On Erotic Philosophy

 

[This essay can be read as an afterthought to some previous posts; cf. here and here]

 

 

The mythos of the androgyne has taken on many different forms throughout the centuries. In the early Fathers (like Origen, St. Gregory, and St. Maximus) it is characterized by the spirit of a monastic asceticism resulting in what could be called a ‘denial of the feminine’ (following the “misei tên psychên heauton” of Lk. 14:26), the killing of the old man through strict observances and austere mortifications, to become ‘monadic’ (monos, monastikos, monachos) by prayer and fasting[1]; an attitude likewise found in certain theosophers like Gichtel, who strictly advises against all marital relations, stating that the seeker should only pursue the celestial Virgin Sophia at the exclusion of all ‘fleshly women’.

However in other authors like Franz von Baader (as well as in the Kabbala) the motive of androgyny assumed a more ‘erotic’ tone (cf. for example his Sätze der erotische Philosophie and Sätze der religiösen Erotik), developing a doctrine whose goal is rather an ‘integration of the female’ through chaste love, similar to the early Christian qaddishe (married people living in celibacy) who practiced spousal love as a spiritual path, or even the medieval bridal mysticism of St. Bernard and others.

This spiritual ‘eroticism’ bases itself on the Platonic insight that “each of us is a mere half of a man, one half of an original whole, and we are all continually searching for our other half” (Symposium, 191D). As we have seen (cf. here), according to the theosophical teaching, the primordial Adam still was this ‘integral man’ possessing both ‘tinctures’ (the male and the female ‘half’) in himself in perfect unity (while being neither male nor female himself). The Fall however dissolves this union and Man finds himself split into Adam and Eve, such that male and female (fiery and aqueous tincture, yang and ying, centrifugal and centripetal dynameis, etc.) now manifest in separation (Schiedlichkeit) and even in opposition to one another. [2]

But we have to imagine the interplay of male and female tinctures not as a strict dichotomy (A – B), but rather as a ‘quaternary’ of A/a  – B/b (mirroring the theogonic quaternary of Father-Son-Spirit-Sophia in divinis).

The perfect marriage of the first Adam (A/b) and his celestial spouse Sophia (B/a) should thus be conceived of not merely as a coincidentia oppositorum, but rather as an ‘androgynous union’ [3], each carrying both tinctures in different potencies (and we see how ‘sin’ means, for Baader, also reducing this quaternary to the ‘bestial’ bi-sexuality of A – B).

We could thus say that the ‘androgynous’ Adam represents ‘femininity-in-masculinity’, i.e. the (masculine) human form as manifesting the (feminine) pleroma of Wisdom, whereas  the ‘gynandrous’ Sophia (‘masculinity-in-femininity’) represents the pole of Ousia as containing the form within it.

As Borella states, in Sophia “the masculine appears within the general form of the feminine; here it is no longer Adam that contains Eve [A/b], but Eve that contains Adam [B/a], and such is also the relationship that unites Mary, the New Eve, with her only-begotten Son, the New Adam”.

 

The meta-sexual feminine signifies alterity in identity, whereas the eternal masculine expresses rather identity in alterity. Woman is the ‘other’ of man: within the identity of the human form, she expresses difference, introduces duality. She is the image of man in man, man-as-image (l’homme en image), the mirror-image of man (l’homme en miroir).

 

“Adam, on the contrary, is the image of God in creation. He thus affirms the identity of the One within the cosmic alterity, unity in multiplicity”, i.e. the ‘separative unity’, the unity of the Divine One as reflected in the individual identity of each being, whereas Sophia is the (possibility of) multiplicity in the One, i.e. All-Possibility (cf. Théologie Mystique, XI.3)

But even though the male (A) and female (B) tinctures are detached by the Fall, this rupture – like that of God and man – can never be absolute. Even in the post-lapsian state there is still an aspect of the male in the female and vice versa, albeit in an unnatural ‘imbalance’[4] (A/B – a/b), and this ‘quadropolarity’ is also what makes a reunification or reintegration again possible, for each tincture desire the other for its completion.

 

The feminine tincture tempers the masculine and receives warmth from it; the masculine is sustained by the feminine. There are four generative forces in this erotic-androgynous system, since each of the two tinctures potentially contains something of the nature of the other. The gentle feminine tincture looks for its corresponding gentleness in the harsh masculine tincture, to excite and provoke it out of its latency, so that by uniting with what is feminine within the masculine, it is able to soften the harshness and keep it from turning itself into a destructive fire. Likewise and inversely, the harsh masculine tincture looks for its corresponding harshness in the feminine gentleness, to compel it to leave its passiveness, give form to what is still formless, and prevent this ‘water’ from remaining stagnant and putrid. Thus, the feminine unites with the feminine within the masculine, and the masculine unites with the masculine within the feminine (Faivre, Love and Androgyny in Baader).

