It is a curious thing when a Lutheran theologian and Friedrich Nietzsche are fond to be in agreement. Nietzche bemoaned the ways in which Christ (his great enemy) had spoiled and ruined eros —that is erotic love. Jesus the Galilean had come and ushered-in an age of charity and had done away with the dark and alluring erotic core of heathenism. Anders Nygren, writing later, agreed. Eros is for Nygren something that no Christian should have anything to do with —really and truly. Sure, we may experience romantic affection but the real core of the world was agape —selfless charity.
Do you see how they both agree? Charity/agape is disinterested love and therefore “Christian.” Eros/romance is interested/desirous and therefore pagan. Nygren and Nietzsche form a loose alliance of the strangest sort, though they play from very different convictions.
Nietzsche would have us regain the pagan blood cult, the temple-prostitutes, the bleating of the dying scapegoat as it belts-out its dithyramb in the darkness which gives cloak to an eros which has broken-free of Yahweh’s order.
Nygren would have us suspect all erotic love as being, in some attenuated way, essentially pagan.
The fundamental problem with both accounts is the Bible. For the Bible speaks of a God who desires, who pursues, who —having no needs— wants. God’s love is deeply interested and full of desire. And human loves, both “agape” loves and “eros” loves flow from the Love of God. Erotic Love, we are told, is lit by the Flame of Yah himself (Song 8:6).
Without tracing in this limited area all of the places throughout the Scrptures in which God speaks with a voice of desire, we can merely remember the way in which Jesus speaks on the night He is betrayed. There at the great agapeic climax, at the precipice of the Sacrifice of Charity Himself, he blurs the distinction between disinterested and interested love: “Father I desire that those you have given me would be with me where I am…” (John 17:24).
Joseph Ratzinger summarized it simply: “God loves, and his love may certainly be called eros, yet it is also totally agape” (Deus Caritas Est, I.9).
This carries more freight than a mere disproving of Nygren or Nietzsche, it matters for life lived by real persons seeking to follow the Way of Jesus. If ‘eros’ is something not found in God then it creates a kind of secular space in my affections. It means that there may be forms of love in my life, relationships of desire, which the Love of God does not inform. But if the love of God is both ‘eros’ and ‘agape’ then the greta shadow of the Cross lays claim to all my modes of loving. The love of God must inform all my relationships: my love of my family, my love of the place where I live, my love of my wife, my love of my friends, my love of my parishioners, my love of my enemies… etc.
I am desired by God. I am called, therefore, in all my desiring, to be like Him.