It was the lark, the herald of the morn,
No nightingale: look, love, what envious streaks
Do lace the severing clouds in yonder east:
Night’s candles are burnt out, and jocund day
Stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops.
I must be gone and live, or stay and die.
– Romeo, Romeo and Juliet, Act III, Scene 5

Introduction

Within Christianity, love occupies the highest possible place. God is love, the two great commandments are commandments of love, the Incarnation reveals divine love within creaturely existence, and salvation culminates in communion with God. Yet the love between man and woman has often entered Christian theology under rather different descriptions. Sexuality becomes a reproductive power, marriage an institution, desire a passion requiring discipline, and sexual conduct an object of moral regulation. All of these concern genuine features of sexual existence, but none yet tells us what erotic love itself means when one embodied person comes to desire and love another.

From an Eastern Orthodox perspective, the omission matters because the human person is not a spiritual subject temporarily inhabiting biological machinery. Body and person are not two realities subsequently fastened together, and salvation does not concern an immaterial self which ultimately escapes embodiment. The Incarnation, bodily Resurrection, and theosis all resist such a division. If the whole embodied creature is called into communion with God, then sexuality belongs somewhere within the theological meaning of personal existence itself. Sexuality is not first a bare biological mechanism to which reproduction and moral law later supply meaning. Its significance already belongs to embodied personal existence.

In romantic love, another person can acquire a significance which reorganises attention: their presence alters the significance of places and possibilities, their absence is felt differently from the absence of others, and their good begins to enter into projects once organised principally around the self. Yet precisely this intensity makes eros ambiguous. The beloved can be encountered as irreducibly themselves, but they can also become the bearer of fantasies, needs, expectations, and promises of completion which belong more to the lover than to them.

The alternative is not to rescue eros from biology by spiritualising it. If the beloved becomes valuable chiefly because they disclose Beauty, transcendence, God, or some deeper metaphysical unity, then the body has escaped biological instrumentalisation only to acquire a spiritual one. The argument therefore has to move between two reductions. The beloved cannot be reduced to reproductive function, but neither can they become a finite means towards some supposedly more ultimate spiritual reality. Christian eros requires instead a conversion of desire itself: agape does not abolish erotic attachment but makes it capable of communion without possession. Asceticism therefore belongs within eros as the renunciation of fantasy and mastery, making possible a communion that preserves rather than abolishes difference. Fidelity then binds the lover to a person whose future remains open, while the Resurrection carries this commitment into Christian eschatology by refusing to treat embodied particularity as something God ultimately discards.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Embodied Sexuality

Sexual attraction belongs to the reproductive history of the species: mating, pair-bonding, reproduction, and the care of offspring cannot simply be removed from an account of human sexual life. The reduction occurs only when this biological function is treated as an exhaustive description of erotic meaning, as though everything else lovers experience are subjective embellishments placed upon nature’s underlying reproductive machinery.

In The Phenomenology of Perception, Maurice Merleau-Ponty makes this reduction difficult because the body we actually inhabit is never first encountered as a collection of biological functions. We perceive, move, desire, touch, suffer, and encounter other people bodily before we analyse the body as an external object. Sexuality consequently belongs to what he calls the whole structure of embodied existence: “sexuality is not an autonomous cycle. It has internal links with the whole active and cognitive being” (PP, p. 182). This means that sexuality is not confined to the genitals or to a single reproductive function. It belongs to the whole way a person inhabits the body and encounters the world, shaping perception, attachment, movement, intimacy, and relation to others.

Erotic perception follows the same pattern. Merleau-Ponty writes that it “Erotic perception is not a cogitatio which aims at a cogitatum; through one body it aims at another body, and takes place in the world, not in a consciousness” (PP, p. 181). Attraction is ordinarily experienced before it is analysed. One does not first confront a neutral organism, enumerate its features, determine their reproductive suitability, and infer desire. Another person has already become bodily significant through voice, movement, expression, proximity, posture, smell, touch, and presence. These are not subjective meanings and values placed upon a fundamentally impersonal biological body but belong to the way this embodied person appears and acts in the world.

