. . .which is the message, implicit or brazen, that drives the advertising machinery of the modern "surplus" economy. But what it if were also true that our identity is essentially shaped, for better or worse, by the nature not primarily of our desires but rather of our desiring? As we grow older and perhaps wiser, we come to see that the most important existential questions * despite our untutored moral instincts * are generally not about what it is that we desire, but rather how we desire * which is another way of saying, toward what ends we desire as we do, and how these ripen and "grow" us if we practice becoming accurate readers of our lives, faithful interpreters of ordinary attitudes and deeds as the pathway toward nobler aspirations and acts.
This afternoon, I found myself sitting at a trendy café on Newbury Street. It was one of those magnificent late summer days, and I had an hour to spend over a great coffee with a fascinating new book on aesthetics * the bliss of sabbatical, when one has time to read and think about new things! But as often happens at such places, I found myself the unwitting partner in the flow of conversations at tables near mine: at one, an older woman was telling her friend, in breathless delight, of her adventures of being pursued by a young artist during her recent vacation in France; at another, two young women chatted with studied nonchalance about their prowess as shoppers amid the allure of late-summer sales; at a third, a gathering of disgruntled men were voicing the fragile hopes of Red Sox Nation. All were speaking, unknowingly, of what Plato described in his dialogue Symposium as "eros," that ambivalent force of desire that lives in us as the offspring of Plenty and Want. The god of love who shapes, through our desires, who it is we are and who we are becoming.
The poet Sappho put it this way: "Some say a marshaling of horsemen, others, soldiers on the march, and others still say that a fleet of ships is the most beautiful thing on the dark earth. I say it is what you love." Such a claim seems reasonable enough, if the "object" of our love has an essential nobility, or ennobles us and others as a result. But could one say this of erotic adventures in the dark alleys of Marseilles, the exploits of affluent shoppers at Gucci on Newbury Street, or the October aspirations of the Fenway faithful? Such a claim seems inappropriately intended, if not outrageously wrong.
But perhaps we should think again, and consider Socrates' discussion of eros more closely. Our desires usually do begin with the mundane, with the ordinary pleasures of attraction to what or whom we think of as beautiful, and from these we might work our way up: toward seeing beauty in things or persons for whom we have no claim of possession or affection, and on to the pursuit of a life devoted to "birthing in beauty," as Socrates puts it, thereby learning to give ourselves to those virtues that nurture greater wellbeing for others. In so doing, we outgrow the limits of our immediate and unformed desires * for designer jeans that might appear to some as a bargain at $200, an unexpected tryst with an amorous partner, or the delights experienced in the demise of the Yankees * and recognize these as possible means to nobler personal and, yes, political ends.
Jesus seemed on to what Socrates is all about in this dialogue, embodying in his actions as in his words that the "least" as well as the greatest are "pregnant" in the capacity to create beautifully in this world * but not all are equally aware of this, and it is often enough the "least" who seem most susceptible to accepting the outrageous invitation of such a claim. What, after all, do they have to lose? We see it in Jesus' refusal to disdain ordinary things or marginal people; in his courage in accepting the embraces of a woman bent to anoint him with costly ointments; in his changing water into wine when the barrels had run dry; and, in all such occasions, his radical vision in seeing God's reign on earth as having everything to do with embracing the realm of everyday desires as the occasions for imagining and embodying the creative work of God * on earth, here and now, in the ordinary texture of our lives. Jesus' servant life reminds us that desire is rarely simple, and never simply what it seems to be. His words and acts suggest that it may also be the place where we * and, others * confront our essential capacity for acting nobly toward others, even if this means breaking the "law" (Lk. 14. 1 * 6). This radical insight structures his upside-down, inside-out ethics, and explains not only why but how it is that the "last" rather than the "first" are often better able to embrace the pressures required for such change. Nothing less than conversion of soul lies at the heart of Jesus' aesthetics.
Perhaps the beautiful is constituted by what it is that we love, if we come to understand love as a journey that invites us to bring healing amidst the broken shards of despair and desire, loneliness and longing, within and all around us. At the beginning, it is surely true: we are . . . what we love. Yet as we grow in the grace we find in following this Jesus, we might also learn to change and grow, not only for what it is that we love but particularly in the how of it all.
Professor Mark S. Burrows
September, 2007
