5

The Fourth Root

Eros and Antinomian Behavior

That movement of the desiring part is virtuous which leads the yearning upwards to the really desirable and truly beautiful, so that if there is in us any erotic power and disposition it is wholly engaged in that direction.

ST. GREGORY OF NYSSA

After all, what is bhakti or devotion; what is union? They are the sublimated pure form of sexual energy.

SWAMI SATYANANDA SARASWATI

At thirteen years old, I was making my stand. On this winter’s evening after dinner, the dishes still in the sink, I was standing in my parents’ kitchen, having the last conversation I would have with my father for nearly two years. Previous to this night, I had taken and passed the entrance examination for Regis High School, a prestigious Jesuit preparatory school for boys on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. My admission to this excellent and highly selective school had become a matter of pride to my father, as many of his work colleagues had sons who had taken this exam over the years and had been denied. Regis was tuition-free, so my education at this famed institution would be free and would virtually guarantee my admittance four years later to at least several of the country’s best universities.

The only problem was that I did not want to go. I had decided instead to attend St. Joseph’s Preparatory Seminary to begin a course of spiritual formation that, I hoped, would end with my ordination to the priesthood twelve years later at the age of twenty-five. St. Joseph’s was a good school but did not carry the prestige of Regis, nor was its academic filter quite as selective. While highly subsidized, it was not free. Worst of all for my parents, I would have to live there; this was a boarding school in what was then the countryside outside of Princeton, New Jersey. My mother mourned my decision to leave. She and I were incredibly close, and she was having a very difficult time imagining me leaving home at such a young age. In her mind, I’d be home for at least another four years, until I would leave for university studies. Yet she was supportive; she said that, if after much thought, prayer, and conversation, I really believed that going to prep seminary was my best choice, she would support me. After several long and heartfelt conversations, she agreed that at thirteen I should be granted the freedom to make my own decision.

My father was another matter. Placing the paperwork in front of him that gave permission for me to attend my desired high school, I told him of my final decision. The school’s policy was that both parents (if there were two in the household) needed to sign the papers allowing the aspiring student to enroll and reside in the high school seminary. In a rare display of emotion, he sat at the kitchen table on this cold night and pushed the papers away, pounding the table and shouting. His face became red, even purple, and twisted with rage. “No son of mine is going to waste his life in the church!” he screamed. “No, no, no!!!” His fist came down again. “Never!” Again with his fist, shaking the glasses and the remaining silverware.

I was totally taken aback. I had never seen my father this angry or heard him speak so forcefully. He was typically an incredibly even-tempered, mild person. Any anger or violence typically got sucked down in a martini or cigarette, leaving him always outwardly calm. He was glad to leave decisions and discipline to my mother, and take a back seat in the family. I knew he hoped I would attend Regis but had no idea how much emotion he carried around all this. His behavior that night was something new. “NO SON OF MINE is going to waste his fucking life in the church! I will NOT sign these papers!” This time, his fist knocked a knife to the floor. He leaned over in his seat to pick it up and slammed it, too, onto the table.

I was really frightened; at thirteen, I was not as tall or as strong as my father (I’m still not, actually). Yet I continued to stand motionless in front of him, not backing up a single step. A grounded sense of power and determination rose up within me and infused my voice with a deep calm. “Then I guess I am no longer your son. This is what I’m going to do,” I began, as I reached over and took the papers from the table. “I am going to forge your signature on this paperwork, and mail it to St. Joe’s. And you can do whatever you want to do about that.” I engaged his eyes for a long second, turned around, and walked out of the kitchen. Ten minutes later, I was headed down to the neighborhood mailbox to mail my application. My four years at St. Joseph’s Preparatory Seminary were some of the happiest of my life; and by my junior year, my father and I began, tentatively at first, to speak again.

Now, I should contextualize this story. I was not a disobedient child. I was well behaved and honest and typically did what my parents asked of me. I kept my room clean, did my homework, and was rarely surly or disrespectful. I helped out with chores around the house without being asked, kept my parents’ confidences, and enjoyed their company and respected their opinions. So why did I choose to disobey my father and begin my seminary formation by committing forgery? The answer lies in two concepts that together form our fourth root of Tantra: eros (deep desire) and antinomianism (trespassing, violating the law). Each can be easily misunderstood and misused, but each when properly harnessed can be a powerful tool of spiritual transformation.

Eros is the power of deep desire. While that night in my kitchen it was still true that I held a desire to please my parents, and a growing desire to avoid a conflict with my agitated and formidable father, neither was my true, deep desire. While its adjective erotic bears cultural overtones of sexual, sexual desire is only part (yet an important part) of the holistic reality of eros. Deep desire, eros, has to do with the fulfillment of our most intimate and ultimate longings, our sacred purpose, our quest for profound meaning, deep pleasure, and holy flourishing for ourselves and for our world. My desire to begin spiritual formation and enter the seminary high school was my deep desire, was the desire fueled by eros. Eros was what gave me courage and poise in a destabilizing situation. Eros, as we shall see, is the driving energy of Eastern Tantra as well as the source of the Christian mystical life.

Eros was what allowed me in a powerful and visceral way to prioritize my sense of true purpose over my desire to “be good” and obey my parents. Eros propelled me along what Christian theology sometimes calls the Law of Love: the deep law implanted in us by the Divine. The Law of Love always stands for the flourishing of individuals and systems, which means it may often stand in opposition to the law of the land or of the household. Let’s be really clear on this: I’m claiming my deep desire that drove me to disobedience and to forgery was erotic (that is, sourced in eros), not primarily because it was a very intense desire but because it was an intense desire aligned with the Law of Love. It was because of this deeper moral compass that I committed my act of disobedience and my crime of forgery.

And so my actions that night could be called antinomian (against the law). We shall see that within the world of Eastern Tantra practitioners engage in antinomian actions, especially in ritual settings, in order to stoke the transformative energy of deep eros. In Jesus’ life and in the teachings and stories of Christian mystics we find antinomian actions as well, typically when adherence to the Law of Love necessitates a break with the other bodies that assume authority to make law. After all, Jesus himself was executed as a criminal by the Roman Empire through his own adherence to the Law of Love. Let us now in more detail explore these great ideas, and see how they form another root source for our understanding of Eastern Tantra and of our understanding of Christian spirituality as a tantric practice.