Biological reductionism therefore suffers not from taking nature too seriously but from making nature too thin. Human sexuality is biological, but human biology is already the biology of persons. The reduction occurs when one level of explanation – the reproductive function of the organism – is treated as though it exhausted the reality being explained, while affection, attraction, attachment, imagination, and personal meaning are relegated to secondary effects added afterwards. Yet explaining the mechanism by which something occurs is not the same as explaining the human phenomenon that occurs through it. The physiology of the vocal cords can explain how sounds are produced, but it cannot by itself explain what a sentence means, why it was spoken, or what relation is being expressed between speaker and hearer. Reproductive physiology stands in much the same relation to erotic life. It explains indispensable conditions of sexual response and reproduction, but it does not explain why this particular person becomes desirable, why their presence acquires significance, or how sexuality becomes bound up with affection, memory, vulnerability, and intimacy. To acknowledge these dimensions is not to move beyond biology, but to recognise what human biological existence is like when lived by persons.

Procreation can remain an intrinsic and extraordinary good of sexual communion without exhausting its meaning. Sexual union may be genuinely ordered towards the generation of children, but husband and wife do not therefore relate to one another chiefly as the biological means by which children are produced. Their sexual relation is also a personal relation between two embodied people who love, desire, and share a life with one another.

Erotic desire itself resists that reduction because the lover does not desire reproductive capacity in the abstract or an interchangeable member of the species, but one particular embodied person. Face, voice, movement, touch, and presence belong to the beloved’s particular existence and are inseparable from the way that person is encountered and loved. The body is therefore not a merely biological base to which personhood is later added – it is already the body of a person. In eros, personhood is disclosed within embodied human nature itself.

Plato and C.S. Peirce on the Ascent of Desire and Particularity of Love

Romantic love does not simply rank one person above other possible objects of attraction. It changes the way that person is perceived. Places, memories, and future possibilities acquire significance through their relation to the beloved, while the beloved’s joy or suffering can reorder the lover’s own priorities. Irreplaceability does not mean perfection, infinity, or metaphysical absoluteness. It means that another person could possess the same desirable qualities and still not be this unique person.

In Plato’s Symposium, Socrates recounts how Diotima taught him the ‘rites of love’: a disciplined ascent in which eros is gradually educated towards its highest object. Eros begins in lack and desire, seeking beauty and the good because it does not possess them. The lover first attaches himself to one beautiful body, then learns to recognise beauty in all bodies, before passing to beauty in souls, laws, forms of knowledge, and finally Beauty itself, ‘starting out from beautiful things and using them like rising stairs’ (S, 211C). The difficulty is that the particular beloved becomes progressively less central as the ascent succeeds. Once beauty is recognised as something universal and ultimately independent of any one body, attachment to this person can appear merely provisional: the beloved awakens desire, but the education of eros finally leads beyond them.

The objection is not that love can deepen beyond physical attraction, nor that one person may awaken the lover to forms of goodness and beauty previously unseen. The problem is that Diotima’s ascent makes the particular beloved valuable chiefly as a stage in a movement towards something more universal. In the image of the star, each step is necessary only until it has carried the climber higher. As the lover learns to recognise beauty in other bodies, souls, laws, and forms of knowledge, etc., the beauty first encountered in one person is progressively detached from that person and understood as an instance of Beauty itself. The beloved therefore risks becoming spiritually instrumental: important because they begin the ascent, but increasingly dispensable once the lover has learned to desire what lies beyond them.

A Christian theology can reproduce the same Platonic structure if the beloved is valued chiefly because they lead the lover towards God. The language may change – divine beauty, transcendence, sanctification, sacrament – but the danger remains. If the beloved is prized primarily for the higher reality encountered through them, their particular existence becomes subordinate to the lover’s spiritual ascent. They become a means of reaching beyond themselves rather than the person loved in their own right.

The Incarnation resists this logic as Christianity does not treat flesh as something provisional, valuable only until a higher spiritual reality has been reached. In the Word becoming flesh, divine life is revealed within concrete, embodied, historical existence. Movement towards God therefore cannot mean becoming progressively less attached to the particular creature. Communion with God should deepen the lover’s attention to the beloved as this embodied person, not make them dispensable to spiritual progress. There can be no Christian ascent past the beloved.

