Around the Horn--Agape and Eros: Love is Not Identical to Selflessness
"Love implies or presupposes affection. Disaffection contradicts love. In affection an intention of the I is carried out with reference to another, an intention from the I to the Thou. But in affection the I remains with itself. I want to move toward the other, but I have not yet arrived there with that one. The I does not take leave of itself. In affection, the self relatedness in which every I naturally and innocently )seen ontologically) turns toward itself is confronted by an emergent selflessness which favors the Thou who is the object of affection...As an I who is had by the beloved Thou, I do not have myself at all anymore, but rather I have lost myself, surrendered myself. But altogether there is no claim on this: the beloved Thou gives to the loving I a new being which anticipates the loss of self in the event of surrender...It is a prevenient consequence in which the self-loss in the event of love is already surpassed by the new being which the loving I receives from the beloved Thou in the act of surrender. In this anticipative exchange of being between the self-surrendering I and the THou who gives me myself anew consists the true desire or lust of love, which cannot be made to happen. One would, however,n ot only have denied but never have seen the true seriousness of every genuine love if one felt one could ignore the self-surrender and the self-loss it contains because of the prevenient character of the new being which arises out of love. Every despair of love is an indirect reference to how very seriously in successful love the lovers are subjected to nothingness...It is not the fact that they are lovers, but only the fact that they are beloved and thus recieve themselves from the Thou which makes them people who are existing ex nihilo. The loving I may not be without the beloved Thou. But it is only through the love of the beloved Thou which he experiences that his being-nothing-for-himself in his self-surrender becomes real, and this happens in such a way that the loving I is given an existence which does not derive from it. In that sense, love makes new or, with a very apt metaphor, young again: The lover does not exist on the basis of what he has been until now or has made of himself. Instead, in receiving himself from another, the lover exists. Thus he exists only because of the existence which is given to him, and apart from that he is nothing. The loving and beloved I is then totally elated to the beloved Thou, and thus to his own nonbeing: Without Thee I am Nothing."
--Eberhard Jungel God as the Mystery of the World pp.320-323
"The trinitarian interpretation of the indissoluble interrelations of the love of God and love of neighbor finally set in a new light the relation between the divine agape that is at work in believers by the Holy Spirit and Platonic eros as a needy and seeking form of love of the beautiful and the good. Although erotic love is not identical with love of God in the Christian sense...[nevertheless] the tendency of the erotic striving after the good and the perfect can no longer be an argument for maintaining an antithesis in principle to the Christian understanding of love as agape. Instead, we have to recognize the upward moving tendency of Platonic eros...something corresponding to the upward inclination of biblical love of God as filial love for the Father...Yet although we must see erotic love as defective relative to the [perfection] of the Son's fellowship with God, we must not equate it with the self-seeking desiring that is a manifestation of sin. We have to view concupiscence as a perversion of the erotic. Erotic fascination is an ecstatic phenomenon that is undoubtedly exposed to many such perversions and corruptions by human self-seeking but is more than these, for it can also lead us to worship of the Creator. Naturally the ecstatic element of erotic love in our turning to God cannot vouch for the victory over all selfish desire. Victory over selfish perversion of the love oriented to fellowship with God, who himself is love, takesp lace neither in the ecstasy of eros nor on the in many respects comparable ways of human hope, but only by faith, which frees us from our imprisonment in self and sets us in Christ, on whom it relies, and thus gives us a share in his filial fellowship with the Father. Yet the prior love of God and the response of love that it kindles in us are constitutive for faith. At this point what is at issue is grace, to which faith owes itself."
--Wolfhart Pannenberg Systematic Theology Volume 3 p.195-196
"What startles and provokes is glory, in which one finds a coincidence of strangeness and recognition. Often, seeing the color of another's eyes is the beginning of 'responsibility.' Of course...real desire is typically absent and that, for just this reason, beauty is not always visible; there is always a degree of utopian or eschatological deferral in moral desire; but without love's vital appetite, and the capacity for sympathy it opens, there is no impulse within one that can be cultivated toward a responsibility not consequent simply upon immediate affection or interest...the hope of reciprocity, of gratitude, is the only true generosity: it is one's consent to behold and be beholden to another (anything less reduces the other to nothing)."