 

This ‘integration’ is not effected on the horizontal but conceived of as a (vertical) hierarchy, a ‘mediation’ (Vermittlung) in the most literal sense (as a meeting in the middle, or in the Grund), requiring descensus on the part of the masculine and an ascensus of feminine (Demut & Erhabenheit).  Male (A/B) and the female (a/b) each have to sacrifice one ‘half’ of themselves to the other and in this mutual self-giving they find and ‘ground’ (begründen) themselves in their integral wholeness (A/b – B/a).

The ‘subjection’ of the inferior by the superior element (mirroring the subjection of Nature to Spirit in divinis) is not to be understood as an violent ‘suppression’, but as voluntary submission, both ‘tinctures’ being not antagonistic but complementary (and as such they even  become corrupted when separated or isolated from each other), requiring nevertheless the right ‘hierarchy’ in their union (all evil resulting essentially from “metastasis” according to Baader, i.e. a ‘displacement’ from the right position).

This ‘erotic hierarchy’ (an ‘erotic’ uprising and ‘agapic’ down-pouring so beautifully described by St. Dionysius in his De Coelesti Hierachia) of course finds its archetype in the relation of God and Sophia, or Christ and the Church, relating to each other like Centre and periphery, Head and body, bride and Bridegroom. As the Apostle tells us:

 

Wives, submit yourselves to your own husbands as you do to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the Church, His Body, of which He is the Savior. Now as the Church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything. Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the Church and gave Himself up for her to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word, and to present her to Himself as a radiant Church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless. In this same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. After all, no one ever hated their own body, but they feed and care for their body, just as Christ does the Church – for we are members of his body. ‘For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh’. This is a profound mystery – but I am talking about Christ and the Church (Eph. 5:22-32).

 

The ‘feminine’ (aqueous) tincture has to envelop the ‘masculine’ (fiery) core as periphery (or ‘covering‘). The ‘inferior’, ‘receptive’ principle has to mirror the ‘superior’, ‘active’ one and the active principle has to pour itself out into the lower to become revealed by it. Only in this reciprocal giving and receiving can they each come to their full realization[5]: without the ‘submissive’ mirror the light can’t be revealed and without the light the mirror stays forever a dark valley (“Neither is the man without the woman, neither the woman without the man”, 1. Cor. 11:11); a relation mirrored in all levels of being (both macro- and microcosmically), and which finds its archetype of course in God Himself, viz. in His creative ‘Ray’, the Verbum Fiat (or Chockmah) shining into the maternal womb of the ‘Deep’ (Binah). But in God’s eternity there was never a moment when the darkness wasn’t replete with light, for “He is Light and there is no darkness in Him” (1. Joh. 1:5).

Adam’s sin was to refuse to mirror his Superior, while the sin of Lucifer (the ‘light-bringer’) lies in refusing to mediate the light to the lower creation, thereby ‘overshadowing’ the world with his pride (the satanic inversion of the overshadowing of the Spirit who, both in the Creation and Incarnation, ‘brings down’ the Light that lighteth every man).

Evil thus results from a ‘suspension’ of the union of male and female ‘half’, a breakdown of the circulum vitae of ascend and descend, a ‘loss of the middle’ (Entgründung), or, Kabbalistically speaking, a detachment of the (dark, feminine, receptive) Pillar of Severity from the (light, masculine, active) Pillar of Mercy, the mirror of Binah (which is also the ‘womb’, the principle of separation and duality which first ‘discerns’ multiplicity-in-unity, and which, again, is in God eternally ‘sublimated’ into Oneness) and the luminous ‘Ray’ of Chockmah.

The feminine ‘matrix’ desires to be pregnant, but in her ‘baseness’ (Niedertracht) she turns away from the Light and tries to fulfill herself thus obscuring herself in a dark, ‘contractive’ egoity, whereas the male ‘ray’ in its pride (Hochmut) desires to manifest itself by itself, thereby falling into incorporeity.

This metastasis can ultimately only be cured by love, for love is the gift of self, that which ‘makes two into one’ (“Finis armoris ut duo unum fiat”), the magic spell of Aphrodite that can once more restore paradisiacal wholeness.

