The Creator’s Kiss

We often believe, Paul Griffiths writes (Decreation, 162-4) that eros is “a drive or appetite internal to itself by means of which it relates itself to a world external to itself.”

Not so. “The flesh’s eros is received as git, not possessed as aspiration.” We become capable of caressing by being caressed, and “the lover becomes such only by receiving the gift of himself as beloved.” The kiss is paradigmatic: “Becoming one who kisses is dependent, causally (and indeed definitionally), on being kissed. The impress of the lover’s lips on one’s own provides the gift of being one who, in virtue of being kissed, can kiss. Kissing is not a possibility for the unkissed; the flesh’s eros, concentrated in this case in the lips, is without remainder received from without.”

The gift of eros comes first from the love of a mother for her baby: “Babies receive the gift of their flesh as erotic, as desirous of and erotically responsible to the flesh of others, only by being caressed, usually, at least in the first instance, by their mothers. Absent the maternal caress, the eros of the baby’s flesh remains surd, unvoiced and inactive, a possibility unrealized.” Even our sense of fleshly boundaries has to be learned; Griffiths reminds us of “a baby’s surprise when it gums or sucks its toes with sufficient energy that it feels the result.” Boundaries, and the erotic as the mode of fleshly interaction “is learned by receiving the caress given by the flesh of others, and the touch provided by inanimate bodies.”

That our erotic selves are awakened from without is a marker of our creation ex nihilo, by the kiss of the Creator.  Griffiths writes, “Our flesh – we as fleshly – is not properly thought of as autonomously or by nature possessed of the capacity to desire, a capacity that can seem then to be actualized by receiving the gift of being desired. Rather, our very fleshliness, eroticized, is brought into being ex nihilo by the LORD’s kiss. The only thing we can do about it is to open our mouths to the kiss, or turn our faces away from it.”