Marriage: Christian Love vs. Erotic Love

Posted by Eric F. Langborgh on 08 Jul 2007 at 07:53 am

Lord’s Day Meditation

The second cultural force that has undermined traditional marriage is the romantic conception of love, which is largely the product of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Distortions are more difficult to identify here. Erotic passion did not spring into existence two centuries ago, and passion has always been a recognized enemy of obligation, especially marital obligation. The romantic conceptions of love, furthermore, owe a significant debt to the semi-Christianized notions of the medieval courtly love tradition. Without the confession that God is love and that God has saved the world out of love, what Robert Polhemus has called “erotic faith” would never have taken cultural hold. Yet, the erotic faith of romantic love is a threat to Christian love and marriage, since it represents a substitute for Christian faith.

As Polhemus describes it, erotic faith is

an emotional conviction, ultimately religious in nature, that meaning, value, hope, and even transcendence can be found through love — erotically focused love, the kind of love we mean when we say that people are in love. . . . Men and women in the hold of erotic faith feel that love can redeem personal life and offer a reason for being. . . . with the spread of secularism since the eighteenth century, erotic faith, diverse and informal though it may be, has given to some a center and sometimes a solace that were traditionally offered by organized religion and God. By love we can change the situation — that sentiment moves people: love relationships have the highest priority in the real lives of millions as they have had for innumerable characters in fiction.

Love at first sight is the sacrament of erotic faith — a love that is not merely sexual attraction but, as Anthony Giddens puts it, “an intuitive grasp of qualities of the other. It is a process of attraction to someone who can make one’s life, as it is said, ‘complete.’”

The flaw in this romantic conception is subtle but deadly. The key shift can be neatly expressed as a grammatical one, a shift from the Christian confession that we love because we are first loved to the erotic faith in first love, or love at first sight; from the Christian confession that the God of love saves to the erotic faith that Love saves; from the Christian confession that God is love to the erotic faith that Love is god. The faith that self-transcendence and “completion” come through erotic attachment to another human being is a species of idolatry. Marriages built on or infected with this vain hope are doomed, for what happens when the satisfaction is lacking, as it must be?

~Peter Leithart, A Great Mystery: Fourteen Wedding Sermons, pp. xi-xii