This does not elevate the beloved above God. It means that love of God places a limit on the lover’s claim over the beloved. The beloved has a life, purpose, and relation to God that are not created by being loved and cannot be exhausted by the lover’s desire. They cannot therefore be reduced to a means of fulfilment, sanctification, or spiritual progress. Peirce captures this insistence on particularity when he writes that “Love is not directed to abstractions but to persons,” and especially to “our own dear ones,” those near us “in life and feeling” (EL, p. 354). Agape does not require the lover to move away from particular attachment towards an impersonal love of humanity. It requires that this particular person be loved as a person rather than used as the occasion for something supposedly higher.

The ineffable More disclosed in love should therefore not be understood as a higher metaphysical reality behind the beloved. What exceeds the isolated self is the relation that becomes possible between two persons. A shared life can emerge – formed through memory, intimacy, fidelity, care, and common purpose – without either person ceasing to be distinct. The More is this communion itself: a unity created between persons rather than a reality reached by passing beyond them.

C.S. Peirce on Possession, Development, and Love in Time

To recognise that no one else can simply take the beloved’s place is to acknowledge their particularity, not to acquire a right over them. Trouble begins when that particularity is tied too closely to the place they occupy in the lover’s own life, so that change, distance, or refusal comes to seem like a failure to remain what the relationship requires. The beloved is still treated as unique, but their uniqueness is now valued in terms of the lover’s need for continuity, security, or fulfilment. What began as recognition of irreplaceability has therefore hardened into a claim of possession.

Peirce describes agape as moving “at one and the same impulse projecting creations into independency and drawing them into harmony” (EL, pp. 352–53). The two movements belong together. To draw another into harmony is to seek relation, intimacy, and a shared life. While to project them into independence is to allow that person to retain purposes, possibilities, and a course of development that are genuinely their own. If harmony can be achieved only by fixing the beloved within a form already desired by the lover, then independence has been sacrificed and communion has become possession. Peirce’s agape instead treats love as creative because what is loved is allowed to develop beyond what has already been imagined for it. The beloved contributes something new to the relation rather than merely conforming to a place prepared in advance.

Closeness, fidelity, sexual intimacy, and a shared life do not cease to belong to eros simply because agape enters the relation. What changes is the way those goods are understood. They can no longer be treated as entitlements which allow the lover to determine the beloved’s future or absorb their purposes into the relationship. Commitment remains real, but it binds two persons who continue to possess agency, judgment, and forms of flourishing that cannot be reduced to what either partner presently wants from the other.

Peirce’s description of growth as arising from “the ardent impulse to fulfil another’s highest impulse” (EL, p. 353) gives this freedom a constructive direction. To cherish another person is not merely to refrain from controlling them, but to desire that their life develop according to goods that are genuinely their own. That does not mean the lover is entitled to define those goods paternalistically. The beloved’s flourishing cannot simply be identified with whatever preserves the relationship in its existing form or keeps them nearest to the lover’s present hopes.

A lasting relation must therefore make room for positive development. People acquire new convictions, capacities, vulnerabilities, ambitions, and needs – the person first loved is not a finished form to be preserved unchanged. To love them through time is to participate in that becoming without claiming authorship over it. Agape deepens eros in this sense: attachment becomes capable of remaining faithful to a person who continues to exceed the expectations with which the relationship began.

Soren Kierkegaard on Asceticism Within Love

Desire does not encounter another person neutrally. It can magnify certain qualities, invest the beloved with hopes they never accepted, and make change or refusal appear as a failure of what the relationship was supposed to provide. The intensity of erotic attachment can therefore generate possessiveness, jealousy, and a sense of entitlement. Christian asceticism was right to recognise that eros can become disordered. The mistake was to identify the disorder too readily with sexuality or embodiment themselves, rather than with the way desire can turn another person into the bearer of the lover’s own needs and expectations.

