Toward a Theology of Eros: Transfiguring Passion at the Limits of Discipline

Notes

N O T E S I N T R O D U C T I O N : T H E O L O G Y A N D E R O S A F T E R N Y G R E N 兩 V I R G I N I A B U R R U S 1. Anders Nygren, Agape and Eros, trans. Philip S. Watson (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1953), 31. 2. Ibid., 52. 3. Ibid., 125–27. 4. Ibid., 49–50. 5. Ibid., 243. W H AT D O W E TA L K A B O U T W H E N W E TA L K A B O U T P L AT O N I C L OV E ? 兩 D A N I E L B OYA R I N This essay is dedicated to Carlin Barton. 1. Anders Nygren, Agape and Eros, trans. Philip S. Watson (New York: Harper & Row, 1969), 303. 2. This point is not uncontroversial; some would read ‘‘Platonic love’’ as a summation of all of the discourses on love in the Symposium, while others (notably Mark Jordan, in this volume) take the final speech of Alcibiades as more transformative and decisive than I would. 3. Nygren, Agape and Eros, 51. 4. Throughout much of the history of Western (English and German) writing about Greek love, it was understood implicitly and explicitly that no sex was involved. Kenneth Dover eloquently makes this point on the very first page of his book. One of the scholars whom he cites goes so far as to refer to ‘‘homosexuality’’ as a Dorian perversion adopted only by a tiny minority in Athens. K. J. Dover, Greek Homosexuality, rev. ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), vii. 376 兩 n o te s t o p a g es 4 – 6 5. Michel Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, vol. 2 of The History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley, rpt., 1984 (New York: Random House, Vintage, 1986), 245. 6. Dover, Greek Homosexuality, 163. 7. Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 9. 8. See also Gregory Vlastos, ‘‘The Individual as Object of Love in Plato,’’ in Platonic Studies (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1981), 39–40, whose view of the matter is very like Foucault’s. 9. Virginia Burrus, The Sex Lives of Saints: An Erotics of Ancient Hagiography (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003). 10. I am not, however, ascribing to Christianity some kind of contamination from Hellenism, as, e.g., in Nygren, Agape and Eros, 228–29 (for Catholicism ). Still less am I trying covertly to argue for a Judaism uncontaminated by Platonism, as perhaps I once did. For some preliminary revision of the claims I made in Carnal Israel: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993), see my ‘‘Why is Rabbi Yoh .anan a Woman? or, a Queer Marriage Gone Bad: ‘Platonic Love’ in the Talmud,’’ in Authorizing Marriage? Canon, Tradition, and Critique in the Blessing of Same-Sex Unions, ed. Mark Jordan (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005). 11. After doing so much work in the 1980s to disrupt this hyphenated term, I find myself coming back to it as a convenient moniker for the cultural complex formed by what might be called Jewish Hellenisms, including the various Judaisms of the first centuries B.C. and A.C., rabbinic Judaism and late ancient Christianity. See Daniel Boyarin, Border Lines: The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). 12. David M. Halperin, ‘‘Why Is Diotima a Woman?’’ in One Hundred Years of Homosexuality and Other Essays on Greek Love (New York: Routledge, 1990), 124. 13. For a discussion of Aspasia’s probable status as pallakē, or concubine, see Madeleine Mary Henry, Prisoner of History: Aspasia of Miletus and Her Biographical Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 14–15. While surely not a fully honorable wife, a concubine like Aspasia was much more legitimate than a courtesan. Henry suggests that the reason that Pericles didn’t marry her was owing to her status as metic. 14. Halperin, ‘‘Why Is Diotima a Woman?’’ 124. Cf. Martha Nussbaum’s version of Halperin’s point: ‘‘Here, then, Socrates too takes a mistress: a priestess instead of a courtesan, a woman who prefers the intercourse of the pure n o te s...