Tantra is often divided into the right-handed and the left-handed paths, representing two streams differing in how the tantric worldview is translated into spiritual practice. Right-handed Tantra tends toward the conventional, avoids antinomian (taboo-breaking) behavior, and can in practice look very much like the conventional orthodoxy. Some have said that the right-handed path is the way of peace, while the left-handed path is the way of ecstasy.¹ How are we to understand ecstasy? Matthew Fox defines an ecstatic experience as

one of forgetting oneself and of being turned on in a full and deep way. . . . Ecstasy is our getting high. For this very reason, because ecstasy is a forgetting, it is also memorable. Ecstasy is a memorable experience of forgetting oneself, of getting outside of oneself. Our ecstatic experiences, then, are the memorable experiences of our lives.²

Spirituality that draws upon and moves toward ecstasy is an active, dynamic process. Fox tells us that

all ecstasy is a uniting, a forming or a re-forming of what once was or is all new. In this sense, then, a spirituality that honestly begins with ecstasy is a spirituality of God as verb. . . . A spirituality that takes ecstasies seriously enough to meditate on them and the lessons of union learned from them is a spirituality about God as verb, about God as experienced and experiencing us; about ourselves as becoming, growing, expanding, exploding.³

Experiences of ecstasy can come through open engagement with nature or through spiritual practices that both offer the joy of acute ecstasy and gradually transform us in a long-term, lasting way. We are, truly, re-created.

Breakthrough or ecstasy is a breakthrough in our consciousness—an awareness of the unity of all things in God. It is even nobler than our creation insofar as it is our awakening to the holiness of all being, the godliness of our creation included.⁴

In left-handed Tantra, properly prepared adepts engage in taboo activities that can serve as conduits to such ecstasy, such as the notorious “five Ms”: consuming parched grain (called mudra—a different word from the mudra meaning “hand gestures”), fish (matsya), meat (mamsa), and wine (madya) and ritual sexual intercouse (maithuna). These forbidden activities are done for the purpose of transmuting our instinctual and primal erotic drives into fuel for the pursuit of union with God, which is its ultimate aim.⁵ All of them have to do with eros in its sexual aspect, as traditional Indian society considered the first four M’s to be aphrodisiacs.⁶

Tantra today (and for many centuries) is largely synonymous with a third stream, Kaula, which synthesizes the right- and left-handed paths.⁷ Kaula maintains the strong antinomian tendencies and practices of left-handed Tantra but provides for three forms of engagement with taboo, depending on the nature of the practitioner. According to Kaula, humans are of three types: animal (pashu), hero (vira), and saint (divya).

Those of the pashu type are still imprisoned by hate, fear, and shame and as victims of “the passions” are not sufficiently evolved to engage in the transmutation of desire through ritual taboo breaking. Their path is the lower (right-handed) path, for they are unable to negotiate the power of the five Ms or other such practices. Those of the vira sort have sufficient self-control and inner strength to engage in the violation of erotic taboos. The vira, for example, will drink wine after dedicating it to the goddess and learn over time how to translate the sensation of drunkenness into a spiritual bliss. Likewise, the vira may engage in strictly controlled ritual sexual intercourse with a tantric consort (dakini) in order to learn how to morph the potency of sexual desire into spiritual progress. The vira experiences underneath and within the ecstasy of sex the higher bliss of the Shiva-Shakti embrace.

Divya practitioners are the most highly spiritually evolved and have no need of such practices: their eros is already fully oriented toward divine union. For the divya, engagement with the five Ms is replaced by inner engagement with consciousness (chit), bliss (ananda), and exaltation (bhava). Divya practitioners, who are very rare, sometimes speak of “inner wine” or their “inner woman,” meaning that the same ecstasy the vira achieves through external substances or through physical sex is present within the divya through engaging his or her own body energetics.⁸

In the Christian family, Meister Eckhart mirrors this intentional engagement of erotic consumables when he uses meat and wine (two of the five Ms of Tantra) as examples of how we can experience ecstasy, the experience of union with God, through three levels of pleasure. First, wine and meat are experienced for themselves; next, they are experienced as gifts; finally, they are experienced as “eternally-not-other.”⁹ The ecstatic experience becomes woven into our memory, our reality, our eternal process of being created. Eckhart, through his great modern interpreter Matthew Fox, tells us that

[w]e are ecstasy; ecstasy is us. All subject/object relationships, all relationships of dualism are pierced: oneness is recognized for what it is: the law of the universe. This is breakthrough, when “all is in God and God is in all.”¹⁰

And so we move through (not from) a simple experience of physical pleasure into unitive consciousness. This is the purpose and power of the five Ms.

The use of the five Ms (or their divya substitutes) highlights an important maxim in Tantra: one must rise by that by which one falls.¹¹ This insight is the source of the antinomian tendencies of Tantra and can help us inhabit the paradox of John’s Gospel in which Jesus’s crucifixion (a shameful form of execution) is spoken of as his “exaltation.” It is also related to the wisdom of the Easter Proclamation sung at the Great Vigil of Easter in some liturgical Christian churches:

O happy fault! O necessary sin of Adam

Which gained for us so great a Redeemer!

In terms of tantric ritual, rising by that by which one falls might mean that while an outward-oriented direction of taboo activity brings about dissipation, loss of center, and compulsion, an inward-oriented direction of the same activity can lead the adept to a deep experience of the underlying consciousness beneath and within all reality, the ultimate reality, the Godhead, that is the ground of even Shiva and Shakti’s union: Satchitananda. As we have seen in Meister Eckhart’s theology of pleasure, the inward-oriented direction is more than simply creating pleasure and being present to that within oneself as an object of meditation. What we experience is a true channeling of the deep currents of our desire in service to the process of our divinization, or in the East the process of the awakening of kundalini.

