Eros, Eucharist, and the Poetics of Desire

Introduction

In some sense, Georges Bataille is surely right that “all eroticism has a sacramental character.”¹ Bataille’s point, of course, is that just as sacraments bridge the chasm between divine transcendence and creaturely immanence, so erotic desire substitutes the “isolated discontinuity” of individual existence for the “profound continuity” of sexual union.² For theological purposes, however, one might think that the wisdom in Bataille’s claim could also bear the inversion of its terms: all sacramentality has an erotic character. Catholicism, for example, has long construed marriage as “the sacrament of the covenant of Christ and the Church” and sexual intimacy within marriage as a form of communion both physical and spiritual.³ Something similar goes for the other sacraments, most notably the Eucharist, which Aquinas calls the “sacrament of love” because through it we are “made perfect in union with Christ.”⁴ And yet if sacramentality and eroticism share a common quest for wholeness and communion, it is precisely as quest rather than satisfaction that they belong together. As Socrates tells Agathon in the Symposium, everyone who desires “desires what is not at hand and what is not present, and what he does not have, and what he himself is not, and what he lacks.”⁵ Socrates’ lapidary account of eros as lack or privation will require significant nuancing, but even this initial formulation casts into sharp relief the erotic character of sacramentality. Sacraments, after all, function as sacraments only to the extent that the divine presence to which they point remains imperfectly realized. In fact, even in those traditions that emphasize sacramental efficacy and “real presence,” the Eucharist itself is nonetheless also a sacrament of absence: one celebrates Holy Communion because Christ has not yet come again and because the kingdom of God has not yet been fully realized. Every Eucharist is therefore “erotic” in Socrates’ sense: a longing for what is absent, a yearning for what is not yet fully at hand.⁶

In a moving and sophisticated poem called “The City without Laura” (1938), the Argentine poet Francisco Luis Bernárdez (1900– 78) brings together these two themes—the erotic character of sacramentality and the sacramental character of eros—in a complex theological and poetic vision for which I shall have to justify the phrase a poetics of sacramental desire. Although Bernárdez is relatively unknown outside Argentina, his place among an influential group of twentieth-century Catholic poets, together with his theological and poetic sophistication, ought to make him an important point of reference for contemporary Catholic thought.⁷ Perhaps most crucially for the purposes of this essay, Bernárdez is equal parts sacramental poet and love poet. A student of Aquinas and Bonaventure, he was also influenced by the courtly love tradition and, more directly still, by Petrarch, a connection reinforced by the happy historical accident that his own wife, like Petrarch’s beloved, was named Laura.⁸ What I wish to argue is that, in “The City without Laura,” these two otherwise divergent streams, the romantic and the sacramental, flow together in such a way that Bernárdez’s understanding of eucharistic sacramentality comes to supply the implicit model for his experience of romantic desire. More interesting still, if romantic eros finds its model in the Eucharist, then for Bernárdez both depend upon a version of eros even more basic: the intrinsically erotic character of language. By linking the erotic, the sacramental, and the linguistic-poetic in this fashion, Bernárdez offers, so I want to suggest, not merely an account of sacramental desire, but a poetics of sacramental desire: a vision of eros that sees the process of linguistic meaning-making as itself erotic and hence as deeply implicated in our understanding of desire.

I make this argument in three parts, beginning with an overview of the erotic character of sacramentality (part 1) and then turning to a detailed reading of “The City without Laura” (part 2). In the third part, I argue that Bernárdez’s vision of the erotic character of both language and sacramentality opens upon a series of...