Freedom, Love and Pleasure Continued
Sex has become a mechanical activity based in technique, and experience, or so it seems if we consider the manner in which sex is discussed today. Perhaps putting it such gross terms does not sit well, and does not sound agreeable to most people, but nonetheless, this appears to be the way we look at sex today.
In Allan Bloom's posthumously published book, "Love and Friendship," he suggests that it is not the deeper Christian virtues of "agape," and "phileo," (sacrificial love, and brotherly love respectively), but "eros" which has somehow lost its definition, and somehow demands reinstatement to a nobler view in order to recapture the true romance of sex.
"Christianity gave Eros poison to drink. He didn’t die, but became vice," Bloom quotes Neitzsche, and I suppose we must ask ourselves if this is intrinsically true for the faith we follow, or more a by-product of Christianity going astray of its purer values. How is it that the same religion which reveres the Song of Songs by Solomon is the a demonizer of that which is romantically erotic?
Although Allan Bloom was not a Christian (being Jewish, athiest, and most likely gay), he highlights a basic value which Christians ought to consider about sexuality - eros has been denuded of its romantic power by the modern likes of Freud, the Kinsey Report, and pop culture.
In the depths of romantic eroticism lies comraderie, companionship, and commitment found in such classics as "Romeo and Juliette," and certainly in the pursuit of the Shulamite in the Song of Songs
