Eros, Thanatos

The following essay has been written in multiple parts. Each part is explained and dated in the Blog chronology…

Part I

Sigmund Freud claimed there are two fundamental desires of the human heart: Eros and Thanatos…

Eros is the desire for living-up the embodied life. It’s the root word for erotic, and, yes, it does represent our fleshly desires. Yet, Eros goes beyond our concupiscence. It’s our longing for everything that sex represents; the relational intimacy of nakedness, the feeling of belonging found in the embrace, and the breathless satisfaction of putting forth your all. Even those who aren’t married experience the profound need for intimacy, belonging, and contentment. If Eros is our desire to enjoy everything good in life, then it’s only appropriate that our modern connotation strongly associates it with the act that brings new life.

Thanatos is our desire to be an inanimate object. It represents our darkest desires and perversions; the desire to torture, kill, and die. Thanatos shows its ugly face most often in personal depression and suicide or in abusive situations, when our desire to be numb is projected onto others through verbal or physical violence. Thanatos takes the goodness and vibrancy of Eros and fouls it up, but Freud points out that’s sometimes just the way we want it.

Christianity’s the only religion that offers the fulfillment of both our Eros and Thanatos desires. Christ was the en-fleshed and lived his life to the fullest. As a socialite, he was known for his frequenting parties and his uncanny ability to look beyond people’s outer facade and anticipate the questions of people’s souls. As a Rabbi, he he led a group of twelve men who dropped everything just to belong in his posse. As a carpenter, he new the breathless satisfaction of putting his all into his craft. Jesus strove to embody the completeness of Eros fulfillment.

Christ also embodied the completion of Thanatos. Christ was not the mere victim of his jealous peers. Sure, they wanted to terminate his life, but they couldn’t have done it if he hadn’t let them. Christ let them project the fullness of their deadly desires onto him. He willing became the curse to put it to an end.

Christ’s life challenges our cultural understanding of desire. He moves us beyond a mere sexual eroticism to a fully embodied understanding of longing. I guess that makes Christianity more than a Sexy Religion, it’s Fully Human.

Part II

Faithful commenter Josh posed some serious and challenging questions that provide worthy discussion. I will respond to those questions in conversational format:

Having read the above, I think its fascinating to rethink what Christ did in His life and death in light of Freudian theory. A number of thoughts in reply: (1) Should we understand Christ as coming to fulfill the Eros and Thanatos desires of man? Or maybe he didn’t come to fulfill those desires directly, but by carrying out His other main purpose(s) he thereby fulfilled these desires as a by-product?

In answer to your first question, I give a resounding yes. Christ did come to fulfill the desires of man. He came to give us life and life in abundance. He came to give us freedom, declaring, “I am the way, the truth, and the life,” and also saying, “The truth will set you free.” This freedom is not a only a liberation from bondage but a power that removes any inhibition to the will of God. God’s will in creating us was for us to live (Eros), not die (Thanatos). Our unity with Christ in his resurrection gives us life and clearly fulfills our Eros desire.

Ironically, our freedom to the will of God inherently brings our death. God said to Adam, “The day you eat of the fruit of good and evil, you will surely die.” When he ate the fruit, God cast Adam out of the garden and let him await his natural physical death. God’s desire for our life (Eros) never ceased, but disobedience and sin are anathema to God. In our sin, we became sin and thus anathema to God. Adam’s sin was so repulsive and God’s love so strong, that he wanted Adam both dead and alive.

Christ, as the second Adam, was born of a virgin and died of unnatural causes, embracing life before its natural order and death before its natural time. Every moment recorded of his life reveals that in some way he lived to die, and the foreknowledge of his death gave him life. Even before the Passion, ‘Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?’, of his final cry of surrender, Christ had overcome death. It was his death and resurrection that allowed him to share his life with others, across the borders of culture, race, and time.

This is the act of the Eucharist: we submit our bodies to Christ, by taking in his body, and sharing in his living sacrifice. By examining ourselves before taking the elements, or by offending the Holy Spirit through an inconsiderate consumption of the host, we participate in the judgment that Christ bore on the cross (the remembrance) and we anticipate the judgment of his second coming (the proclamation). As living sacrifices, we become slaves to Christ, our Thanatos desires are fulfilled, and the will of God (our death) is completed.

Did Christ come to fulfill our desires? Yes. Did he fulfill them directly? Yes. Was that his sole purpose? No. According to the Platonic tradition (i.e. God is omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent), God does not in any way need us as humans or any other part of creation. God is complete in and of himself, and he did not need to fulfill our desires. Arguably, God chose to fulfill our human desires.

Perhaps understanding the fulfillment of desires as God’s choice will help us to tackle the second half of your question. From my understanding of scripture and the incarnation, God’s favored medium for reaching his ultimate end (Calvin presumed this was his own worship and glory, but the Catholics might argue his goal is the relentless pouring out of self to share in blessing of divine intimacy with someone truly other) is embodied, human relationship.

