Still Running Off at the Keyboard

EROS

Given that this word formed a major part of the recent encyclical, it seems appropriate to explore it for contemporary meaning. What exactly is eros?

Websters Unabridged offers:

1. the ancient Greek god of love, identified by the Romans with Cupid.
2. a representative of this god.
3. a winged figure of a child representing love or the power of love.
4. physical love; sexual desire.
5. an asteroid that approaches to within 14 million miles of the earth every 44 years.
6. a. the libido, b. instincts for self-preservation collectively.

I think it would be safe to say that Benedict didn't have No. 5 in mind.

Google offers this image of the Greek god Eros, but I think we get somewhat closer to the concept Benedict was using with this picture. It's one of the more chaste renditions of eros that I was able to find. Eros is sexual. A website which offers the Old Testament in pictures illustrates the Song of Songs this way.

At the website of The Regular Grand Lodge of Italy, Fabio Venzi, Most Worshipful Grand Master, gave a talk in Rome on July 3, 2004, which is reproduced at the website. A portion of it concerns eros. Speaking of his study of the philosophy of Freemasonry, he writes:

...one can infer that the Florentine Neo-Platonism and its Anglo-Saxon continuation, constituted by the Cambridge Neo-Platonists, represent a philosophical doctrine in which the Freemason's thought finds important correspondences and that most of all does not contrast with the various religious expressions, particularly with the Christian one, allowing to overcome and settle the centuries-old arguments between Catholic Church and Masonry. Exactly on this level, what we must avoid is to simplistically unite thinkers as Pico della Mirandola or Marsilio Ficino to others, as Giordano Bruno. One can verify the antithesis especially with regard to the doctrine of the Eros, nucleus of Neo-Platonic thought. The platonic theory of love, that the Florence Academy tried to merge with Christianity, is in fact to be twisted by Giordano Bruno, who sees in Eros the proof of the titanic force of the man. It is Eros that equips the man with that "heroic fury" which enables him to have a vision of the infinite Universe and to break the snares that tie him to religion. So, if Pico della Mirandola and Marsilio Ficino never look for the conflict with the Christian theology, trying to have the platonic concepts coexist with Christian theology, in Bruno, on the contrary, the platonic doctrine of Eros will become a real weapon against the Christian doctrine. The Italian Neo-Platonists, as opposed to Bruno, set themselves as the guardians of a tradition that they absolutely do not want to demolish, but to save.

--Snip--

So we arrive at the third and last phase, maybe the most delicate, that concerns the esoteric aspects of our way as Freemasons. It is obvious that going near the esoteric part implies that the Freemason has completed a whole series of preparatory studies on the subject, which can lead to an adequate comprehension of it. We sometimes speak about mysticism, ermeticism and esotericism, with very little knowledge of the facts, and this inevitably causes confusion and misunderstandings.
Running after the "Holy Grail" as an anachronistic templarism and looking for improbable Masonic traces in the "Rolls of the Dead Sea" does not really help in recognizing to Freemasonry the credibility and dignity that the body itself is entitled to have for history and tradition.

Was Benedict's encyclical an answer to Fabio Venzi? He was certainly speaking of the "credibility and dignity" of the body.

Pico della Mirandola and Marsilio Ficino whom Venzi mentions were 15th century philosophers who admired Plato. Fiscino was a priest. He translated Plato, Pythagoras, and Iamblichus among others, and wrote an "Introduction to the Philosophy of Plato". He is credited with introducing Platonic philosophy to Europe. Mirandola, a student of Ficino, believed in the Kabbala and interwove its teachings with his own philosophy.

Moshe Idel has written a book on the Kabbalah and Eros. So has Mark Jay Mirsky who also links Dante with the Kabbalah and Eros in the title.

At the website of the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco Professor Moshe Idel and Rabbi Lawrence Kushner presented a talk titled "Kabbalah and Eros: Eroticism & Erotic Love in Kabbalah."

Kabbalah is not limited to the Jewish community. It is used extensively in Freemasonry and in Gnosticism. Albert Pike speaks of it in MORALS AND DOGMA. He speaks of Dante as well:

Commentaries and studies have been multiplied upon the DIVINE COMEDY, the work of Dante, and yet no one, so far as we know, has pointed out its especial character. The work of the great Ghibellin is a declaration of war against the Papacy, by bold revelations of the Mysteries. The Epic of Dante is Johannite and Gnostic, an audacious application, like that of the Apocalypse, of the figures and numbers of the Kabalah to the Christian dogmas, and a secret negation of every thing absolute in these dogmas. His journey through the supernatural worlds is accomplished like the initiation into the Mysteries of Eleusis and Thebes. (p. 822)