But all unification requires submission to a superior principle, says Baader, and only through a participation in the ‘Central Love’ can the periphery be gathered (armor elevat), hence why love cannot stay closed in on itself but has to open up vertically, for even in divinis the Love of Father and Son is ‘fecund’ and boils over into the Holy Spirit, Love hypostatized.

And just like in the Trinitarian Liturgy each Person eternally empties itself into the Other to be fulfilled by it, so in the ‘liberating service’ of martial love (Minnedienst) each partner has to let itself be ‘completed’ by the other; not in an exploitative ‘consumption’, by selfishly taking from the other what one is lacking, but in a free gift of self, kenosis.

The lovers appear then “like visible servants, priests and agents of a higher Eros, who dwells invisibly among them when they are gathered in His name, and one could therefore rightly say, that the lovers do not so much love themselves mutually as that rather that a higher Being loved itself in and through them” (Baader, Foreword to Vom Geist und Wesen). And it is only this chaste [6] and ‘selfless’ love which can exorcise the passions of the flesh: “Amor holds his torch toward heaven, and blind Cupid lowers his toward the receptacle of the material senses”. 

Thus true love because religious for it ‘binds’ (religare) us to our supreme Principle which is Love itself (1. Joh. 4:8), and it is in this manner that the Prophet once said that “marriage is half the religion” (“Mann und Weib, und Weib und Mann, / reichen an die Gottheit an, sing Papageno and Pamina in Mozart’s Zauberflöte).[7]

God being Love we can only attain Him if we ourselves become lovers: “Love is a child of those who are united in love”, says Baader, and without love all is in vain:

 

Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not love, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal. And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not love, I am nothing. And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not love, it profiteth me nothing.

Love suffers long, and is kind; loves envies not; love vaunts not itself, is not puffed up, does not behave itself unseemly, seeks not her own, is not easily provoked, thinks no evil; Rejoices not in iniquity, but rejoices in the truth; Bears all things, believeth all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

Loves never fails: but whether there be prophecies, they shall fail; whether there be tongues, they shall cease; whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish away. For we know in part, and we prophesy in part. But when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away.

And now abides faith, hope, love, these three; but the greatest of these is love (1. Cor. 13).

 



[1] In St. Maximus we even find the idea of the monk as being “neither male nor female”, but pertaining to a distinct third (monadic or ‘androgynous’) gender.

[2] Man being the paradigmatic synthesis of all creation and the mediator between heaven and earth, this microcosmic dissolution of male and female also manifests in the macrocosm at large. As Faivre writes: “Even the physics of the entire universe is a spectacle of this original degradation. Attraction and repulsion are ontologically understood if one comprehends that the passive-feminine principle of the desire to be pregnant and fulfilled is, in an ambiguous way, accompanied in actual nature by the opposing negative desire to want to fulfill oneself. The forces of attraction and repulsion, like Newtonian gravity, do not have production as their end, but rather reciprocal neutralization leading to inertia. They are the effect and testimony of an ancient cosmic drama through which the universe lost the perfect copenetration, the intimate, fruitful union of its generative potencies. There is hardly any room left for the former erotic relationship between masculine and feminine forces, in which both of them were at once active and passive, full of desire for each other, and generating an incessant burst of life” (Love and Androgyny in Baader).

[3] Interestingly a similarly ‘androgynous’ vision of Sophia is also furnished by Blessed Henry Suso in his Horologium aeternae sapientiae (I.1), who describes her as appearing “now like a pleasant young maiden, beautiful and lovely; and then, suddenly, like a handsome youth”.

[4] We might say that this imbalance manifests in man as an excess of the rational, discursive faculty (animus) and in woman as an excess of the psyche (anima). 

[5] Baader also uses the analogy of ‘vowel’ (masculine tincture) and ‘consonant’ (feminine tincture): The vowel needs the consonant in order to be able to express itself, and be fully articulate. The consonant needs the vowel in order to be expressed.

[6] In the Greek of the Fathers, “chastity” (sôphrosune) can also mean “integration” and “integrity” for it is through the spiritual virtue of chastity, of ‘ontological virginity, that we are once more rendered whole.

[7] We should however clarify that Holy Tradition has always held the celibate state to be superior to married life (“Better to marry than to burn”, 1. Cor. 7:9). For no matter how sanctified sacramental marriage might be, it is only a symbol of the true and eternal marriage that awaits – Deo volente – each and everyone of us, the hierogamy of the soul and God in the visio beatifica: “I will betroth you to Me forever – And then you will know YHWH” (Hos. 2:21-22). 

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