificing and kenotic agape over and against other forms of love has deprived it of its capacity to accommodate the positive aspects of self-love and desire associated with the truth of eros.
Kamitsuka navigates the complex pitfalls of unbridled desire, while arguing for the liberation of the erotic aspects of divine and human love, friendship and attraction from the repressive influences of shame. She returns repeatedly to the claim that eros resists all attempts at moralisation or containment: “Eros’s essential unruliness lies in the body, outside of moral categories.” “Eros does not seek nuptial propriety but, rather, wild, reckless, blushing passion” (Ch. 1). Without denying its narcissistic undercurrents and tragic possibilities, Kamitsuka’s version of eros situates us in the direct firing line of Cupid’s bow, and all the armoury of our moral prohibitions and defences cannot deflect the arrow of irresistible, overwhelming desire—a desire that is ultimately a yearning for an unattainable love experienced through bodily touching and consummate union.
Augustine predictably makes numerous appearances as one whose “tortured introspection” in the quest for “a ‘teknê’ for managing lust” helped to fuel Christianity’s repressive orientation of desire away from eros towards agape by way of deferral, kenosis and transcendence: “Under the tutelage of agape, the church channeled desire for sexual pleasure toward a chaste desire for God” (Intro.). But Augustine does not stand under the kind of blanket condemnation that is a common over-simplification in some feminist writings. Kamitsuka credits him with giving “one of the first phenomenologies of desire”. Juxtaposing Augustine’s blushing and ashamed couple in Genesis 3 with Jane Austen’s blushing heroines, she argues persuasively that the blush is a form of erotic communication without the need for words. She suggests that “Augustine and Austen offer both right and wrong directions for theologizing about eros beyond the Janus-faced binary of sinful or sacred” (Ch. 1).
This pairing of an ancient Christian writer with an early modern novelist is typical of the idiosyncratic couplings that continue throughout the book. The medieval mystical longings of Angela of Foligno are read alongside the fervent spiritual writings of freeborn Black woman Rebecca Cox Jackson, who lived in Philadelphia in the early 1800s and associated herself with various Christian movements, including the African Methodist Episcopal Congregation, the Quakers, and the Shakers. Feminist psychoanalytic theory and Simone de Beauvoir provide the critical lens through which these writings are appraised in order to bring out the visceral eroticism of Foligno’s dictations to her sometimes reluctant scribe, and to suggest possible lesbian allusions in Jackson’s writings.
A lyrical reading of the Song of Songs argues persuasively that it is “a sad love song” of eros deferred, owing to the woman’s love for two men—the king to whom she is betrothed or married, and the shepherd who has aroused her erotic desire. Kamitsuka draws on Origen’s commentary and suggests links with magic realism as a way of interpreting the heightened sensuality of the Song: The magical-realist reading of the poem resists the erotic consummation that allegory, typology, and literalness permit and even encourage. The subtext of the Song is real desire, but erotic union remains imaginary. Hands touch and taste magically transformed fruit, but the beloved’s body is beyond reach…. The Song’s metaphors are lush, but its refrain is melancholic. (Ch. 3)
A chapter titled “Bethany, Gethsemane, and Sacrifice” offers the most theologically focused discussion in the book, reflecting at length on the conflict between divine impassability and the pathos of the Gospel accounts of Jesus’s earthly life. Kamitsuka considers the significance of eros for the doctrine of the Trinity, comparing progressive trinitarian theologies (from below), which draw on human experience to inform their reflections, and conservative theologies (from above), which posit a greater distinction between human and divine ways of loving. In the incarnation and resurrection of Christ, she sees a reconciling of apatheia and pathos through the paradoxical incorporation of the risen Christ’s incarnate humanity within the Trinity. Dante’s Divine Comedy provides a guide to reflecting on heavenly eros in his desire for Beatrice, while the encounter between Jesus and the woman who anointed him at Bethany casts the shadow of a tender erotic pathos over Gethsemane and Calvary. Echoing the Song of Songs, the woman’s anointing with its sensuous caresses deepens Jesus’s self-understanding of his own humanity, which becomes a lingering memory of loving desire in the experience of Gethsemane and the crucifixion. Kamitsuka imagines how the smell of the anointing nard is “the perfumed subtext” to Jesus’s lonely suffering, making him conscious of the vulnerability and eros of human love so that his dying becomes “the final divinized union of agape and self-love” (Ch. 4).
Such are the couplings and resonances that Kamitsuka sets in motion as she trawls the history of desire through its struggles against shame and repression, showing how time and again it eludes the censorial gaze and expresses itself in rapturous mystical exhalations and erotically charged revelations. But creative juxtapositions are sometimes offered at the expense of contextualised attention to historical and cultural differences, which left me with some frustrations. There are thousands of texts one could muster to argue for the persistence of eroticism in Christian devotion and literature, so that a selection such as this is necessarily somewhat scattergun and omits many potentially significant resources, including Pope Benedict XVI’s extensive reflections on eros in his 2005 encyclical, Deus Caritas Est. From Kamitsuka’s liberal/queer theological perspective, that encyclical would invite criticism, but it merits at least some comment in a book about the theology of eros. Perhaps this is an indication of subtle but significant differences between Catholic and Reformed approaches to questions of desire, embodiment and the material world, rooted in different theological interpretations of nature, grace and sacramentality. Kamitsuka is Presbyterian, and this might help to explain some of the lacunae which, for this Catholic reader, risked homogenising the representation of eros in the multi-faceted traditions of early and medieval Catholicism. I would, for example, have welcomed a discussion of the ways in which troubadour poetry and the Song of Songs suffused medieval Marian devotions with a potent eroticism.
But this is an engaging and beautifully written book, which offers a cornucopia of insights and imaginings that illuminate, provoke and stimulate further reflection. Its extensive notes attest to its scholarly underpinnings. I recommend it as a welcome invitation to probe more deeply into a theological understanding of the dynamics of desire and its discontents. Kamitsuka’s extravagant paean to the power of eros made this seventy-year-old grandmother want to repeat that famous line from the film When Harry Met Sally: “I’ll have what she’s having!”