Moving to the more esoteric and so-called "irregular" side of Freemasonry, one finds Theosophist H. P. Blavatsky speaking of eros in THE SECRET DOCTRINE:

Hence arose the necessity of making of the "Dragon of Wisdom," the Serpent of Genesis: of the conscious god who needed a body to clothe his two subjective divinity, Satan. But the "innumerable incarnations of Spirit," and "the ceaseless pulse and current of desire" refer, the first one, to our doctrine of Karmic and cyclic rebirths, the second--to Eros, not the later god of material, physiological love, but to the divine desire in the gods, as well as in all nature, to create and give life to Beings. (Book II, p. 234)

At the website of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, in an article titled "The Secret of Eurasia: The Key to Hidden History and World Events", Mehmet Sabeheddin describes mystical anarchism, indicating that it included an element of eros as opposed to agape:

They grounded this ideal in their notion of the “mystical person,” the soul or the psyche, which seeks union with others and recognizes itself as a microcosm of the macrocosm, as distinct from the “empirical person,” the I or the ego, which asserts itself apart from or against others. Evoking and developing this “mystical person” would make feasible a “new organic society” united by invisible inner ties of love (eros, not agape), “mystical experience,” and sacrifice – the very opposite of liberal society, based on the social contract and mutual self-interest and characterized by rational discourse.

Hermeticism is the new spirituality, drawn from the old Gnostic heresy. It is the religion of those who want only spirituality with no limiting dogma. There is a great deal of it on the web. In fact it could almost be called the religion of cyberspace. With no need of doctrine or dogma, with the mystical experience providing everything that is required, a website is as good a church as any other.

One of these spiritual websites offers an essay titled "Eros and the Mystery of the Inner Process" that discusses the Kabbalah and Eros along with tarot cards. In the words of the webmaster, "The Greek mysteries relate that at the very beginning of creation, only chaos existed, and from chaos was born Eros."

Tarot expert Christine Payne-Towler offers the following observation on a change in the major arcana of a popular tarot deck:

Etteilla was drawing from a Hermetic book, The Poimandres, a Greek treatise on the creation of the world and the fall of humanity into Eros. Essentially it's a Greek version of the Genesis story, but with differing names and an altered ordering of events.

In the same vein the Journal of the Western Mystery Tradition, Vol. 1, No. 8 presents an article "The Coming of Elias Artist: Chains of Transmission: Forge of Tubalcain, Phoenix of the Nephilim". The article describes Schambala:

This fabled Centre of the Brotherhood of Light, most usually placed in Central Asia, is often portrayed as a sobernost, a free community of love (eros) and faith, the Mystical Person, the “host of sunbearers who will erect a hundred story house of fire to match together Abyss and Zenith” : this again refers to alchemy. And the other Russian notion of the staretz, the Old One : symbolising the unseen forces which guide events on earth, the political revolutions reflecting a realignment of the cosmic sphere, in whom the new world is imminent : here are the origins of Illuminism.

A look at the Gnostic side of eros would not be complete without an entry from Rosslyn Chapel. Here "Rosa Templum: The enigmatic arcanum of Rosslyn Chapel and the Bride of Christ" by Barry Dunford related eros to the rose:

It was not accidental that the cult of the Rose (an anagram of Eros) flourished and bloomed in the garden of Provence." She further remarks: "The idiom 'under the sign of the rose' actually meant something specific for the initiated. For them….the secret is the rose - the red rose of the other Mary, the Mary who represents Eros, the passionate bridal aspect of the feminine, which was denied by the established church."

Additionally one cannot have eros and Greek philosophy without including homosexuality. Paul Halsall discusses eros in early Greece in his paper written as a graduate student paper. As Catholics we know too much about eros of this variety from the daily headlines.

Into this cultural milieu Benedict XVI has waded with his encyclical. He has not mentioned any other definition of eros except a Catholic one, but there are other definitions out there, and they are gaining in popularity rapidly as the sale of Dan Brown's book demonstrates. One difference between Benedict and the culture, though, is his inclusion of agape as an essential part of eros. It is the lack of agape in eros that brings about the degradation of sexual love. Incredibly enough both Benedict and Eliphas Levi, father of the Paris occult revival, make the same claim. Levi wrote:

Charity is the mysterious bond which, according to the dream of Greek initiates, must reconcile Eros and Anteros. It is that coping of the door of Solomon's Temple which unites the two pillars Jachin and Boaz; it is the common guarantee between rights and duties, between authority and liberty, between the strong and weak, between the people and the government, man also and woman. (THE HISTORY OF MAGIC, Translated by A. E. Waite, p. 152)

It almost sounds like the outline for Deus Caritas Est.

Our Lady of Fatima, pray for us!