In his 2005 encyclical God is Love, Pope Benedict defended the Christian view of sexual love. Despite those who claimed that Christians were killjoys when it comes to sex, Benedict offered a correction. Christianity “in no way rejected eros as such; rather, it declared war on a warped and destructive form of it, because this counterfeit divinization of eros actually strips it of its dignity and dehumanizes it.”
As Benedict explained, “The prostitutes in the [Greek] temple, who had to bestow this divine intoxication, were not treated as human beings and persons, but simply used as a means of arousing ‘divine madness’: far from being goddesses, they were human persons being exploited.”
Reclaiming genuine eros is at the heart of a brilliant new book, Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture
Join the conversation!
Please share your thoughts about this article below. We value your opinions, and would love to see you add to the discussion!