David Bentley Hart The Beauty of the Infinite p.84
“The one thing about ourselves we know with certainty is that we are to die. When we accept this death, or prepare ourselves, if necessary, actively to appropriate it, we fulfill most rigorously the Greek demand to value only that which cannot be taken away from us. We do so, it is true, in a somewhat paradoxical manner; that which most securely defines us-death-is that which puts an end to us, while the moral gesture which supposedly establishes our subjectivity, and so is inalienable, involves our being drawn beyond our own boundaries. Nevertheless, one might suggest that pure self-sacrifice strangely turns out to be the securest self-possession, and so one might wonder whether, after all, there is something stoically solipsistic about this ethic despite its being founded upon a disinterested regard for the other. In exalting resurrection, I will also have to point out that self-sacrifice is not the highest good which is, rather, that for the Christian, to give is itself to enter into reciprocity and the hope for infinite reciprocity. And to offer oneself, if necessary, unto sacrificial death is already to receive back one’s body from beyond the grave. To give, to be good, is already to be resurrected.”
--John Milbank “The Ethics of Self-Sacrifice” in First Things (March 1999) p.33-38
--Eberhard Jungel God as the Mystery of the World pp.320-323
"The trinitarian interpretation of the indissoluble interrelations of the love of God and love of neighbor finally set in a new light the relation between the divine agape that is at work in believers by the Holy Spirit and Platonic eros as a needy and seeking form of love of the beautiful and the good. Although erotic love is not identical with love of God in the Christian sense...[nevertheless] the tendency of the erotic striving after the good and the perfect can no longer be an argument for maintaining an antithesis in principle to the Christian understanding of love as agape. Instead, we have to recognize the upward moving tendency of Platonic eros...something corresponding to the upward inclination of biblical love of God as filial love for the Father...Yet although we must see erotic love as defective relative to the [perfection] of the Son's fellowship with God, we must not equate it with the self-seeking desiring that is a manifestation of sin. We have to view concupiscence as a perversion of the erotic. Erotic fascination is an ecstatic phenomenon that is undoubtedly exposed to many such perversions and corruptions by human self-seeking but is more than these, for it can also lead us to worship of the Creator. Naturally the ecstatic element of erotic love in our turning to God cannot vouch for the victory over all selfish desire. Victory over selfish perversion of the love oriented to fellowship with God, who himself is love, takesp lace neither in the ecstasy of eros nor on the in many respects comparable ways of human hope, but only by faith, which frees us from our imprisonment in self and sets us in Christ, on whom it relies, and thus gives us a share in his filial fellowship with the Father. Yet the prior love of God and the response of love that it kindles in us are constitutive for faith. At this point what is at issue is grace, to which faith owes itself."
--Wolfhart Pannenberg Systematic Theology Volume 3 p.195-196
"What startles and provokes is glory, in which one finds a coincidence of strangeness and recognition. Often, seeing the color of another's eyes is the beginning of 'responsibility.' Of course...real desire is typically absent and that, for just this reason, beauty is not always visible; there is always a degree of utopian or eschatological deferral in moral desire; but without love's vital appetite, and the capacity for sympathy it opens, there is no impulse within one that can be cultivated toward a responsibility not consequent simply upon immediate affection or interest...the hope of reciprocity, of gratitude, is the only true generosity: it is one's consent to behold and be beholden to another (anything less reduces the other to nothing)."
David Bentley Hart The Beauty of the Infinite p.84
“The one thing about ourselves we know with certainty is that we are to die. When we accept this death, or prepare ourselves, if necessary, actively to appropriate it, we fulfill most rigorously the Greek demand to value only that which cannot be taken away from us. We do so, it is true, in a somewhat paradoxical manner; that which most securely defines us-death-is that which puts an end to us, while the moral gesture which supposedly establishes our subjectivity, and so is inalienable, involves our being drawn beyond our own boundaries. Nevertheless, one might suggest that pure self-sacrifice strangely turns out to be the securest self-possession, and so one might wonder whether, after all, there is something stoically solipsistic about this ethic despite its being founded upon a disinterested regard for the other. In exalting resurrection, I will also have to point out that self-sacrifice is not the highest good which is, rather, that for the Christian, to give is itself to enter into reciprocity and the hope for infinite reciprocity. And to offer oneself, if necessary, unto sacrificial death is already to receive back one’s body from beyond the grave. To give, to be good, is already to be resurrected.”
--John Milbank “The Ethics of Self-Sacrifice” in First Things (March 1999) p.33-38
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