Eros and the Christ: Longing and Envy in Paul's Christology

3 Kenōsis, or As the Snow Melts

3 Kenōsis Kenōsis, or As the Snow Melts I am on fire, and in my but now vacant heart Love sits his throne.1 Erotic Kenotic Imagine looking over the shoulder of an industrious poet of the sixth century, Paulus Silentiarius. When not occupied with the duties of a silentiary or composing an epic length poem on the architectural wonders of Agia Sophia, Paulus wrote some of the best erotic verse of his generation. Your curiosity is not directed at the poems he writes, however, but the ones he thumbs through. Were you to read his favorites and see the images that inspired his own writings, your eyes would gaze out over a sea of longing lovers. You would see lover after lover melt like wax, or just plain melt.2 Lovers sucked dry of blood, emaciated, and dissolved.3 You would see them dripping, pouring themselves out, overflowing, draining and drained dead.4 You would see lovers wither, shrivel, and grow old in a single day.5 How quickly they waste away!6 Blankly they stare with hollow eyes emptied by the shedding of tears.7 Empty are their hearts, and chasms gape where hearts once beat.8 Roasted, with only bones and hair left, their marrow and innards burned up, longing has consumed limbs and whole bodies.9 In a gesture of respect to Hesiod, Sappho, and Alcaeus, Paulus selects their jarring descriptor of love as “limb-gnawing” and tenderly puts it to use in his own poem about the infinite longing of two lovers.10 The Christian tradition is familiar with poured-out divinity; the condescension of the second person of the Trinity is standard stuff. Yet few theologians have understood Christ’s kenōsis in a poetic way.11 What if Paulus’s favorite texts shed light on Paul’s Christology and were allowed to inform 57 Christian doctrine? What if Christ were one of these erotic sufferers? What if Christ’s kenōsis in Phil 2:7 were the melting away of his body in love? No doubt it takes a deep bending of the contemporary Christian mind just to listen to these questions, since most interpreters have considered “he emptied himself” emphatically not erotic. Kenōsis has rather been a matter of voluntary self-limitation: Christ gave up, constrained, or hid divine power, privilege, and status. Few interpreters think the second person of the Trinity suffered kenōsis as a bodily experience, and fewer still believe that Christ’s emptying was the physical correlate of his falling in love with humanity. But haven’t they missed something? Read the texts Paulus read. From Sappho on, what lovers had in common was the melting of innards. Though relatively few of these sufferers are described with words having the κεν- root, the notion of emptying is nevertheless there when lovers pour themselves out, waste away, wither, or suffer any other physiological process involving liquefaction of the flesh. A few ancient texts say so explicitly. The fifth-century c.e. lexicographer Hesychius, for example, equated ἐρᾶσαι (“to pour forth,” “to vomit,” but also “to love”) with κενῶσαι.12 The fact that one and the same verb designates loving and the pouring forth of liquid is not surprising, given the long association of falling in love with the liquefaction and draining away of the lover’s organs. A lexicon of the thirteenth century (falsely ascribed to the twelfth-century historian Zonaras) reports that κενῶσαι means “to drain dry (ἀντλῆσαι)” and is equivalent to “to melt (τῆξαι).”13 Lastly, an eminent classicist of the recent past draws what he believes to be an obvious connection between love and liquid in eraō: “No satisfactory etymology has been found for eraō. . . . It was, I suggest, in origin just eraō ‘I pour out (liquid)’ . . . eramai would thus originally mean ‘I pour out myself, emit liquid’ (Middle) or ‘I am poured out’. . . .”14 The evidence so far has been philological. Staying with this approach a little longer, we call attention to a scholium on a passage from the Argonautica of Apollonius of Rhodes. In order to depict Medea’s love for Jason, Apollonius alluded to standard erotic motifs found in the archaic poets: . . . she cast her eyes down and smiled with divine sweetness. Her heart melted within her (χύθη δὲ οἱ ἔνδοθι θυμός) as she was uplifted by his praise, and she raised her eyes and looked into his face; yet she did not know what word to utter first, but was bursting to say everything at once. Casting off all restraint...