Song of Songs: Interpretation of Interpretations.

Over the last few weeks I've been mulling on the historical treatment of Eros within the Catholic Church. As I've said before, the Catholic Church was the big player in the development of European culture and thus its understanding of Eros profoundly influenced European culture's understanding of it. Particularly, I've been thinking about the historical treatment of the interpretation of Song of Songs. As this Wiki article mentions, Song of Songs is a "interesting" book of the Bible. A literal reading shows it to be about the Eros-love between a man and woman.

1. How beautiful are thy feet in sandals, O prince's daughter! Thy rounded thighs are like jewels, The work of the hands of a skilful workman.

2 Thy body is like a round goblet, Wherein no mingled wine is wanting: Thy waist is like a heap of wheat Set about with lilies.

3 Thy two breasts are like two fawns That are twins of a roe.

4 Thy neck is like the tower of ivory; Thine eyes as the pools in Heshbon, By the gate of Bath-rabbim; Thy nose is like the tower of Lebanon Which looketh toward Damascus.

5 Thy head upon thee is like Carmel, And the hair of thy head like purple; The king is held captive in the tresses thereof .

6 How fair and how pleasant art thou, O love, for delights!

7 This thy stature is like to a palm-tree, And thy breasts to its clusters.

8 I said, I will climb up into the palm-tree, I will take hold of the branches thereof: Let thy breasts be as clusters of the vine, And the smell of thy breath like apples,

9 And thy mouth like the best wine, That goeth down smoothly for my beloved, Gliding through the lips of those that are asleep.

Compared to other books, it gives little direct reference to God, His laws or even the implied obligation to procreate. It's basically an erotic poem that celebrates sexual love. Given the literal nature of the subject matter,  there was considerable controversy amongst the early church fathers as to whether it should be included in the Bible or not. Historically, the book has been treated an allegorical representation of God's love for his Church. Looking at the above passage, all I've got to say is, Hmmm.

Anyway, whilst thinking about this subject I got sidetracked into a discussion over the The Orthosphere which bought up the subject of Galileo. An interesting realisation occurred. Galileo was censured for advocating a view which directly contradicted the literal reading of scripture. On the other hand, Song of Songs literal meaning (i.e Erotic) was deliberately downplayed and its allegorical reading emphasised.  Why the interpretive inconsistency? Why is it, that when the subject matter is "positively" erotic the material is meant to be treated as allegorical, but when the subject matter is "negatively" erotic the matter is literal?

As I've said before, I think that the Church has an anti-carnal bias and sometimes I wonder how Eros would have fared if weren't so intimately tied with procreation and romance.

For those who are interested, here is a good and brief paper outlining the historical treatment of Song of Songs.

Carnal Lite.

 
My interest in the Christian relationship with Eros is based upon the notion that this dysfunctional relationship provides the key to the understanding of our current socio-sexual dysfunction. As I've said previously, I'm broadly in agreement with Nietzsche and his claim that Christianity gave Eros poison to drink and it degenerated into vice.

Sexual perversion was rife in ancient times and from my perspective, it appears that the Christian pushback left a legacy of hostility towards it. Over the long run Christianity was able to  effectively "de-carnalise" it, transforming it into a "fleshy-lite" version of its former self.  It was this new understanding of Eros that manifest itself in a variety of ways into Christian culture and became a mainstream understanding.  Part of the reason why Trads are so hostile to Game is because Game's understanding of erotic love is explicitly carnal in nature and thus opposed to the traditional understanding. For the Gamesters, it's all about carnality/biomechanics,.... spirituality.........eh?

Christian masculinity and the Christian romantic tradition were in many ways shaped by the "carnal-lite" understanding of Eros. The good Christian male was quiet, meek, industrious and would "turn the other cheek". With regard to women, he would having nothing but the "best intentions".
The system worked well for both society and the man, when the woman's choices were limited. There was a social pressure on women to marry and the alternative to not doing so was rather bleak for the average women.

Economic and political emancipation changed all this. Having financial independence and social freedom to be single freed women of a lot of the pressure to marry. Social changes, particularly sexual license, and the elevation of the importance of romance, meant that the externalities which forced marriage onto women were gone. Women were free to choose the partner they wanted and experiment a bit. Hypergamic affirmative action was effectively shut down.

Serious Christian males were sideswiped completely by the phenomenon. They did everything they were told to do only to find that they were relatively unattractive to women. Trying to understand this phenomenon, they posited that women who failed to find them attractive were in some ways flawed. i.e. that they were skanks or sluts, or that they were psychologically unwell, or that they were being "manipulated" by the man. How many nice beta males have stood, mournfully perplexed, at their love interest who spurned them for a loser thug? How many women, recognising that they made a bad impulsive choice, were able to rely on these old chestnuts to abdicate themselves from any responsibility?  The trads still argue along these lines.

One of the stock standard arguments of the traditionalists is that the world has gone mad. But it is also the same argument of a schizophrenic. When you start thinking that everyone else is mad, perhaps it is you that has the problem. It never occurs to the Trads that maybe their understanding of Eros is flawed and that Nietzsche, despite his faults, was maybe onto something.

Take, example this understanding of "Bad boy" by Zippy;

Define “bad boy” = “men who make poor fathers”.

Fatherhood has nothing to do with being a "bad boy". A computer geek can be an objectively a bad father yet he is not a bad boy. An dorky engineer can be a good father and yet he is not a bad boy.
A bad boy is a man with erotic capital. His potential fatherhood status is irrelevant.This continual conflation of moral and sexual attraction is something that is continually present in the trad crowd.
Initially, when you read comments like this you feel that the commentator is dense, but, since the same error gets repeated over and over again, the impression forms that perhaps this is systemic error of Traditional Christianity and not an individual failing.

The continual conflation of physiological sexual attraction with moral parameters (either positive of negative) seems to be a problem of Christianity when it comes to an analysis of sexuality.  Good Christian men can't understand why they are not sexually attractive, despite living according to God's law.  Living in the hope that God will send them a good woman who will not be like the "others". This deficiency in the understanding of the biological dimension of sexuality means that no practical advice is given on how to improve the success rate with the ladies, apart from pray. Most of the other advice is next to useless.  On the other hand, due to this hostility to the "flesh" men and women who are sexually attractive are deemed to be morally bad. Amongst weaker minds there almost appears to be an associative incompatibility between being "hot" and being "Christian".  Drab women and grey men.

The Trads seem to be unable to recognise that he attraction a woman feels for a man is involuntary, i.e. it is morally neutral. How she chooses to act on the attraction gives her actions a moral dimension. But they continually conflate the two. The fact that Jessica is attracted to Bill, the bad boy, does not mean she will be attracted to dweeby Ben, who is also morally bad but lacks erotic capital. Morals have nothing to do with the issue, attraction is decided by the flesh.

This tradition of conflation in my opinion stems of Christianity's aversion to "flesh". The overtly erotic was simply seen as the express route the Hell and Christianity did all it could to suppress it. As a result, Christianity developed a good tradition of fighting the flesh and neglected to develop an understanding of it or accord it any legitimacy. The result has been that Christianity can't evaluate sexuality on the biomechanical level and insists to continually evaluate it on the moral on. The resistance to this common sense understanding is perplexing.  It's as if the Trads do not want to acknowledge a carnal nature to our sexual desires and instead continue with their understanding of human sexuality as if the mechanics of sexual attraction did not matter, only its moral evaluation; still, which they nearly always view in the negative.

This historical position has had practical real world sequelae. Admittedly, Christianity is not responsible for the excesses but it provided for a a cultural fault line which was waiting to be exploited.

1.  For good or ill, the Church was the dominant cultural force in the West till about the end of the 19th Century, it's suppression of the erotic, not procreative, component of sexuality, meant that as the Church lost power, the pendulum swung the other way. Nature abhors a vacuum and in the absence of any theology of desire the world developed it's own. Predictably it was stupid. Today's sluttery is due to yesterdays prudery.
2.  It has made a meaningful discussion on sexual polarity difficult since the spirit was more important that the flesh. Yet our sexual polarity is intrinsically tied to our carnal bodies. Gender equality/interchangeability is easy when the flesh is irrelevant. Cue feminism.
3. It has conditioned people towards evil by making sexual evil fun and virtue boring.
4. It has encouraged physical ugliness by neglecting or erotic complementarity. Desire is supercharged in bodily perfection and diminished in dysmorphia. The Fat acceptance movement is based on the idea that we shouldn't be so "superficial" and judge people on appearances.

I get a lot of heat for taking this position, but here is an interesting question I'll wish you to ponder: Why has "bad boy" become synonymous with sexual attraction and "good boy" with sexual repulsion? Perhaps it's because contemporary Christianity lacks the capability to be sexy and good. The flipside to this is the notion that the erotic and good are incompatible. See what I'm getting at?

Finally, I want to say something about the Neoreactionary Canon. While I'm chuffed to have some of my posts there I think it was a grave error to leave Roissy out. The errors of Modernism are cross-cultural, affecting nearly every facet of life. Human sexual dynamics is one such area and the supreme Neo-reactionary warrior has been Roissy. Don't get me wrong, there's lots of things he says that I disagree with, but when it comes to the red pill reality as pertains to Eros, he is the prime expositor.
 
Furthermore, any Neoreactionary neophyte is better starting off with his writings than those of Moldbug or myself. His turgid style and my shitty blogging are liable to put people off. At his best, he is an unbelievably good writer who is able to shove the red pill down your throat. Nothing hooks a man more to neoreaction than sexual success is the presence of what seems a never ending drought. Roissy is able to co-opt primal force in the pursuit of truth. It's an unbeatable combination.

The Consolations of the Flesh.

One of the things which moved me in Augustina's comment is the realisation that despite the good moral polarity of the woman, her life was a emotional struggle against her fleshy instincts. Whilst she may have had joy through her children, her joy as a woman--as someone who was loved by a man--was destined to elude her.  Caritas and the grace of God may have given her peace but her ultimate psychic deficiency remained. To quote;

I don’t get much out of my marriage. For all intents and purposes I am like a single mother, and I often wish I had romance in my life. I have never had romantic love, and doubt that I will ever experience it in my life. 

Perhaps I am devoted to a higher cause: my family. I have devotion to him, and fondness for him. I recognize now what a struggle it was for him and that he is not at fault for his ‘failings.’ But it is not based on ‘tingles’, attraction, previous romantic feelings or any other such thing. I took vows to love and honor him, in good times and bad and in sickness and in health. So be it.

Some commentators are wont to disparage the legitimacy of the "tingles", but it is the "tingles" which provide for the natural attraction in marriage and which give it, and life, some of its felicity. The rush of love--and lust--is one of life's joy's, and a life absent of these things is a life deficient. Procreation out of duty is a different beast to procreation out of desire and dutiful marriage, devoid of the pleasures of the flesh--and here I mean more than just actual physical pleasures--is dry and barren. Augustina describes a marriage in which Caritas is present but is devoid of Eros.

Caritas perfects all things, including Eros but perhaps due to historical circumstances or inappropriate theological developments Christianity has put the two in opposition.  Nietzsche's comment, "Christianity gave Eros poison to drink; he did not die of it, certainly, but degenerated to Vice" has some legitimate traction in my opinion.  Benedict tried to the defend the Church in his encyclical Deus Caritas Est, but I felt that his defence was weak, dismissive of the accusation more than a tackling of it. To his credit, Benedict put out the encyclical as a discussion document more than a definitive statement of things. These musings are my two cents on the matter.

Spiritual writers on the topic of marriage tend to emphasise the spiritual nature of it. It's all Caritas and zero Eros.  John Paul II--in his theology of the body--in my opinion, tried to "mystify a carnal act" in order to justify it. It was as if sex couldn't just be sex, rather, it had to be a reflection of some kind of divine relationship in order to be legitimate.  The Church asserts that the created world is good but when it comes to sex it needs added justification.

One of the consequences of the "All Caritas zero Eros" approach to marriage is that our traditional cultural understanding of it has tended to downplay--in fact disparage-- its carnal dimension. Wives are meant to have sex with unattractive husbands out of Caritas, without any reference to whether Eros is satisfied. Husbands who stray when their wives have become sexually repulsive for whatever reason, bear all the guilt for their act. Never is there a consideration of the legitimacy of Eros in a marriage or the recognition that one can sin against it.  

Morever, what Eros is divinely ordered to desire is no given no consideration whatsoever; it's as if we are all spirit and no flesh. Christian writers have always emphasised the war of the Spirit against the flesh but this does not imply that the Spirit is meant to kill the flesh, rather, it is to overcome it and control it, not pretend that it is not there.  Caritas perfects, it cannot destroy. It can reign in our sexual desires but cannot eliminate them.  Caritas does not turn a man into a eunuch. 

Wives submit to your husbands, is always quoted by traditionalists without any reference to a woman's biology. A good Christian wife may choose to submit to her husband but there is no way of guaranteeing that she will enjoy the subsequent relationship because the flesh controls the underlying neurobiology. Augustina lays the case out better than I can,

Flash forward fifteen years or so. I had finally had it. I wanted to be the good Christian wife, and be submissive to my husband. But there was nothing to submit to. [ED] He didn’t lead. He drifted. It was like being on a ship, but with no captain to guide it. And the waters are full of icebergs, rocky shoals, submerged reefs, and vast stretches of the doldrums. It was terrifying to have my now large family on a ship with no one to navigate these waters.

He was passive, hesitant, didn’t lead as a father should, couldn’t discipline the children, and still couldn’t support his family. I was forced to make every decision, to consider our options with no input from him. I would wait for his input, request his input, but never got it. 

This was clearly a victory of the spirit over the flesh, Augustina stayed with her man--despite the promptings of the flesh--but how much easier would it have been for Augustina if Eros was not in rebellion? This spiritual victory is still a human tragedy since the joy of a happy marriage eluded Augustina.  Don't get me wrong, the type of love Augustina gave her husband is the type of Divine love that really matters, what she missed out on, though, was human fleshy love.

Adultery and fornication are ever present realities of the human condition and are perpetuated by the pleasures achieved in their execution. Desire, lust, anticipation, the feeling of being "in love" all feel so damn good that men are willing to burn in Hell just to experience them. But the problem with Eros is that eventually leaves one unsatisfied. Chasing poon becomes boring. One girl is just like the other. The repetitive high that women get from bedding hot men gets boring as well. Even girls who have only slept with only18 guys want something more permanent.

The central theme in the novels of Michel Houellebecq is love in a world without caritas.  There is plenty of sex in his books but each of the characters ultimately ends up alone and fending for themselves. It's an atomised existance and profoundly depressing. Caritas means that we are never alone and that there is always someone who cares for us. Deeply happy marriages can exist on Cartias alone, but the blessed ones have a healthy dose of Eros as well.

 *I not criticising Augustina's husband here. He is suffering from a medical condition. It just that Augustina's comment illustrates how much hard work a good woman must put in to a marriage without Eros, and how such a state of affairs can tempt one to divorce.