The Eros of God

Simone Martini
"Annunciation", 1333, panel, Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence

The Annunciation, one of the most profound feasts in the liturgical year is almost upon us. . In many paintings of the Annunciation, there is a certain posture which seems to be repeated ove and over. It is that of the angel on one knee, holding out a lily to a retiring maiden- Our Blessed Mother. What I think of as the real meaning of this posture was hidden to me, I believe, because there was a part of my spiritual life which was not yet developed or awakened.

It was when I read the Holy Father's meditation on the Love(s) of God for Lent when this part of me was tapped upon the shoulder and began to look sleepily around. Let me go back a bit to explain:

For many years, before my conversion, I knew I did not understand love. It seemed so vague, and varied- what was the difference between the love my mother had for me and that other love she had for my father? How should I love my friends? Was I supposed to? Was that betraying my family in some way? It wasn't that I shut myself away because I didn't know the word storge but rather a feeling of bumbling around in a pitch-black, glass store.

When I converted to the Faith, something in my intellect began working properly: that is the only way I can describe the reality that I was a different mind, a different heart and soul. I was Home and the moral universe began to fit into a pattern I could understand. In study, I began to understand that "LOVE" - our big and clumsy English word - is a much more varied, and fruitful reality; and in beginning the philosophy of love I was becoming more who God wants me to be.

I understood now the difference between philia and storge, and began to grasp that agape, the selfless love, as Christ grows it in us, is the transfer love. It is like the beam in Star Trek which penetrates the person and lifts them and all the rest of the loves into the supernatural sphere. But I did not understand the relationship of eros- the passionate, the lover's love- to the other loves, especially agape. In fact, I simply did not understand eros, but I thought I did (ignorance being made nearly invincible by dependence on one's own understanding).

...until I read the Holy Father's Lenten reflection and Theology of the Body at the same time, a providential juncture of study. The piece I needed for my understanding of eros on the natural sphere, as God intended it, was the movement from original solitude (in which Adam understands himself as essentially different from all other creatures) to the gift of self to the other, "the flesh of my flesh". The body is the sacramental sign of this reality, this pure and unadulterated passion for a joining with the beloved.

From this, I began to wonder about the eros of God: how can He make that same movement, or have that need for His creatures, when He is not in solitude nor does He need us? Yet if God is love, then He must encompass all the loves. I thought for awhile that agape superseds all the others, and these are absorbed into it on the supernatural level. But I was making the Buddhist mistake- that whole "we're absorbed into the tapestry of the universe" nonsense. No. God does not destroy what is good-somehow we are meant to be absorbed, in Divine Union, yet in this becoming more ourselves. And so the same with the different kinds of love, and eros specifically. As the Holy Father elucidated for me, the eros of God is seen quite clearly in His death for us on the cross. And it is indeed a sacramental sign in the body. No detail of true eros left unanswered: an act of selfless love and passionate love at the same time. Not out of need, but eros out of agape.

So it is that God wishes, like a lover, to unite with His creatures in intimacy. It is a profound and absolutely astounding thought! And so, the paintings of the Annunciation are profound in their portrayal of the love of God, the eros of God, personified in His angel, wooing The Blessed Mother. I wonder: does she provide us with an archetype of how God wishes to incarnate Himself in each of us? Not as another savior in the same historical way as the Savior of the World, but that He wants us to be one with Him, to be filled totally with Himself so that we become incarnations and bear the fruit of His love.