Eros and Grace

“Eros and Grace” was initially presented to the Nasson College Sunday Morning Breakfast Club on October 6, 2025.

Many times in my life, I have climbed out on a limb with a saw in hand to cut away confusion and find simplicity. Today I shall do it again, sitting on the limb, hoping that the saw is in the correct hand, and, by the way, neglecting any trigger warnings. I shall explain the erotic origins of Western Civilization. This is the story of Eros and his necessary companion, Grace, also known as gratia, gift. Love and Grace.

After retiring from the software company Annie and I created, I started writing (finally) about the structure of certain ideas that seem to remain the same as I look back upon Western Civilization. Better words might be “patterns” or “convincing forms of rhetoric”; forms of expression that resonate with others and within our own consciousness. They are forms of understanding for which we are wired. They have changing uses and differing values may be assigned, but their underlying structure remains intact. A simple example is cause and effect. Lightning is a phenomenon that anyone with sight may experience, and people add to the experience by attributing the cause of this effect. Some may say that the cause is static electricity, while others attribute it to the hand of Jove. One never sees the cause; the cause-and-effect relationship is a constant in the way we think; we are wired that way. If we see something, we want to know “the cause,” but the cause is contingent and has been described in many ways. Returning or cycling to a mythical golden age, better than the present, is a recurring standard, but the nature of the model varies immensely from the apostolic community to an Eden-like state of nature. This is very apparent in our current politics where different parties use the same structure, claiming renewal, with radically different values or content. MAGA vs Biden’s Build Back Better. I am interested in relationships such as cause and effect, cycles, and renewal, which are apparently deeply embedded and can be traced through history. My work is value-neutral; I seek permanence, not the multiplicity of opinion, as I examine Eros and Grace. 

Stripping the value content from important contemporary ideas, so that only a bare boned structure remains, we may trace them within history to determine whether they are a constant part of our humanity. Hoping that you agree that Eros (Love) and Grace (a gift from a person or force) are important, I shall demonstrate this process. 

When I use the word Eros and the associated adjective Erotic, you probably think of sexual attraction, fantasies, and perhaps Freudian psychology. You may associate grace with religion and the gift of salvation. My historical studies have led me to conclude that they are integrally connected and that the rhetorical power of their combined structure explains not only our desire for sex and friendship, but also science, mysticism, and salvific religions. I do not denigrate or diminish the importance or “truth” of any points of view concerning the meaning of Eros and Grace, but instead seek to understand their combined, structural role within our essential humanity. 

Today we enjoy something I remember well from Nasson days, a drinking party.

This Sunday Morning Breakfast Club tradition reminds me of the symposium, an ancient Greek tradition where a subject for speeches was assigned during a drinking party. Twice, dialogues from the fourth century BCE survive, describing such a party: one by Plato and another by Xenophon. Both include the character Socrates, who taught these authors, and both were on the subject of Eros, the fourth god created in the Greek theogony, out of abyss, earth and chaos, and who is associated with desire and creativity, surely modeled upon the human experience of sexual union and reproduction. Notionally, primal experience leads to magic and myth, which are then aggregated and simplified in concept. Somehow, the pattern is wired into mind, soul, neural circuitry, cognitive unconscious, the “whatcha-callit.” I do not know the exact container, but it is inherited.

From my early days, I have sought to understand why humans desire to know things that transcend direct experience, such as gods, absolute beauty, and the nature of the cosmos. Looking back three millennia, I found that Plato had explained the structure in his Symposium. First, various well-known Athenians offered their perspectives on the assigned subject of Eros, commenting on how sexual desire led not only to physical fulfillment but also to courage in war, the propagation of the race, and service to the community, the polis, as a means to impress one's lover and secure a place in posterity. Socrates agrees, but says there is more to the story, describing what he has learned from Diotima, a mysterious priestess of whom we know little. She says that Eros is a Daemon, an intermediary between men and absolute ideas such as beauty. This is the Beauty common to all beautiful things. Compare this with the Newtonian concept of F=ma, common to all motion. One may love another sexually because of their individual beauty, but this is only the first step on a ladder leading toward a deeper understanding of ideal, perfect beauty.

Weak humanity is only able to desire immediate objects; it is with the help of a Daemon that we may climb the ladder toward friendship, community, science, mysticism, and philosophy. (Note that in computer science, a daemon is an intermediary application providing a bridge between two different applications.) For my purposes, daemon is that “something” which allows and requires us to seek and speculate. Everyone knows simple Eros, Kubrick’s “old in-out, in-out” from A Clockwork Orange. Diotima elevates it to another level, stating that it is the engine of desire. If someone uses such a model or pattern in language, it resonates with others and convinces; subjectively, it allows one to feel that they are on the right path. For me, it is the creative force that drives me to understand the structure of ideas within history. (Part of my evidence is always found in using my own consciousness to rethink texts from the past. How do these thoughts work? What is their structure?)

