Passion versus Eros

It is said that there is more sex than ever before, or, at least, more than in recent times. Constant cries of outrage come from the latest news story about a principal making porn with school teachers or school kids doing hanky panky under the table. A better illustration would be the early university (founded by churches) compared to the modern university (whorehouse with a clock tower).

Eros is the behavior we see today in modernity. It speaks to the sensation, to the feeling, and more to the appetite. The ‘sex’ of moderns is not revolutionary or wild, it is lame and pathetic. In fact, it is so lame and pathetic that moderns continually have to dress their sex up with words pregnant in sophistication. Did the woman or man really ‘seduce’ you? From what I see, the behavior was acting exactly like that of a Happy Meal commercial. It would be absurd to say McDonald’s tries to “seduce” our gluttony with pictures and rotations of their food (at best, such ‘commercials’ speaks only to a mild sensation).

Passion is a word commonly misused. Passion does not mean “strong sensation” or “wild feeling.” Passion is an animation of the soul which is why the word “passion” is used in reference to religion (such as the PASSION of Christ). Someone who is following their passion in life is literally following their soul. Those, whose souls ‘animate’ at, say, singing, will become bitter and unhappy if they were a banker instead. You can tell when someone is ‘passionate’ about something not because they ‘really like it’ but because they become much more animated within it.

There is very little passion in the moderns today. Moderns do not believe in souls, they believe in selves. The Self can never be satisfied and has an infinite appetite. It used to be that the smallest and most subtle differences of religion would be enough to drive our ancestors to wage bloody war against one another. Not saying we should return to this, I am just pointing out how passionate people used to be. Using a measuring stick of American politicians, one can go back fifty years and more to hear passionate (i.e. speaking of the soul) speeches from politicians of either party. Even though politicians like Truman were not orators, they were manly. The lack of passion breeds androgyny. I have never met a man who didn’t have some sort of passion within him. Often, it is passion that makes the man (and woman) rather than these poorly emulated androgynous men and women of today. There is no ‘passion’ behind a woman’s (or man’s) adultery these days. There are no more Romeo and Juliets. Most of Shakespeare, built around and on passion, sounds wordy and irrelevant to moderns. The monologues speaking of heaven and earth or characters agonizing over their effects unleashing hell upon nature cannot be heard by moderns.

The biggest annoyance to me is the misuse of the word ‘tragedy.’ If a cute, pig-tailed little girl ran off from her mother to run in the street and was hit by a speeding car and killed, it is not a tragedy. However, if the mother then laments and agonizes in her soul how she should have been looking after her daughter better that becomes a tragedy. Somehow along the way, tragedies were seen as nothing more than corpses on stage and bad feelings. So now anything that gives us a bad feeling is labeled a “tragedy.” 9/11 was not a tragedy. The notion that certain key people agonized of how they could have prevented it, that is the tragedy. Without the basis of soul, there can be no tragedy.

Modern women are very easy to deal with if you engage only in Eros rather than passion. The MRA complaints against marriage is actually more centered in the lack of passion within marriages rather than the laundry list of errors such as ‘nagging,’ ‘no sex,’ ‘spends all the money,’ etc. I actually don’t believe today’s women know what passion is or what to look for it.

Men and women are hungry for passion. Women are probably hungrier for it if the shelves of romance books mean anything. The problem is that many young women are overwhelmed with the feelings of Eros and mistake it for passion. To those who wonder why ceaseless hedonism can often make life become absolute misery, it is the denying of one’s soul to flights of Eros.

Eros just simply isn’t as fulfilling as passion.

Let me take you back to the Brave New World. The citizens of that world go so far as anti-passion with ‘feelies’ or ‘soma’ to counteract any anxieties they feel. The Savage is full of passion as even the slightest twinges of lust can cause him agony within the soul. Brave New World is not a work of prophecy or biology; it is a reworking of Buddhist legends.

Young men are not in ‘agony’ that their girl has chosen to love another or ‘cheated’ on them. The agony is that these girls do not know how to love at all. While some will blame Feminism for creating a sense of ‘no passion;’ feminism can only exist and spread where people are not passionate. It is the soul-less who readily join mass movements.

This means that the Source of Errors is something deeper than Feminism. Even if the world banded together and eliminated Feminism…very little would change.