As the ultimate demonstration of his commitment to the human form as his favored medium for ministering to creation, God first gave Adam and Eve dominion over the land and the animals that inhabited it. When that went awry, God chose the save the world himself by taking on human flesh. As more evidence, God commanded (1) love the Lord your God and (2) love your neighbor as yourself. He is honored and glorified not as a biproduct of human inter-relational and intra-relational wholeness, but he has chosen it as the means for his own personal enjoyment. From Calvin’s perspective, this enjoyment evidences his glory. From the Roman Catholic perspective, this enjoyment realized through sharing it with creation. Our fulfillment, healing, redemption is not a biproduct, it is the chosen means to God’s chosen ends.

(2) To what degree might it be somewhat anachronistic to re-read Christ’s first century life in light of Freud’s 19th century theories? Of course, if Freud was right about these desires (and he may well have been on to something . . . I really am in no place to make that judgment), then it would be entirely reasonable that the life that Jesus provides for His followers and calls them to live does meet these their most basic of desires.

The danger of theory is not its misapplication, it is its potential refusal to submit to truth. While good theory can explain multiple situations with similar circumstances, the best of theory must stand the test of time. Thus, if Freud’s theory is good, there should be clear evidence of these desires in scripture.

Conversely, if the truth of Christ’s good news is true, (1) if the Kingdom of God is Here, and (2) if he died, was buried, and rose from the grave, then his story should also speak to circumstance throughout the rest of time (past, present, and future). Reformed theologians argue that all of eternity pivots on the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. If either Freud’s theory is helpful for interpretation or Christ’s gospel is valid, then it is no way anachronistic to apply one to the other. I think believe this essay is worth writing because in the end both qualifications are met: eros/thanatos helps us understand this crazy world, and Christ’s death and resurrection help redeem it.

(4) There is an element in which Christ did not come to fulfill the desires of men as Freud would have understood it, in that much of the fulfillment of man’s desires are seen as awaiting fulfillment with His second coming or, to use a perhaps more technical but precise term, the eschatological existence of man.

Your point is well taken, and I would like to take this opportunity to clarify that the fulfillment of the human Eros and Thanatos desire were completed in Christ. In as much as we are in Christ and he is in us, we are full and complete. Sadly, as wait in the passover for the second coming of Christ, our hope is sustained by the more abstract mediums of his presence and grace (the Lord’s Supper and the Communion of the Saints). In as much as we allow the Holy Spirit to reign in our lives by submitting ourselves as living sacrifices to the work of Christ in the world today as manifest in the work of the living and vibrant invisible church, our desires are fulfilled here today. When Christ returns, we will be judged and glorified, so that we are given over to righteousness as we once were given over to our sinful desires. At this time, the invisible will be visible, and our desires will be fully aligned with the desires of the Father.

In short, it may be problematic to make such a distinction between the first and second coming of Christ. The difference between now and then is one of visual prominence, but the fact is still true now as it will be then: Christ is seated at the right hand of the Father and with Him he is honored and glorified. In this truth, our eschatalogical existence of man has already begun.

(5) Lastly, Christ meets man’s needs and desires at his deepest, most profound level. In fact, I would propose that Christ and his teaching goes far beyond Freud in that he consistently calls his followers to redefine the way that they think about themselves, their needs, their desires, how they interact with their heavenly Father, etc. That is to say, while in our terminology it may be helpful to think of Christ meeting man’s Eros and Thanatos desires, I think that there is a very real sense in which, to properly understand Christ’s life and mission, and to truly do Him justice (as if we can ever really really do Him justice, Praise God we cannot) we must understand him as calling man to rethink the way he thinks of himself, life and his world. If Eros and Thanatos desires are to be met in Christ, this likely will only be by seeing their relative insignificance in light of the big picture of God the Creator reaching out and restoring man to his once held place of fellowship with His Creator.

Christ is both the means and the end of human desire. He not only meets man’s needs and desires, in a very real way he is man’s deepest desire. The reworking of man’s desires and the reframing of man’s relationship with God the Creator comes through identification with Christ and the appropriation of his relationship with the Father. As we contemplate our identification with Christ, we must not forget that Christ took on flesh along with its temptations and trials, which at their core are rooted in our distorted desires. That is, the miracle of the incarnation and subsequent libidinal redemption is Christ took our embodied life along with all its baggage, and he now calls us take part in his Body where we can give up our burdens completely.

The redemption of desire has and always will be about man just as it will always be about God, because it brings glory to the divine and human person of Jesus Christ. As Christians, we must affirm that this story is as much the “big picture” as the creation story. Just as with the first and second coming, we must remember the ontological connection between creation and the gospel of Christ.

In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made. Without him, nothing was made that has been made….