Eros, the Incarnation, and the Will to Wholly Live
- Shannon Craigo-Snell
- Jun 1
- 6 min read
Updated: Jun 1
Shannon Craigo-Snell on Margaret D. Kamitsuka’s Desirable Belief
Margaret Kamitsuka’s Desirable Belief : A Theology of Eros (Fortress Press, 2024) reexamines Christian theology through the lens of eros, challenging traditional binaries of sacred and profane love. The work navigates biblical narratives, patristic allegories, mystical experiences, psychodynamic theory, and artistic representations, exploring how desire and love intertwine with faith.
Kamitsuka weaves together primary scholarly material—scripture, particularly the Song of Solomon and stories of Jesus; Christian theology from Augustine to medieval mystics to contemporary womanist and queer scholars; and literature encompassing everything from Greek mythology to contemporary fiction. Yet the text is not an erudite scholarly tome: it is a wildly creative, witty and whimsical love poem to Eros.
Kamitsuka critiques rigid doctrinal frameworks that marginalize embodied human experiences, advocating instead for a theology that embraces the complexities of desire, eros, as central to spiritual vitality. Eros is, traditionally, the lowest rung on the hierarchy: agape, philia, and eros. Throughout the course of the book, Kamitsuka acknowledges how eros has been derided in Christian theology and offers an alternative view that has systematic ripples throughout the doctrines of Christology, Trinity, and Eschatology. Kamitsuka does not offer a dictionary definition of eros, but rather draws from various wells to describe it in fluid and powerful ways. Her method is part analysis and part seduction.
The heart of this book is Christological. Kamitsuka rejects sterilized accounts of atonement that present a barely human Jesus and a watery form of love. “Losing oneself in acts of self-sacrifice, no matter how agapeic, misreads what God wants of anyone, including Jesus on the cross. Self-sacrifice, to be an act of love, must feel desire in one’s belly, taut like a bowstring,” writes Kamitsuka. Jesus, fully human as well as fully divine, cannot be limited to agapeic love, but knows every love that makes his cup hard to drink—the philia that bonds him to his friends, the eros evident in the intimate caress as he is anointed with oil at Bethany. How easily we miss the fact that his own prayer requests “may this cup pass from me.” Kamitsuka writes, “at the core of vital life, eros encompasses not just desire in pursuit of satiation but, more broadly, any experience of pleasure that resists self-negation.” Christ does not want to die. And yet, the final words of the prayer are “not my will, but Thine.” Who would wish to suffer the torture and death of a Roman crucifixion? No one in their sound mind, or body. It is precisely Jesus’ will to live, his lust for life, that makes the self-negation demanded of sacrifice so powerful.
Margaret D. Kamitsuka, Desireable Belief: A Theology of Eros. Fortress Press, 2024. 242 pgs. $45 (hardcover)
Jesus’ prayer at Gethsemene—his will to live—cannot be discounted as merely the humanity of Christ fearing physical pain. The incarnation itself is a profligate display of God’s desire to love humanity, in all our fleshy reality. It is true that strands of Christianity have denied the importance of human bodies and denigrated erotic desire. Practices of celibacy, extreme fasting, and isolation are part of an ascetic mystical tradition that demands disciplining the body in extreme ways in order to find spiritual closeness with God. Yet Kamitsuka highlights different elements of Christian mysticism, particularly female mystics who experience passionate mysticism, erotic in its accounts and visual depictions. Their longing is rich with erotic tension within which, Kamitsuka says, “the mystic comes to know the truth that in her experience of waiting and waiting and waiting for God, the Creator reveals God’s own longing.”