EROTIC ENERGY IN INDIAN TANTRA

This process succeeds because the drive toward divine union is sourced in our erotic energy. Our eros, our foundational life of desire, needs to be fired and strengthened so that it can serve as the fuel for our spiritual transformative process. The tantric path is an embodied path that involves intensifying and (re)directing our energies that typically manifest as desire: emotional, sexual, intellectual, physical—all of our many streams of desire. This means that embodied desire is itself both important and good. Desire, eros, is the engine and fuel of the tantric path. Indian and Christian tantrikas agree that if we intensify and consciously direct our desire we help open the door to union with the Divine.

The Vijnana Bhairava Tantra asks, “What are these energies, undulating through our bodies, pulsing us into action?”¹² The Indian understanding of how we use the erotic energy is related to, but deeper than, the idea of Freudian sublimation common in the West. In sublimation, sexual energy (libido) is rechanneled into another outlet, such as creative work, in order to keep the individual from violating social taboos while bringing about the individual’s personal fulfillment. In Tantra, sexual energy itself is understood as just one of many forms of the kundalini. The kundalini, our Shakti-in-residence, encompasses all the erotic elements of our life, involving our instinctual life, our sexual life, our relational life, our physiological life, our volitional life, and our spiritual life. All are rooted in desire, and all are manifestations of kundalini. Our chakras, those energy centers that awaken on our path to deification, are themselves grounded in desire.¹³ Scholar Georg Feuerstein names this tantric process of working with our ultimate eros “superlimation,” explaining that

[w]hereas sublimation is largely driven by external standards . . . superlimation is based on bringing the light of consciousness to the actual psychosomatic process that makes sublimation possible: the process of activating prāna and the Kundalini. This allows Tantric initiates to appreciate the larger context in which the sexual drive is embedded, for the sexual impulse is merely one expression . . . of the psychospiritual power that extends over the entire spectrum of human and superhuman possibilities.¹⁴

If this life of deep desire is potential food for our spiritual nourishment, then the lines between the sacred and the profane—as they are usually understood in the West—become blurred. In a particularly provocative verse, the Kula Arnava Tantra asserts that in Kula (Kaula Tantra) the dualities of “sacred and profane,” so important in the Vedantic and Gnostic paths, are overcome:

O Mistress of the kula! In the kula teaching, bhoga [enjoyment of worldly pleasure] is directly conducive to yoga [divine union], sin is conducive to good karma, and the world is conducive to liberation.¹⁵

It is for spiritual communion that one enters into erotically charged practices such as the five Ms, not for the mere pleasure of the practice. Swami Nikhilananda writes that “[t]antra never countenances sexual excess or irregularity for the purpose of the gratification of carnal desire.”¹⁶ Reflecting upon Brajamadhava Bhattacharya’s experiences of tantric initation, Georg Feuerstein is also clear about this: “Maithuna is not about sex but energy, specifically the vast psychospiritual force of the Kundalini.”¹⁷ The practice of ritually engaging in the five Ms, especially maithuna, is a powerful experience that helps to direct the energy of eros to that which it ultimately seeks, spiritual transformation:

The cornerstone of these teachings is that, when sexual, mental, or emotional energy is fully experienced and allowed to build, it becomes neutral energy and if you persist, it will be experienced as spiritual energy.¹⁸

Certain practices become taboo or highly socially controlled because they contain power, and power is difficult to negotiate. Tantra asserts that the same powder keg that can destroy a psyche or a family can, when properly utilized under the guidance of a master, lead toward the deep, lasting bliss of divinization. For example, most societies have strict guidelines that govern sexual relations: how, when, and with whom one can have sex are structured around a number of taboos that vary from culture to culture. Likewise, in traditional cultures in which intoxicating or mind-altering substances are known, there exist rules governing how, when, and in what circumstances such substances may be used.

These taboos come from a wisdom that understands the possibility of misusing powerful forces and causing pain and chaos in the human community and destroying the human heart and mind. Yet it is that very power that makes sex or intoxicants such potentially strong catalysts in activating and moving the kundalini through the aspirant. Tantra itself recognizes the potential for things to go off the rails, and the Tantras themselves are clear that the use of such taboo experiences to induce ecstatic states and move the kundalini should only be attempted after appropriate training and under the strict guidance of a guru. Otherwise, aspirants are simply duping themselves or being duped.

We know today that erotic engagement—in both the narrow and wide sense of the term—is connected with the production of serotonin and oxytocin in the brain, creating extreme pleasure. The uninitiated person will simply become hooked on this experience, much like a mouse in a lab study that chose to drink water with dissolved cocaine in it rather than eat, until it starved to death. Tantra is not a way to paint a veneer of spirituality upon such destructive, undisciplined dissipation or pleasure seeking. The practices of Tantra are often incredibly pleasurable, as we will see and experience in Part II of this book. Thus, discipline is all the more important, so that one may rise and not fall, may attain freedom rather than land in the bondage of compulsion or addiction. As the Kula Arnava Tantra (2.112, 116–19) reminds us:

Drinking wine, eating meat, and gazing at the face of one’s beloved are not [in themselves] behaviors leading to the supreme state . . .

Many who lack transmission (parampara) and are duped by false knowledge imagine the kaulika teaching according to their own mind.

If men could attain perfection (siddhi) merely by drinking wine, all the wine-bibbing rogues would [readily] attain perfection.

If the mere eating of meat would lead to a meritorious state, all the meat eaters of the world would [effortlessly] enjoy merit.

If mere intercourse with a woman (shakti) would lead to liberation, all creatures in the world would be liberated by cohabiting with females.

Yet within a safe ritual field, after the requisite development of consciousness and under the appropriate guidance, such experiences can not only provide an analog of the intense bliss that comes about through the inner uniting of Shiva and Shakti, but can also help the aspirant progress toward the experience of that union. The aspirant is brought to a high level of rapture, in which he or she both participates in and consciously experiences the erotic nature of existence. This is the “state of ecstasy deriving from the marital bliss of God and Goddess filtering down from their celestial abode into the duly prepared body of the tantrika.”¹⁹

EROTIC ENERGY AND CHRISTIAN TANTRA

For many Westerners it may seem that Christianity and eroticism could not be further apart. One example is the book Agape and Eros written by the Swedish Lutheran theologian Anders Nygren in the 1930s. In this work, Nygren not only drew definitive distinctions between these two Greek words translatable as “love” but also placed them in opposition to each other in regard to Christian spirituality. Nygren defined agape as selfless, sacrificial, unconditional love, divine in nature (because it was free of desire), and so proper to God and to the lovers of God. Eros, on the other hand, he described as self-seeking, selfish, and acquisitive. Nygren saw eros as primitive and anti-Christian. Agape was Christian love; as for eros, it wasn’t really love at all.

Unfortunately for Christian Tantra, this work “went viral,” becoming “probably the most influential Protestant account of love in the 20th century.”²⁰ The impact of Nygren’s treatment of love went far beyond his own Swedish Lutheran tradition, and his influence can even be seen in the thinking of such spiritual giants as Martin Luther King Jr.²¹ Although today few Christian theologians hold Nygren’s views or espouse his oversimplified categories, his work continues to hold sway on popular Christianity, influencing how both Christians and non-Christians think Christians are supposed to think about love and desire. It is important for us to note that Nygren’s categories and conclusions have almost nothing to do with Christian spirituality as it comes to us from the early centuries of the church. As it turns out, original Christian spirituality is a spirituality of eros. Ancient Christian views on love and desire have much more in common with the Vijnana Bhairava Tantra and the Kula Arnava Tantra than with Nygren’s Agape and Eros.

As early as the great Christian thinker Origen (184–254 CE), eros was understood to be an essential element in Christian love. Origen affirms that it is just as correct to say “God is eros” as it is to say “God is agape,” citing an even earlier source (the bishop and martyr Ignatius of Antioch, 35–98 CE). Most biblical scholars today would tend to agree, seeing any absolute distinction between eros and agape as foreign to the world of the Bible. The great Christian theologian St. Gregory of Nyssa (335–395 CE) wrote about the importance of “the engagement of the erotic power” in reaching God (not its suppression or sacrifice) and in several important works speaks of the centrality of what he calls the “erotic disposition” in the human person as the engine of the mystical life. In one of his homilies he says that eros is an intensified form of agape.

Since our work as Christians is to perfect and intensify love, Gregory’s homily would indicate that our holy work culminates with the sacred erotic (desire-based love) rather than with the agape aspects of love (generalized human concern), important though they may be. Like a tantric guru, Gregory counsels that our eros is intended for uniting us with God. One scholar says that in Gregory’s thought, “The love of God is a kind of eros. Comparing desire to a stream, Gregory says that our eros is intended to flow infinitely into the infinite God.”²²

One of the most influential Christian writers of all time, Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite (late 5th to early 6th centuries CE), agrees with Gregory, seeing eros as more divine than agape.²³ He is joined by other greats such as St. Maximus the Confessor and St. Augustine of Hippo, who in spite of his own ambivalence around eros clearly affirmed thinking about God’s love (and thus the pinnacle of love) in erotic terms.²⁴ This early stream influenced later spiritual theologians such as Thomas Aquinas, who saw eros as the seat of the virtues,²⁵ and Meister Eckhart, who taught that eros belongs within the nature of the Godhead²⁶ and that “all deeds are accomplished in passion,”²⁷ by which he means the erotic energy. These and other great thinkers describe for us a spirituality in which the human contribution toward attaining theosis happens through channeling the energy of the erotic power (the kundalini of Indian Tantra).

Do the kundalini energy within us and the primal erotic energy of love of the early Christian mystics point to one and the same reality? Let us think about it this way. Kundalini is the Shakti-in-residence within the human being, and Shakti is an expression of Satchitananda (the Godhead). The “erotic power and disposition” in Christian mystical theology, too, is not different from God but is part of God’s energies that fill all things. We have seen how Christianity, like Eastern Tantra, affirms the embodied human person as a temple in which God resides. And if Origen is right—that is, if the scriptural affirmation that “God is love” (1 John 4:8) can equally be “God is agape” and “God is eros”—then the Christian understanding of this erotic power within us points to the same reality as does the Eastern understanding of kundalini. This reality can be said to be an expression of the Trinity (or of Satchitananda) within the human person. Once again we see that traditional Christian mystical theology resonates strongly with Eastern Tantra, as it is founded on an understanding of the erotic nature of our spiritual loving and striving.

It actually makes a lot of sense that early Christian thinkers would see erotic love as holy and transformative. They were inheritors of Greek and Jewish culture, both of which held eroticism in high esteem as a path to God. In Plato’s Symposium, Diotima instructs Socrates on the nature of eros. Her monologue bears strong resemblance to the Tantras of India in that she understands sexual passion as one but only one expression of eros. In general terms, Diotima says that eros is a yearning for the good and the beautiful and, when healthfully used as a spiritual tool, can lead the human person to experience the ultimately good and beautiful, the “divine beauty.”²⁸ Her understanding of divine beauty is not far from the Eastern tantric understanding of Satchitananda or the Christian understanding of the Godhead, the Trinity.

The highly erotic Song of Songs, Canaanite love poetry that was wisely incorporated into the Hebrew Bible (sometimes called the Song of Solomon), has been an important scriptural text for many Christian and Jewish theologians and mystics through the centuries. Reflecting on the nature of their own spiritual experiences, Christian mystics recognized in the Song of Songs an allegory describing the longing and desirous love of the soul (the bride) for God (the bridegroom) or of the church (the bride) for Christ (the bridegroom). The Song of Songs offered these ancient and medieval mystics a beautiful and enthralling Hebrew text in which divine love expressed itself as erotic love, even sexual love: in one of her many unambiguous metaphors for her sexual excitement, the bride in the Song says, “While the king was on his couch, my nard gave forth its fragrance” (chapter 1, v. 12). As a sample of its power, here are the first five verses of chapter 1 of the Song of Songs:

The Song of Songs, which is Solomon’s. Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth! For your love is better than wine, your anointing oils are fragrant, your name is perfume poured out; therefore the maidens love you. Draw me after you, let us make haste. The king has brought me into his chambers. We will exult and rejoice in you; we will extol your love more than wine; rightly do they love you. I am black and beautiful, O daughters of Jerusalem, like the tents of Kedar, like the curtains of Solomon.

The Song of Songs affirms that it is the power of desire itself that brings union with the beloved. To the ear of the mystic, this means (as it does in Indian Tantra) that the power of the erotic energy is what transforms us so that we can awaken to divine union. Just as the kundalini represents the coalesced force of the erotic within the body, which opens the energy centers, unites with Shiva, and transforms consciousness, so in the Song of Songs it is the very strength of desire on the part of the “bride” that brings about her union with the “bridegroom”:

Upon my bed at night I sought him whom my soul loves; I sought him, but found him not; I called him, but he gave no answer. “I will rise now and go about the city, in the streets and in the squares; I will seek him whom my soul loves.” I sought him, but found him not. The sentinels found me, as they went about in the city. “Have you seen him whom my soul loves?” Scarcely had I passed them, when I found him whom my soul loves. I held him, and would not let him go until I brought him into my mother’s house, and into the chamber of her that conceived me. I adjure you, O daughters of Jerusalem, by the gazelles or the wild does: do not stir up or awaken love until it is ready!²⁹

We see that this third chapter of the Song even includes an admonition to be careful about “playing” with this energy. Kundalini literature is likewise rife with such warnings.

Among the many tantrikas who saw the Song as a central text for Christian mysticism, Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153) was one of the Song’s most famous commentators. He wrote eighty-six sermons on the Song of Songs, dying before finishing what would have been an even longer series of sermons. His work affirms the sexualized eros in the Song of Songs as an appropriate metaphor for the love of the soul for God (and vice versa). Christian art and legend have correctly intuited that Bernard was in touch with the Shakti nature of God, even if his cultural milieu did not allow him to formulate this in any but allegorical terms. One common theme in medieval art was the lactation of St. Bernard, in which the Virgin Mary, seated and taking a pause from breastfeeding the infant Jesus, shoots breast milk into the face of the kneeling St. Bernard; as a son of the divine feminine, he is fed by a potent channel of Shakti, the Virgin Mother herself (see color plate 4).

Christian art through the centuries has affirmed the erotic nature of the spiritual energy that leads to mystical experience and divinizes us. Perhaps no other work of art demonstrates this more clearly than Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s sculpture The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa, a high Roman baroque masterpiece in which the sculptor portrays St. Teresa of Ávila in holy rapture. Even a cursory glance at the sculpture makes it clear that this is a charged and even sexualized experience, a mixture of the pain and pleasure that characterize potent desire. Bernini portrays Teresa as pierced by the arrow or spear of an angel of God. Teresa describes this same scene in her autobiography:

I saw in [the angel’s] hand a long spear of gold, and at the iron’s point there seemed to be a little fire. He appeared to me to be thrusting it at times into my heart, and to pierce my very entrails; when he drew it out, he seemed to draw them out also, and to leave me all on fire with a great love of God. The pain was so great, that it made me moan; and yet so surpassing was the sweetness of this excessive pain, that I could not wish to be rid of it. The soul is satisfied now with nothing less than God. The pain is not bodily, but spiritual; though the body has its share in it. It is a caressing of love so sweet which now takes place between the soul and God, that I pray God of His goodness to make him experience it who may think that I am lying.³⁰

In relating this experience, the late medieval Teresa stands in a long line of Christian tantrikas grounded in the erotic. Her imagery could not be clearer: in Greek mythology, the god Eros would pierce those whose hearts he wished to inflame with his arrows of love. Teresa stands in a mystical stream that, in our day, we can describe as tantric spirituality.

The same deep sense of eros as the engine of Christian spirituality can be found among the great Anglican poets of 17th-century England known as the metaphysical poets. Such greats as John Donne, Thomas Traherne, George Herbert, and Henry Vaughan wrote spiritual poetry of a wholly Christian and clearly erotic nature, making them the spiritual cousins of the great Islamic Sufis writing in Persian such as Rumi, Attar, and Hafiz. As Anglicans, these metaphysicians were partially heirs of the Celtic stream of Christianity, which had not “displayed the fear of sexuality that was to dominate much of the Western Church.”³¹ The most well-known work from the metaphysical poets is likely John Donne’s sonnet “Batter my Heart, Three-Person’d God”:

Figure 5.1. The Ecstasy of St. Teresa (Gian Lorenzo Bernini, 17th century)

Batter my heart, three-person’d God, for you

As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;

That I may rise and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend

Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.

I, like an usurp’ d town to another due,

Labor to admit you, but oh, to no end;

Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,

But is captiv’d, and proves weak or untrue.

Yet dearly I love you, and would be lov’ d fain,

But am betroth’ d unto your enemy;

Divorce me, untie or break that knot again,

Take me to you, imprison me, for I,

Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,

Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.

Let us enjoy one other example of the metaphysicians’ poetry of deep desire. Here is the beginning of Thomas Traherne’s poem “Love,” in which he names his own soul as the “glorious Bride . . . [the] Bride of God”:

O Nectar! O delicious stream!

O ravishing and only pleasure! Where

Shall such another theme

Inspire my tongue with joys or please mine ear!

Abridgement of delights!

And Queen of sights!

O mine of rarities! O Kingdom wide!

O more! O cause of all! O glorious Bride!

O God! O Bride of God! O King!

O soul and crown of everything!

At the poem’s end, the erotic nature of Traherne’s experience of God is made even clearer as he calls himself “His [God’s] Ganymede . . . His boy.” For the classical Greeks, the myth of Zeus and Ganymede expressed an erotic relationship. In the same few stanzas, Traherne also calls himself God’s bride, among other epithets:

His Ganymede! His life! His joy!

Or He comes down to me, or takes me up

That I might be His boy,

And fill, and taste, and give, and drink the cup,

But those (tho’ great) are all

Too short and small,

Too weak and feeble pictures to express

The true mysterious depths of Blessedness.

I am His image, and His friend,

His son, bride, glory, temple, end.

In our own day, Pope Benedict XVI, known as a conservative leader even within the Roman Catholic Church, made it a point to uphold and defend eros in his first papal encyclical, Deus Caritas Est (God Is Love). By doing this, Benedict enters this ancient but often surprising aspect of Christian spirituality into the magisterial teaching of his church. In Deus Caritas Est Benedict affirms that eros and agape do not represent different kinds of love; that there is one love that at times may show forth different nuances. Commenting on Benedict’s Deus Caritas Est, scholar D. C. Schindler notes that

[d]rawing on the Platonic philosophical tradition in particular, the pope describes Eros as an “ecstasy,” a “divine madness,” in which we human beings are driven almost violently outside and beyond ourselves through a glimpse of beauty that offers a foretaste of the experience of God that is our ultimate destiny. In this respect, Eros is a promise of “infinity, eternity—a reality far greater and totally other than our everyday existence.” It represents, the pope says, the “pinnacle of our existence” and “the most precious thing in life.³²

The recovery and promotion of the erotic to its central place in Christian spirituality is not the concern of a fringe or “progressive” group. We see that even a recent Roman Catholic pope affirms the high place of eros in the spiritual life of the Christian, answering Nietzsche’s challenge to uproot the false distinction between erotic love and agape. Pope Benedict here is closely allied with the ancient mystical teachers of the church, who themselves closely parallel the tantric masters of India and Tibet in their understanding of spiritual energy and the process of deification.

So why, then, is Christian spirituality assumed by many to be anti-erotic or antisexual? Is all this due to Anders Nygren and his book we mentioned earlier? Of course not. Nygren’s Agape and Eros was embraced so widely because by the time of its publication many in the West had reduced the human person to a merely rational entity and had grown less comfortable seeing deep eros as holy. The Age of Enlightenment lifted up the processes of the rational self above the deeper processes of the libido and the unconscious, and the scientific revolution and then the Industrial Revolution seemed to affirm the limitless power that could come from harnessing the rational intellect. Developments within both Roman and Protestant theology, as we have seen earlier, led to a distrust of our deepest nature (and thus of our life of desire), culminating in theories of the total depravity of human nature, and a shift in understanding grace no longer as the culmination of our nature, but as a force of God working in opposition to it. It is easy to see how in such a milieu eros would be highly suspect, and how Thomas Merton’s observation that “[y]ou are made in the image of what you desire”³³ might cause anxiety, rather than hope, in such a setting. Agape, however, was a safe form of love that did not conflict with the Enlightenment paradigm of rationality.

There may be a second, subtler reason that Christian spirituality is not linked with eros in the popular mind today. By the time of the Constantinian church (4th century CE) and well into the late Middle Ages, Christian mystics most often chose to direct the fires of eros toward divine union through methods of sublimation rather than superlimation. From the outside looking in, sublimation can look like repression if the one looking doesn’t understand what is going on. For example, the practice of celibacy taken on by many Christian mystics and monastics was not originally intended as a denigration or repression of sexual energy but rather as a full redirection of that energy toward deification: “Gregory [of Nyssa] wholly predicates virginity or celibacy for the Lord on the engagement of the erotic power, not its sacrifice.”³⁴ This is in line with the understanding of tantric yoga. In India celibacy as a spiritual discipline is called brahmacharya, translatable as “going after God.” Brahmacharya is undertaken by divya practitioners who have no need of maithuna (sacred coitus) but rather superlimate their sexual energy solely within the energetic system of their own bodies.

Kaula Tantra is clear that while vira practitioners are common, the highly evolved divya tantrika is a rarity. Yet it does not take long in Christian history for the celibate path to become the favored spiritual path. For example, Gregory of Nyssa, whom we have quoted as a famous and central Christian proponent of the erotic, saw virginity—which really encompassed abstinence from all sensual pleasures—as a prerequisite for the truly spiritual life. In tantric terms, for Gregory, there was only one path to theosis: a Christian analog of the divya path. We see the same issue alive in the thoughts of Pope Benedict, whom we have quoted earlier, to uphold the central place of the erotic.

Pope Benedict criticizes the “counterfeit divinization” of “eros in the pre-Christian world, in which Eros was cultivated as a divine madness that tore the human being from his finitude and gave him a direct experience of the happiness of the gods.” Associated with such a divine erotic ecstasy, he says, was the use of temple prostitutes. Although Benedict affirms the transcendence sought by these sorts of practices, he nevertheless claims that this divinization of eros is in fact a “degradation” of humanity.³⁵

What Benedict understands to be a “degradation” or a “counterfeit divinization” the Kaula tantrika, or left-handed practitioner, might see as the vira path toward tantric actualization (leaving aside the question of prostitution). Benedict believes that an experience such as ritualized sacred sex removes one from one’s finitude; the Kaula Tantra master would likely see things differently. In the understanding of Kaula Tantra, the vira path and the divya path each lead to embodied deification. Neither represents a flight from the body, from finitude, or from particularity.

An informed Christian Tantra would do well to question whether the vira path, appropriate for a very large number of spiritual aspirants, should not come to be seen as a worthwhile model for Christian growth. If the Christian genius centers around incarnation (God becoming and inhabiting flesh/matter), must there not be a place for a Christian vira path? If the divya path is seen as the only legitimate path, or as a higher path, we have moved away from Kaula and left-handed Tantra into right-handed Tantra. Strange as it may seem, right-handed Tantra (the more conservative path of peace) is less native to the Christian impulse than left-handed Tantra (the wilder path of ecstasy). One reason this is true is because, as we will now explore, Jesus’s teachings and prophetic actions were consonant with Kaula and left-handed Tantra.

ANTINOMIAN BEHAVIOR: JESUS AS A LEFT-HANDED TANTRIKA

The left-handed and Kaula schools of Tantra teach that highly potent techniques are needed to achieve actualization today due to the spiritual difficulties encountered by adepts in our present age of Kali Yuga (our current “fallen” age in which union with the Divine is markedly difficult). These techniques can include the violation of social and religious taboos, leading the tantric practitioner into what externally looks like sinful or aberrant behavior. We have already seen that in India tantrikas will engage in the five Ms, which on the surface comprises sinful behavior, in order to progress along the path of the transmutation of erotic energy. Such antinomian behavior is a hallmark of left-handed and Kaula Tantra³⁶ and has led to its nefarious reputation. Such antinomian behavior is also a hallmark of Jesus’s prophetic witness and spiritual teaching and likewise led to his own nefarious reputation and eventually to his death.

In considering Jesus, let’s first affirm that Jesus did not espouse the vertically oriented, ascetic spirituality common in his day. In a time and place where purity issues were paramount, Jesus behaves like a siddha (tantric master) and consciously trespasses beyond the boundaries of sin and taboo. Jesus, in contrast to his ascetic precursor John the Baptist, did not shun the things “of the world.” In the Gospel of Luke (7:33–35), Jesus tells his detractors that

John the Baptist has come eating no bread and drinking no wine, and you say, “He has a demon”; the Son of Man has come [i.e., I have come] eating and drinking, and you say, “Look, a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!” Nevertheless, Wisdom is vindicated by all her children.

Not only does Jesus expressly mention bread and wine here (important elements in the worship of the Shekinah in Solomon’s Temple), but overtly ties his “tantric” behavior to Wisdom, the Divine Sophia, who is the Shekinah, who is “almost voluptuous.”³⁷ The modern tantric master Osho says, “Yoga [i.e., ascetic yoga] is suppression with awareness; Tantra is indulgence with awareness.”³⁸

Much of Jesus’s recorded antinomian behavior has to do with the keeping of the Sabbath. For instance, in the Gospel of Matthew (12:1–8), we find the following story:

At that time Jesus went through the grainfields on the sabbath; his disciples were hungry, and they began to pluck heads of grain and to eat. When the Pharisees saw it, they said to him, “Look, your disciples are doing what is not lawful to do on the sabbath.” He said to them, “Have you not read what David did when he and his companions were hungry? He entered the house of God and ate the bread of the Presence, which it was not lawful for him or his companions to eat, but only for the priests. Or have you not read in the law that on the sabbath the priests in the temple break the sabbath and yet are guiltless? I tell you, something greater than the temple is here. But if you had known what this means, ‘I desire mercy and not sacrifice,’ you would not have condemned the guiltless. For the Son of Man is lord of the sabbath.”

Looking at just this one text, we see several familiar tantric themes: the violation of the Sabbath for a higher purpose in line with the Law of Love, the exalting of the body-temple over the structural temple, and the lordship of the siddha (tantric master) over the boundary of the sacred and the sinful. In Matthew’s Gospel, this section is immediately followed by Jesus healing the hand of a crippled man in the synagogue on the Sabbath. Jesus transforms what would be a sin—the violation of the Sabbath—into holy activities of eating and healing.

How conscious was Jesus of this process? Is it possible that he simply broke the Sabbath rules out of laxity, or was impulsively moved by compassion? How can we be certain that in doing what he did he was drawing on an understanding of superlimation resonant with the left-handed and Kaula Tantra paths? In the Codex Bezae version of the Gospel of Luke we read:

That same day [Jesus] saw a man working on the Sabbath, and he said to him, “Man, if you know what you do, you are blessed. But if you do not know, you are even more accursed and a lawbreaker.”

This is not the language of one who is casual about the Sabbath observance or breaks it impulsively; this is the language of Vamachara Tantra. It is because the law is powerful and meaningful that violation of it carries spiritual power. In the Gospel of Matthew (5:17–19), Jesus says,

Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets; I have come not to abolish but to fulfill. For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth pass away, not one letter, not one stroke of a letter, will pass from the law until all is accomplished. Therefore, whoever breaks one of the least of these commandments, and teaches others to do the same, will be called least in the kingdom of heaven; but whoever does them and teaches them will be called great in the kingdom of heaven.

This is the context within which Jesus allows his disciples to pick grain and eat on the Sabbath and heals the hand of the crippled man in the synagogue. Jesus is not being lax but is exhibiting left-handed tantric behavior, antinomian behavior—which only contains real power if the law itself is seen as valid, important, and useful.

This same way of encountering reality lies behind Jesus’s regular association with tax collectors, prostitutes, and others considered “unclean” or polluted in his time. Jesus was famous (infamous, to his detractors!) for dining with such untouchables and for turning the social world order upside down. “Truly I tell you, the tax collectors and the prostitutes are going into the kingdom of God ahead of you,”³⁹ Jesus tells the religious leaders of his time. He is not saying that prostitution or collecting taxes (which, in his time, was a notorious affair including both fraternizing with the enemy—Rome—and being ritually polluted) were noble pursuits; rather, he is trying to shock the hypocritical and ascetical spiritual leadership of his time toward recognition of a deeper morality or code of law, a Law of Love. He is preaching a theology analogous to the left-handed Tantra of the East to a religious leadership deeply entrenched in vertically oriented, ascetic spirituality.

As a practitioner of a Jewish analog to the left-handed path, Jesus would know that one does not make progress by shunning temptation but rather by transmuting it. Yet in Jesus’s model of prayer, he asks us to pray, “Lead us not into temptation.” A better translation of the Greek is really something like, “Don’t bring us into the trial.” This petition within the Lord’s Prayer has to do with imploring God’s mercy, not keeping us in an ivory-towered life experience. The three synoptic gospels attest to this in the stories of Jesus being driven into the wilderness by the Spirit to undergo temptations after his baptism. The temptations of Jesus, too, represent antinomian behavior: for a 1st-century person, going into the wilderness would mean crossing over the boundary from the safe and “good” land into the unknown and the demon-filled, the liminal and polluted, similar to the Indian tantrikas who meditate on the cremation grounds along the Ganges River. And as the cremation grounds are for the Eastern tantrika a place of transformation and renewal, Jesus follows the Hebrew tradition of seeing the desert as a place of renewal. Jesus as a tantric siddha does not avoid temptation. From the perspective of left-handed Tantra (Vamachara Tantra), Jesus’s three temptations in the wilderness can be read as his own work with consciousness (chit), bliss (ananda), and exaltation (bhava), analogous to the work of a realized tantric master via the divya path.

