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

What Do We Talk About When We Talk About Platonic Love?

 What Do We Talk About When We Talk About Platonic Love? D A N I E L B OYA R I N In his celebrated study of Christian love, Anders Nygren identifies the emergence of heresy with the perversion of agape: ‘‘Agape loses its original meaning and is transformed into Eros; not, however, be it observed, into the sublimated ‘heavenly Eros’ of which Plato and his followers speak, but into that despised variety, ‘vulgar Eros.’’’1 The implications of this framing require unpacking. To do so, we must return to Plato’s Symposium, where the term ‘‘heavenly Eros’’ occurs in the discourse of Pausanias, signifying a practice of desire that begins with physical love but ultimately transcends the physical. Yet Pausanias is not the only, or even the most privileged, speaker in the Symposium. The famous speech of Diotima, cited by Socrates, arguably lays greater claim to representing Plato’s definitive views on love. Thus, in referring to ‘‘heavenly Eros’’ as that ‘‘of which Plato and his followers speak,’’ Nygren erases any difference between the Pausanian ideology of eros and that of Diotima/Socrates —the latter of which I take to be Platonic love.2 Indeed, Nygren makes this conflation quite explicit: ‘‘In the Symposium Plato feels no necessity to make Socrates or Diotima speak about it, but entrusts to Pausanias the task of explaining the difference between what he calls ‘vulgar (pandēmos ) Eros’ and ‘heavenly (ouranios) Eros.’’’3 For Nygren there is, then, no difference at all between Pausanian heavenly love and Platonic love. For me this distinction makes all the difference. In Pausanian heavenly love, there is room (to be sure at the bottom) for sex, a point glossed over by Nygren, while Platonic love deems all physical sex vulgar. 4 As we shall 4 兩 t o wa r d a t h e ol o g y o f e ro s see, what is at stake is not only a sexual but also an epistemological and, finally, a political difference: Pausanias speaks not only for sex but also for the city—that is, for democratic Athens—while Plato, via Diotima/ Socrates, advocates a philosophical flight not only from carnal sex but also from the indeterminacies of truth and power inherent to the politics of democracy. Nygren is, of course, not the only one to have collapsed this distinction . For Michel Foucault, for example, there is also little difference between Pausanian heavenly love and Platonic love, though his reasoning is almost the opposite: ‘‘One should keep in mind that [Platonic] ‘asceticism ’ was not a means of disqualifying the love of boys; on the contrary, it was a means of stylizing it and hence, by giving it shape and form, of valorizing it.’’5 Where Nygren obscured the difference between Pausanias and Plato by denying the physicality of Pausanias’s ideal, Foucault obscures that difference by downplaying the radicality of Plato’s asceticizing of eros. Kenneth Dover, in contrast, does make clear distinctions between Plato’s Pausanias (as the representative of the ‘‘best’’ of Athenian eros) and his Diotima (as the conveyer of Plato’s own views), arguing that in Plato’s writings ‘‘heterosexual eros is treated on the same basis as homosexual copulation, a pursuit of bodily pleasure which leads no further . . . and in Symposium it is sub-rational, an expression of the eros that works in animals.’’6 Dover thus discriminates plainly between the sexual practices of Athenians in general—even in their most high-minded, heavenly form—and Plato’s disdain for all physical sex. Below I will affirm and develop Dover’s views on this issue, departing from the legacies represented by both Nygren and Foucault. Plato, I will suggest, promotes an erotics that is almost in binary opposition to the erotics of Athens as best represented in Pausanias’s speech, and this is consistent with, indeed part and parcel of, Plato’s whole stance vis-à-vis the life of the polis itself. In Platonic love, queerness itself is queered. Heavenly (Pausanian) pederastic homoeroticism may (not unlike gay marriage) inscribe a realm of male relationality that is deemed superior to but still comparable with marital heteroeroticism. In contrast, Platonic eros sets itself against both pederasty and marriage in resistance to the conventions of the ancient city (and perhaps to sociopolitical ‘‘convention’’ per se) while at the same d a ni e l boy a ri n...