Soren Kierkegaard’s language of dying away offers another way of understanding asceticism, for to love God is, in a typically stark formulation, “to die, to die away” (KJN 11.2, p. 384/Paper 578). The death in question is not the destruction of the self or a nihilistic rejection of finite existence, but the relinquishment of whatever finite good has been allowed to assume an absolute claim upon it. To love God with the whole self requires that created things cease to function as substitutes for God, sources of final meaning, complete security, freedom from contingency, or salvation. A person, relationship, or hope becomes idolatrous when it is asked to bear that weight. Applied to erotic love, this changes the object of ascetic discipline. The task is not to extinguish desire or detach the lover from the beloved, but to surrender the impossible demands that desire can attach to them: that they complete the self, remove loneliness, guarantee meaning, or secure a future against loss. The beloved is thereby released from having to become more than a creature, and erotic love can begin to relate to the actual person rather than to the absolute significance the lover has constructed around them.

Those meanings accumulate easily: memory fixes upon certain moments, desire heightens certain qualities, hope imagines a future, and fear imagines its loss. Gradually the lover can begin to relate not only to the beloved as they are, but to an image composed from expectation and need: the person who will always understand, who will remove loneliness, who will make life cohere, who will remain recognisably the same. The image need not be consciously formulated in order to govern the relationship.

The actual beloved will always exceed it: they change, refuse, disappoint, reveal purposes not anticipated at the beginning, and become more complicated as intimacy deepens. At that point asceticism becomes something more demanding than the regulation of sexual behaviour. Abstinence can restrain sexual behaviour while leaving the lover’s possessive expectations untouched: the beloved may still be expected to remain available, unchanged, or committed to an imagined future. The deeper renunciation is therefore to surrender the image of who the beloved is supposed to be and to stop demanding that the actual person conform to it.

Love of God makes this possible by restoring the distinction between Creator and creature. Divine love does not compete with human love, as though affection given to God must be taken away from the beloved. It releases the beloved from being treated as divine. No finite person can permanently abolish another’s loneliness, guarantee meaning, overcome contingency, defeat death, or provide salvation. To require these things is not to love the beloved more intensely, but to burden them with a role no creature can fulfil.

Asceticism therefore enters eros at the point where desire becomes possessive. What must be renounced is not the body, attraction, sexual intimacy, or particular attachment, but the attempt to make the beloved answer needs that exceed them and to hold them within an image formed by the lover. Christian renunciation does not ask the lover to love less. It asks them to relinquish mastery so that the person actually before them can be loved.

Martin Heidegger on Belonging-Together, Difference, and Communion

Communion cannot mean the elimination of difference, because a relation whose participants became literally indistinguishable would cease to be a relation. In The Principle of Reason, while reflecting on identity and what he calls ‘the Same,’ Martin Heidegger distinguishes genuine belonging from simple equivalence. Things can belong together without becoming identical; indeed, their relation may depend upon the difference that remains between them. He therefore describes what belongs together as held ‘in the most radical dissimilarity,’ a ‘holding-together in keeping-apart’ (PRH, pp. 89–90). The phrase was not written about erotic love, but its structure is valuable here: communion need not overcome difference in order to become real. It may depend upon preserving the very distinction between persons that makes relation possible.

Sexual union can bring two persons into extraordinary physical and emotional closeness, but that closeness remains reciprocal only because each retains an independent centre of perception, desire, and consent – touch presupposes another body that is not mine. The possibility of welcome depends upon the possibility of refusal; intimacy has meaning because the other cannot simply be absorbed into the self. Difference is therefore not what remains because union has fallen short. It is part of what makes union possible.

The biblical language of “one flesh” can be understood in the same way. Marriage creates something genuinely shared: memories, habits, promises, pleasures, losses, obligations, possessions, perhaps children, and eventually a history that neither spouse could have produced alone. Yet this common life does not require either person to become less distinct. Its unity exists in and through the continuing agency of two persons whose lives have become deeply implicated in one another. What is created is not an undifferentiated identity but a communion in which difference has become relational rather than divisive.

This also clarifies what it means to call eros sacramental – bodily union does not merely represent an invisible spiritual communion located somewhere beyond the bodies themselves. Fidelity, vulnerability, touch, forgiveness, mutual recognition, and the patient creation of a shared life are themselves embodied forms of communion. Embodied intimacy does not merely direct the lovers towards some more spiritual reality beyond the body. The body itself becomes one of the concrete forms in which communion is lived.

In theosis, participation in divine life does not require the creature to cease being a creature. Union with God perfects creaturely existence while preserving the distinction between Creator and creature. The same pattern can illuminate human communion, as intimacy does not reach its fullest form when one person disappears into the other, but when each can become more fully themselves within a shared life that neither possesses alone. Communion therefore overcomes isolation without abolishing otherness.

A.N. Whitehead and C.S. Peirce on Becoming, Novelty, and Fidelity

A person is never exhausted by who they are at any one moment. Character, purpose, judgment, and desire are formed through time, so the beloved encountered at the beginning of a relationship is not a finished person whose future can simply be inferred from the present. Peirce captures this when he writes that personality “has to be lived in time; nor can any finite time embrace its fullness,” describing its orientation as “a developmental teleology” (LM, p. 331). A life can possess continuity and direction without unfolding according to a programme already complete in advance.

That is why Peirce insists that “were the ends of a person already explicit, there would be no room for development, for growth, for life” (LM, p. 331). Teleology need not mean that every future state already exists implicitly within the present. A person may be directed towards certain goods while the concrete form of their life remains genuinely open. Decisions alter character, experience changes judgment, and new possibilities arise which could not simply have been predicted beforehand.

Christianity gives this development a real end, as human life is directed towards communion with God in and through theosis, while the Resurrection affirms the eschatological transformation of the whole embodied person. Yet this does not mean that every life must follow a predetermined script. The Christian telos tells us what fulfilment ultimately consists in without specifying every relationship, vocation, loss, discovery, repentance, or decision through which a person may move towards it. Direction and openness therefore belong together.

Fidelity takes on its full significance within this temporal openness, as a vow is not merely a promise to remain attached to the qualities visible when it is made. It is a commitment to a person whose future cannot yet be known. The person one marries will acquire experiences, wounds, convictions, capacities, and forms of character that neither partner can fully anticipate at the beginning. Fidelity therefore binds the lovers not only to who each presently is, but to the continuing process by which each becomes.

The relationship itself enters into that becoming, as patience, tenderness, courage, forgiveness, vulnerability, and practical wisdom can arise through a shared life in ways neither person could have produced alone. Communion does not simply connect two already completed selves. It becomes part of the history through which both persons are formed.

Writing in Adventures of Ideas, A.N. Whitehead describes becoming as an inheritance of the past which remains open to something genuinely new, under the lure of what he calls Eros. Every act of becoming receives a past that conditions it without completely determining what can emerge from it. His language of Eros describes a movement towards fulfilment as an “urge toward the realization of ideal perfection” (AI, p. 275), but his process philosophy also insists that genuine novelty enters the world. That creates an important tension for love, for if perfection means only conformity to an already finished ideal, then the beloved’s development becomes little more than approximation to a form whose meaning is already settled. A genuinely creative relation must instead allow the beloved to contribute something unforeseen to the future that is being made together.

Whitehead’s emphasis on genuine novelty carries directly into the interpersonal relation. A shared future cannot be authored in advance by one participant. Fidelity gives love direction without fixing the beloved’s future beforehand. To cherish another person is therefore to remain committed not only to who they are now, but also to the person they may yet become.

Death, Resurrection, and Embodied Particularity

If love commits itself to a particular person across a future neither can fully possess, death confronts that commitment with the possibility that no shared future remains. Biological life can absorb individual mortality into succession: organisms die, offspring continue, generations replace generations, and the species survives. Erotic love cannot make the same substitution, because what was loved was never humanity in general but this particular person.

If the continuation of the species cannot answer the loss of this person, neither can the survival of influence. Memory may endure, children may carry something of a family forward, work may outlast its maker, and habits of speech or gesture may pass into the lives of others. These continuities are real, but they preserve something of the person rather than the person herself. The object of love was never a collection of effects that could be dispersed among others; it was this person. Irreplaceability therefore cleaves what remains of a life from the person whose life it was.