Diotima did not speak of Grace specifically, but she did imply that the erotic search through the daemon returned knowledge, a fulfillment comparable to sexual release. Grace becomes explicit in the less confident world of religion. After Plato, new religions emphasizing personal salvation emerged. One, of course, is Christianity. Its origins are both Hebrew and Greek, and Love is essential in the words the Apostle Paul uses to describe the relationship between man and god. Structurally, man seeks god through faith, and god reciprocates with his love through gifts named grace, gratia, charis, hen–all functionally comparable to the Socratic daemon also called Eros. Simply put, man is weak. He must seek through a form of desire called faith. Christianity even assigns a part of the trinity, called the Holy Spirit, the role of a daemon-like intermediary that provides reciprocity in the form of love and knowledge. The Christian man needs more help than Plato’s man, but the structure of the ladder taking us beyond the senses is the same. 

If time permitted, I would survey many examples, including images Annie and I found of Diotima, Eros, and Socrates on household items from Greek/Etruscan/Roman culture. These images from before the Christian era place Eros, holding a book, between Diotima, the teacher, and Socrates, the student. I would describe the work of Ovid, the Roman author of Ars Amatoria and Amores, as well as St. Augustine of Hippo, who, like Diotima, placed Eros (amor) in an intermediary position in human consciousness between simple memoria, consciousness, and intelligensia, complete knowledge. Man, the smallest of worms, must reach out through amor to receive. The ancients were aware of the erotic pattern that persists.

After the fall of Rome, a culture of love emerged in the Middle Ages, in which the lady was placed on a pedestal and addressed in terms of desire and reciprocation parallel with or analogous to religious texts. At the same time, the relationship with Christ was described by both male and female mystics with explicit sexual imagery. The desire to kiss the sacred mouth is detailed along with the divine reciprocity, also a kiss, the gift of grace. If evidence is required, read St. Bernard of Clairvaux’s sermons on the Song of Songs, which must have aroused his monks. 

Two additional examples are Dante and Bernini’s Teresa of Avila. The former’s De Vita Nuova is a compilation of poems about a female neighbor named Beatrice, whom he watched from afar as a child and only met twice. She sparks a spiritual renewal in the poet, and he promises to write what has never been written of a woman. This is accomplished in the third part of his Comedia, where Beatrice is his guide through Paradise. Virgil, the Roman poet, had led him through the Inferno and Purgatory, but he could go no further because he was not a Christian. Beatrice, now a figure of amor and grace, with the help of St. Bernard, takes him to the godhead itself. Everything is connected, from the tension of Dante’s youth to a final revelation of the divine. Jumping forward three more centuries to the sculptor Bernini, we encounter his depiction of the mystic, Teresa of Avila, swooning in ecstasy while being pierced by the arrow shot by a handsome young angel (a traditional depiction of Eros). In Rome, I visit the statue in the Church of Santa Maria in Victoria and have been both bothered and informed by sarcastic smiles and sly comments of “I wonder what she’s doing” from those who do not understand the erotic origins of mysticism.

 The 20th-century philosopher and ascetic mystic Simone Weil says, “To reproach mystics with loving God by means of the faculty of sexual love is as though one were to reproach a painter with making pictures by means of colors composed of material substances. We haven’t anything else with which to love.” The ladder begins with physical reciprocal sex. Its structure is reused to describe friendship, the search for God, the pursuit of knowledge, and even the quest for nothingness. Desire. Even the conservative Pope Benedict XVI began his pontificate with the letter Deus caritas est, where, using the Greek word, he acknowledges the sexual origins of Eros and its role in leading to the divine, while, at the same time, limiting the use of body parts below the waist. He asked for Eros to be disciplined, saying that it “tends to rise in ecstasy towards the divine, to lead us beyond ourselves, yet for this reason, it calls for a path of renunciation and healing.” He acknowledges it as the primal source of physical, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual desires, but asks that it be seen as “only the foretaste of the beatitude for which we yearn”. While appreciating his understanding of the role of Eros, I feel that his argument would be more powerful if he were to acknowledge, explicitly, the inseparable primal pairing of Eros and Grace.

Thus, Eros is the vitalistic, desiring tension seeking to acquire, join, or know an Other, an object, an idea, a god, anything, even something unknown, and, reciprocally, receive. Implicit in the structure of such erotic desire is the expectation of reciprocation, a gift, which I have glimpsed and offer to you today.

As an encore, think upon your loving, desiring, and seeking. Are they a state of tension with the expectation of reciprocation?

Hidden takeaways could be: We are in essential ways the same. No one believes they are wrong.