In her pairing of Augustine and Jane Austen, Kamitsuka states, “[e]ros’s essential unruliness lies in the body...” Eros, bodily, is neutral, but it “is only ever known as culturally constructed”, it is always accessed through a fallen world. Kamitsuka does not shy away from the great harm that eros often brings. However, theological attempts to subjugate eros have not prevented harm so much as inculcated shame, and “moral shaming of sexual desire does violence to the self.” Instead, Kamitsuka commends “erotic truthfulness” and “self-knowledge” because eros does not exist in isolation, but always in world of relationships and responsibilities. Instead of imposing shame from without, Kamitsuka advocates for nurturing moral maturity, when “one makes shame one’s own, on one’s own terms,” and navigates the competing desires of a split heart. Thus, we achieve wholeness, and “Heaven will be the place where one will finally be able to emerge as one’s erotic self, without shame.” In the meantime, in a world both finite and fallen, we ought not be shamed, but we should be guided. The blush of Elizabeth Bennet is one of Kamitsuka’s primary literary examples. Aware of her own desire, her own faults, her own responsibilities—and decidedly longing for more—Lizzie’s blush before Darcy reflects both an uncontrollable bodily response to the man she desires and a socially constructed consciousness of what is ethical and appropriate. The glow of such a blush is the light that Kamitsuka steers toward, but the shadow of Augustine makes the path difficult. For Augustine, manifestations of bodily desire were shameful, uncontrolled by reason, and an expression of disordered love. The stain of concupiscence affects the entire person, leaving even the intellect in a state of sin. Kamitsuka has a very different attitude towards sexuality. The main direction of her book is that shaming sexuality and subjugating eros is both harmful and theologically faulty.
At this juncture, Kamitsuka’s opposition to Augustine tips into a different problematic framing of bodies. There is at least a flirtation with dualism here. I agree with Kamitsuka that bodies are not shameful simply by virtue of their natural form and function, and that morally shaming sexuality is harmful. At the same time, I want a more integrated understanding of the self. Does morality reside only in the mind? Are emotions outside morality or in? Bodily pleasure cannot be, I think, neatly separated from aesthetic delights and relational joys that have moral import, no more than bodily pain can be cordoned off from cruelty and neglect. Furthermore, I don’t think language of bodies as “essential” and “only known as culturally constructed” can rise to meet the current challenges. It is clear that Kamitsuka’s theological anthropology, ultimately, involves an integration of the whole self and, in various ways, integration of the categories of eros, philia, and agape. Nevertheless, I wish the walls came down earlier in the text.
Yet, every page of this book was an intriguing delight. Two related ideas continue to shift my perspective. The first echoes from Kamitsuka’s chapter on mystical longing. She sees in such longing a revelation not only of the mystic’s desire for God, but of God’s desire for humanity. The second, related notion is that human desire for God has its roots in eros. Kamitsuka writes, “Love for God is not created ex nihilo. Love for God emerges out of the ‘tohu va bohu’ of primal human emotion.”
In Bethany, at least one of the disciples objects when Mary pours perfumed oil on Jesus’ feet and wipes them with her hair. Judas says the perfume could have been sold and the money given the poor. But is the concern truly financial or is it masked embarrassment over such a sensuous moment? Only days later, Jesus washes the feet of his followers, making participation in the intimate and hierarchy-threatening gesture a sine qua non of discipleship. Jesus shows both sides of the relationship—God’s desire to be bodily present with humanity, and humanity’s love for God that has its roots in erotic soil.
Kamitsuka’s work is a direct polemic against right-wing forms of Christianity that pretend that God has nothing to do with sexual desire: this inexorably leads to bad theology and an economy of shame. The book is also a challenge to left-leaning Christians whose reflections on sexuality are exhausted by insistence on rules of exchange. This, too, can be a denial of the many ways God is already involved in eros. In our hyper-capitalist context in which freedom is glossed in terms of limitless options for consumption, ignoring divine entanglements in eros also leads to bad theology and a lack of intimacy.
The immediate dangers from right and left are not equivalent—one moves towards violence and the other towards muted pleasure. Yet it is important that they both stem from a shared logic, in which God is divided from eros, and this suggests that they are mutually reinforcing. Kamitsuka’s work removes the well-worn veil of derision from eros in Christian theology, leaving the reader with enticing glimpses of much more.
Shannon Craigo-Snell joined the Louisville Seminary faculty in 2011 as a constructive systematic theologian. She earned degrees (PhD, MPhil, MA, and MDiv) at Yale University and Yale Divinity School. From 2001 to 2011 Craigo-Snell taught in the Religious Studies department at Yale University, where she also earned several Yale fellowships and professional research grants. Her students have included undergraduates with diverse religious backgrounds in the secular context of the University; denominationally diverse Divinity School students; and doctoral students in religious studies. These varied contexts have been part of her formation as a theologian. In 2014 Craigo-Snell was ordained to the Office of Teaching Elder in the Presbyterian Church (USA).