Christianity does not answer that loss by treating embodiment as something finally dispensable. If the real self were an immaterial remainder that survived while bodily existence fell away, the Platonic logic criticised earlier would simply reappear at the point of death. The body would have been one more provisional stage, valuable only until something supposedly more permanent could escape it.

Christianity answers the rupture of death with Resurrection, which the Church Fathers understand not as the abandonment of the body in favour of an immaterial principle – that would be Gnosticism – but as the restoration and transfiguration of the whole person. Death separates soul and body, and Resurrection heals that rupture. What is mortal is transformed. Resurrection therefore preserves the continuity of the person without reducing salvation to the continuation of biological life as we presently know it

If embodiment belongs to personal existence, then redemption must concern the embodied history through which this person became who they are. The beloved cannot be preserved merely as memory, influence, example, or moral legacy. Nor can salvation end in absorption into an undifferentiated divine unity, because the whole argument has depended upon communion preserving difference. Christian hope is more particular than that: the creature who was loved is not finally surrendered to death.

Love cannot establish the truth of the Resurrection, but it makes clear why memory, influence, descendants, or the continuation of human life cannot answer the loss of the beloved. All of these may preserve something that belonged to a person’s life, but none is the person who died. Christian hope presses beyond what survives a person to a more radical affirmation: the beloved is not finally reduced to what remains of them in the world.

The Incarnation and Resurrection therefore belong to the same Christian insistence upon embodied particularity. The body through which the beloved was encountered is not something spiritual maturity finally teaches the lover to leave behind. God does not save by passing beyond the particular creature, but by redeeming the person in the fullness of embodied existence.

Conclusion: Toward a Christian Theology of Eros

Eros and agape can now be distinguished without being divided: eros belongs to embodied desire and gives another person singular importance. Meanwhile, agape does not cancel that particularity by turning erotic attachment into universal benevolence. Rather, it converts the manner in which the beloved is desired: from a person whose importance seems to justify possession into a person whose very importance requires that their freedom, good, and future remain real.

Asceticism belongs within that conversion, because its proper object is not the body but the fantasy that the beloved can be completed within the lover’s imagination, turning desire into mastery and particular attachment into idolatry. Communion then becomes possible as union which intensifies rather than destroys difference. Fidelity gives this communion duration by binding the lovers to a future they cannot possess beforehand. Procreation can arise within such a communion as an extraordinary creative good without reducing the persons themselves to reproductive means.

The governing opposition is therefore not eros against agape, body against spirit, nature against grace, romantic attachment against love of God, or even desire against asceticism – it is possession against communion.

A properly Christian eros seeks union without absorption, fidelity without mastery, and intimacy without asking another creature to bear the weight of salvation. It refuses both reductions with which the argument began: the beloved is neither an organism valued chiefly for reproductive function nor a spiritual means to some reality beyond them. The beloved is an embodied person whose particularity, freedom, history, and capacity for becoming belong to the very life that love is called to cherish.

The beloved whom eros discovers, agape refuses to possess, asceticism releases from fantasy, communion receives as other, and fidelity accompanies into an unknown future is the same embodied creature whom Christian hope refuses finally to surrender to death. Christianity therefore does not ask eros to overcome its attachment to the particular beloved. It asks desire to become capable of a communion in which the beloved is loved precisely as a creature whose freedom, future, embodiment, and existence are not expendable.

Sources and References

~ (S) Symposium (Hackett, 1989) by Plato.

~ (PP) Phenomenology of Perception (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962) by Maurice Merleau-Ponty.

~ (LM/EL) The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings, Volume I (Indiana University Press, 1992) by Charles Sanders Peirce.

~ (KJN) Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks (Princeton University Press, 2007–20) by Søren Kierkegaard.

~ (PRH) The Principle of Reason (Indiana University Press, 1991) by Martin Heidegger.

~ (AI) Adventures of Ideas (Free Press, 1967) by Alfred North Whitehead.

~ (PR) Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (Free Press, 1978) by Alfred North Whitehead.