Eros, the most powerful of the gods?

Though Zeus was the king of Greece's Olympian gods, even he was not immune to the hungers and ecstasies provoked by Eros. Ask his ever-resentful wife Hera. Be it for lovely Leda or lovely Ganymede, he could not keep his divine rod under his toga.

In one telling, Eros is the child of Venus and Ares, of Love and War. In his case, nature and nurture would have been identical. But in other tellings, Eros is older than all the gods and indeed provoked into existence the earliest Greek divine forces; he is as old as Heaven and Earth.

I was speaking with a Canadian friend recently, who has long been friends with the recently disgraced Bishop of Antigonish in Nova Scotia. The prelate was arrested at an airport for having pornographic images of what appear to be underaged teenage boys on his laptop. Not prepubescent children, but sexually capable adolescents who may be below the age of 18.

Of course, in the wake of the priestly sex scandals of the last decades, Canadian Catholics are largely consumed by shame and anger and, as my friend said, broken hearts. The Canadian press is having a field day with one more reason to embarrass the Church. Even if, as it appears, the man's otherwise sterling life contained a hunger for this type of imagery and there is no evidence at all that he ever acted out sexually with young men, his career is over and, whatever the legal outcome, he is a pariah. A child molester. His life is over.

I note that this has been taking place while many of the world's sophisticated elite plead for the cause of Roman Polanski, who has admitted to actually drugging, sodomizing and raping a 13-year-old girl. But that was a long time ago and he is, after all, a great artiste.

I have not much wisdom to offer here. Eros, be he a god or a personification of our peculiarly human sexuality, is indeed a power matched by few others. The cutesy image of Cupid is wholly wrong. Eros is a hunter. He unhinges us not only when we are in his grip as actors but when we are in his grip (or in reaction against him) as spectators. He lets us taste pleasure almost beyond description. And feeds us equivalent misery when it suits him.

Currently, the only two crimes our society responds to with completely self-righteous paroxysms of condemnation and mob bloodlust are racial improprieties and child molestation.
In neither case do we seem to have a sense of proportion or differentiation, a sense inherent in justice.

I have had the rare experience of actually meeting and working therapeutically with child molesters. A few did indeed match the stereotype of the creepy predator, a combination of severe social stagnation and reptilian amorality. The hair on the back of my neck literally stood on end. And I met a lot of men who were stupid or let themselves be duped or were depleted or otherwise inadequate to what was required of them as adults in a situation most of us would have known how to handle. But our current culture and its laws names as sexual predators both the cunning serial rapist of many six year olds and a horny half-drunk loser who once stupidly took up a flirting fourteen year old on his challenge.

Eros, I suspect, will never let us or any civilization arrive at a sexual ethic and attitude which is not shot through with deep irrationality. That is his way. Shiva-like, he creates and he destroys.
Dealing with him, coping with him, honoring him, suffering his slings, and arrows, is part of our human predicament. And in many ways, a predicament it is.

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