In the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus says, “Whoever knows the father and the mother will be called the son of a harlot.”⁴⁰ Who knows the Father and the Mother? It is the tantrika, who ardently seeks to experience their embrace in him- or herself, so as to become deified. And it has always been true that Tantra is at best misunderstood and at worst vilified by the “good people” of any society. Tantric practice always happens in the context of what sociologists call an “antisociety,” a group that protests and deviates from the normal culture of rule and taboo.

Jesus knew what he was talking about in saying that those following this path—his path—would be counted as sons of harlots. And it proved true that in its first few hundred years, Christianity was seen as an antisociety, with members intermittently persecuted and sometimes killed. The language of the New Testament, especially in the Gospel of John, shows us that early Christians did in fact understand themselves as members of an antisociety, not of this world order.⁴¹

The idea of rejection goes hand in hand with antinomian behavior and the left-handed tantric path. The sadhus (Indian holy men or ascetics) who roam the cremation grounds along the Ganges River in India, covered with ash and often naked but for their long dreadlocks and stylized ritual jewelry, are also avoided, feared, treated like outsiders, just like the early members of Jesus groups. In multiple places in the New Testament (Mark 12, Matthew 21, Acts 4), Jesus himself is cast as the “stone that the builders rejected” of Psalm 118 that “has become the cornerstone.” And in the Gospels of Matthew (11:6) and Luke (7:23), Jesus says, “And blessed is anyone who takes no offense at me.” In both cases, a closer translation of the original Greek yields, “And one is blessed if that one is not scandalized by me.” Jesus seems to own his status as both a holy man and as a Kaula siddha, someone both respected for spiritual power yet also the cause of many being “scandalized” by his antinomian behavior.

A great picture of Jesus as a Vamachara siddha is shown us in his entry into Jerusalem. Here Jesus intentionally mocks a typical Roman display of power, possibly at the same time a grand scale entrance into Jerusalem was occurring at another, more major gate into the city by the ruling Roman military elite. Jesus, unlike the Roman governor upon his warhorse, rides a donkey, is waved on by palms along a path of simple peasant cloaks. The singing and celebration of his “grand entry” into Jerusalem is a parody of official Roman celebrations and draws the anger of the Jerusalem authorities.

This prophetic sign orchestrated by Jesus parallels the story of the great procession of Shiva on his way to marry Parvati (Shakti), in which Shiva travels with goblins, ghouls, and other nondesirables from the crematorium and arrives drunk, wearing a tiger skin and a snake for a necklace, his hair matted into dreadlocks, and his face smeared with ash, with the heavy smoke of bhang (cannabis) in the air. Those who were sent to greet him and his entourage run away in horror. Shiva is spurned; he has “scandalized” them all. Jesus, too, has scandalized the leadership of Jerusalem. Within a week, the Roman authorities with the support of the official religious cult will put him to death by crucifixion as a criminal. Jesus’s state execution, from a Vamachara perspective, is the pinnacle of antinomian trespassing, far surpassing Shiva’s failed drug test and body odor on his wedding day!

In addition to the fact that Jesus is executed as a criminal (perhaps the ultimate antinomian “trespass”), the reasons typically given for his enemies’ ire and desire to kill him are themselves pointers toward a resonance with left-handed or Kaula Tantra perspective in Jesus’s teachings. While Jesus was officially condemned to death for treason against the Roman Empire, the Gospel of John argues that the real reason for his being killed was his tantric perspective on his Jewish spirituality: “For this reason the [Judean authorities] were seeking all the more to kill [Jesus], because he was not only breaking the sabbath, but was also calling God his own Father, thereby making himself equal to God” (5:18). Breaking the Sabbath is clearly antinomian behavior; acknowledging one’s own embodied divinity is fundamentally an acknowledgment of the divine feminine—and such a tantric statement in a vertically oriented theocracy can cause much trouble indeed.

Some scholars believe that Jesus was killed for his disruption of Temple commerce in Jerusalem. Jesus, like prophets before him, taught not only in parables and wisdom sayings but also through “signs”: actions that seem strange or even deranged on the surface but which carry a symbolic and spiritual meaning once they are unpacked. Here is the account of this sign in the Gospel of John 2:13–16 (the Gospel of Matthew 21:12–13 also recounts a version of it):

The Passover of the Jews was near, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem. In the temple he found people selling cattle, sheep, and doves, and the money changers seated at their tables. Making a whip of cords, he drove all of them out of the temple, both the sheep and the cattle. He also poured out the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables. He told those who were selling the doves, “Take these things out of here! Stop making my Father’s house a marketplace!”

It is highly unlikely that these money changers were thieves or cheats; this is not a “moral” protest by Jesus against unethical businessmen. Such interpretations speak more to the inheritance of overt or unconscious anti-Semitism of Christian commentators than with the practices of Second Temple Judaism. Likely what is actually going on here is that Jesus is exhibiting a type of tantric behavior in which one violently or shockingly violates the sacred and thus propels the minds of those witnessing the sign into new territory. We see similar behavior among Indian tantrikas, especially among the notorious left-handed Aghora sect of Tantra, in which naked and ash-covered sadhus have been known to gnaw on corpses or even attack and spit upon strangers as a form of blessing.

The first generation of disciples and members of early Christian groups continued along Jesus’s pathway of left-handed Tantra. For instance, we see that for Paul the antinomian aspect of the crucifixion is central to his understanding of the risen Christ who broke into his consciousness. In his First Letter to the Corinthians (1:22–24), Paul says,

For Jews demand signs and Greeks desire wisdom, but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block [literally, “a scandal”] to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.

Here Paul links the antinomian crucifixion of Christ—a stumbling block (scandal) and foolishness—to two tantric epithets for Christ: the power of God (analogous to Shakti) and the wisdom of God (literally, Sophia).

In the biblical Acts of the Apostles (10:9b–16), Peter, one of Jesus’s earliest disciples, has an antinomian mystical experience around food (and therefore, the erotic):

Peter went up on the roof to pray. He became hungry and wanted something to eat; and while it was being prepared, he fell into a trance. He saw the heaven opened and something like a large sheet coming down, being lowered to the ground by its four corners. In it were all kinds of four-footed creatures and reptiles and birds of the air. