Eros

Eros December 15, 2011

What excites erotic desire? Our pornographic culture highlights the sheerly sensual – the visible form of the face and body, the aroma of a perfume, the allure of sexy clothing. Eros is aroused when the lovers are stripped of all external definitions, including finally their clothes and their modesty.

For all its reveling in smells and sounds and touches and sights and tastes, the Song of Songs points to attractions that go beyond the physical and sensual. At the outset, the bride delights in the fragrance of the lover’s oils (1:3), but the sensual delight in a cologne is immediately connected with the lover’s name; the sensual delight is real, but it becomes a metaphor or sacrament of the lover’s reputation. By the end of verse 3, the Bride is delighting in the fact that “the maidens love” the lover. This doesn’t appear to be rivalrous or competitive. Rather, the bride’s desire for her lover is aroused by her recognition that his attractions are known and acknowledged by others.

In several respects, then, the bride’s eros is aroused not by the lover in isolation but by the lover-in-society. What makes him lovable, desirable is not only his physical and sensual attractions but the honor bestowed upon him by others.

What’s important here is that the lover’s approval by society is not merely the cause of dispassionate respect and honor. The bride doesn’t think of the lover’s reputation and feel proud . She thinks of his reputation and her desire is aroused. The lover’s place in society is erotically enticing.

The bride speaks in these verses, and she expresses what is (perhaps) a distinctively feminine perspective (I repeat, perhaps!). Insofar as women take the world in wholes rather than parts, the bride’s desires respond to the lover whole, not to this or that attractive feature.

But there are hints in the Song that the lover’s passions are similar. He compares his beloved to a “mare among the chariots of Pharaoh” (1:9), the mare that arouses the interest of the stallions. As Robert Alter points out, even when the lover catalogs the bride’s physical beauties (4:1-6; 7:1-9), the other things that the lover loves are not far from his mind. He praises her in part because of the reputation that she has among queens and concubines (6:9-11). He finds his whole world within the beloved, and his desires are enflamed not by isolating the bride from everything she is connected to but by taking delight in his bride-in-relation.


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