I do eros not sex

Publish date 24-08-2020

by Flaminia Morandi

In Italy, one in 5 adolescents have sexual intercourse before the age of 14. Just a few years ago they were 16, 17 years old. A trend shared with the whole planet and there are those who are worse off than us. The compulsive bombardment of sex (with its corollaries of substances) is not saved by those who, like children, live on the web. The consequences are dramatic: the virginity experienced by girls as a hindrance to get rid of as soon as possible, the increase in abortions at the age of 15, 16, the terror of males not to make it, the purchase of viagra on the net. And in the long run: impotence, sexual perversions, even suicides.

It is one of the many terrible drifts of the frenetic acceleration that humanity has taken over the last 50 years, in which more changes have occurred than in all previous centuries. Kids feel obliged to have sex before they become aware of what desire really is. And the point is right here: what is desire, what is its goal.

Desire is a symptom. It is a signal, a reminder, like every manifestation of our body and of creation. Even a cold can have a transcendent meaning, even a thunderstorm or a beautiful sunny day, the constitution of an atom, the perfect mathematical formula behind every phenomenon, the harmony of music, the world of numbers, correspondence between numbers and words (of which the rabbinical exegetes were not by chance so expert).

Let alone sex, an act that gives rise to life, thus putting human flesh in direct contact with the divine Spirit that fills the universe. The interpretation of everything that exists can never be horizontal. The devil's cunning, says Maximus the Confessor, consists in diverting man's intelligence from God, fixing it on things: man wants to possess them as a usurper and not as a king-priest of the universe as it was thought. And so the target of its realization fails, because its true power is instead to read the logoi, the spiritual essences in all things, express them and cultivate them in the garden of the world, revealing their beauty.

It is significant that the rabbinic literature born from the study of the Bible never treats sex to itself, but always within the reflection on the whole man. Sex is not a piece, it is the whole, it is a cry of the whole. Plato said: desire cries out for immortality, challenges death, and has two ways to do so, the continuation of the species and the contemplation of celestial reality. The desire satisfied too soon, before having learned to look beyond appearances into the depths of people, phenomena, things, instead of becoming a source of life, it becomes a source of death.

The desire that you want to fulfill in the body does not come from the body, says Clemente d’Alessandria. Physical eros is a figure of your desire for God, says John Climacus.
The Eros you feel is part of the divine Eros, of the energy of Creation. If you want to have a ray of it within, if you want to be creative, if you want to fully realize yourself, immerse yourself in the Eros of God, do not exchange it for the vile currency of consumer sex.

Flaminia Morandi
NP May 2016

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