Caritas vs Eros

I finished reading Andrew Sullivan’s Love Undetectable just over a year ago in between my solitude dips in the Indian Ocean at Cottesloe Beach in Perth, Western Australia. I took a much-needed break away from Melbourne to think through some relationship issues that severely challenged my own spiritual relationship with God.

I deliberately chose to bring along Love Undetectable with me, partly because I was curious to see what Andrew Sullivan had to say about friendships. Love Undetectable was a memoir about life, humanity and survival. In it, he explores a few questions, but the one that I was most interested in was the question of whether friendship could be a substitute for love.

What I read surprised me. Here’s an excerpt from the book. Although I don't necessarily agree with everything he says, the sentiments he expresses in this excerpt gives food for thought, even if a bit extreme in some points.

“The great modern enemy of friendship has turned out to be love. By love, I don’t mean the principle of giving and mutual regard that lies at the heart of friendship. And I don’t mean what Saint Paul meant by love, the Christian notion of indiscriminate and universal agape or caritas, which is based on the universal love of the Christian God.

I mean love in the banal, ubiquitous, compelling, and resilient modern meaning of love: the romantic love that obliterates all other goods, the love to which every life must apparently lead, the love that is consummated in sex and celebrated in every particle of our popular culture, the love that institutionalised in marriage and instilled as a primary and ultimate good in every Western child.

I mean eros, which is more than sex but is bound up with sex. I mean the longing for union with another being, the sense that such a union resolves the essential quandary of human existence, the belief that only such a union can abate the loneliness that seems to come with being human, and deter the march of time that threatens to trivialise our every existence.

The centrality of this love in our culture is so ingrained that it is almost impossible to conceive of a world in which it might not so. And this is strange in a society in which the delusions and dangers of such love are all around us: the wreckage of many modern marriages, the mass of unwanted pregnancies, the devastation of AIDS, the social ostracism of the single and the old. Even those sources of authority that might have once operated as a check on this extraordinary cultural pre-eminence have caved in to the propaganda of eros.

The Christian churches, which once wisely taught the primacy of caritas to eros, and held out the virtue of friendship as equal to the benefits of conjugal love, are now our culture’s primary and obsessive propagandists for the marital unit and its capacity to resolve all human ills and satisfy all human needs.

Far from seeing divorce and abortion and sexual disease as reasons to question our society’s apotheosis of eros, these churches see them merely as opportunities to intensify the idolatry of eros properly conducted and achieved. We live in a world, in fact, in which respect and support for eros has acquired all the hallmarks of a cult. It has become our civil religion.”

Andrew Sullivan, Love Undetectable, p194 &195 (Uncorrected proof version)