Margaret Kamitsuka’s latest book explores eros in the Christian tradition—the ways it does, does not and might appear. Against what she sees as the tradition’s tendencies either to sacralise or condemn eros, Kamitsuka wants a more full-bodied account. To that end, she scrutinises moments in the tradition that flatten or deny eros together with others that suggest possibilities for imagining eros otherwise. Throughout the book, she returns to the Song of Songs for those ‘otherwise’ possibilities, drawing alongside that love poem cultural artefacts as temporally and formally diverse as Origen’s treatises, Titian’s art, Jane Austen’s novels and evangelicalism’s purity rings. She engages them not to craft an apology for eros, exactly, but to suggest a deflationary account of it—or at least a thoroughly human account, one that brings eros down to earth from its alignment with either depravity or divinity.
Reading the first few pages of the book, I thought Kamitsuka was setting up a declension and reclamation narrative. She writes in the Introduction, ‘Metaphors of love pervaded popular and elite Christian discourses. Then things went askew. The early church professionalized church offices overseeing charity, allegorized and moralized the Song of Song’s eroticism, and spurned eros’s discontents with prohibitions against divorce and remarriage or any sexual desire considered inordinate’ (p. 3). But I was puzzled about where she was locating her declension. She had just cited in the previous paragraph the medieval mystics who ‘yearned for illumination by basking in the glow of the perfumed body of Christ’ (p. 2). Was that evidence of declension or material for reclamation? And what about Jesus’s prohibitions regarding divorce in the Gospel of Matthew? Are they also words spurning eros’s discontents? Where is the golden age before things went askew?
Besides the question of when things declined, there is the question of what they declined from, or what kind of eros Kamitsuka is arguing for a return to. The ‘theology of eros’ promised by the subtitle eluded me. But some way through the Desirable Belief, I realised that the book might want to be read in the manner that Kamitsuka reads Christian texts and artifacts—namely, otherwise. Desirable Belief is playful and exploratory. Kamitsuka recasts the tale of David and Bathsheba a story of eros without blushing. She re-tells the famous love passage of I Corinthians 13 by describing an eros that is ‘not patient’ and ‘not always kind’ (p. 5). She wonders what it would mean if the prodigal son were leaving his father’s house for a lover. In these musings and makings, Desirable Belief is not a book that unfolds as a straightforward argument.
In the range of subjects and figures they invoke, the chapter themes and titles register the book’s playful spirit. Over five chapters, Kamitsuka treats shame and shamelessness in (Chapter 1: ‘Erotic Blush: Augustine, Austen, and Narcissism’); celibacy and bodily longing for the divine (Chapter 2: ‘Mystical Longing: Angela of Foligno, Rebecca Cox Jackson, and Abject Jouissance’); the domestication and irruptions of desire (Chapter 3: ‘Eros Deferred: The Song of Songs, Magical Realism, and the Almost’); agape and the desires of Christ (Chapter 4: ‘Love of Self: Bethany, Gethsemane, and Sacrifice’); and the place of eros eschatologically, including its relation to truthfulness (Chapter 5: ‘Eros Ascended: Jesus, Dante, and Divine Impassibility’). The book is full to the point of teeming with imagination, art and wonderings.
Eventually, I came to the conclusion that Desirable Belief is best received as a collection, a collage of images, stories and interpretations of eros. Scholars of the particular texts and artefacts Kamitsuka engages might find points of disagreement, and theologians might find her conclusions underdeveloped. For example, while some theologians may affirm the existence of eros in heaven, their basis is probably not, as Kamitsuka writes, ‘If Jesus’s humanity included not just sufferings but also desires, then there is a Christological basis for human eros in heaven’ (p. 119). Whatever a theologian’s stance on impassibility, affirming suffering in heaven does not seem to be a popular argument. Yet what if, subtitle aside, a ‘theology of eros’ is not what Kamitsuka is up to? What if she is not developing an argument about what eros is, but mounting a provocation to theologise eros otherwise, to see it not as something opposed to sacred and sinful but as more than sacred and sinful?
Receiving the book as a stimulus to get unstuck in our theologies of eros, I found myself able to enjoy its gifts—the vibrant language and vivid imagination of Kamitsuka, for example, or the readings that defamiliarised familiar tales. I could even appreciate the more polemical elements of the book for the way they release energy for new work. There are, moreover, moments of powerful insight. I was struck by her meditations on the split self near the end, when Kamitsuka explores with the Song of Songs and Søren Kierkegaard the divided heart that has been led by eros into places of moral ambiguity. I felt myself as a reader invited to sit with that ambiguity, together with the many images and stories Kamitsuka provided on my journey through her book. I felt goaded to reconsider my own language about eros, to ask how adequate our theologies of eros are (my theology of eros is) to the complexity, the force and the ambivalence of eros. Desirable Belief does not establish a new theology of eros, but received as an intervention upsetting our domesticated versions of desire, it’s possible it might instigate one.
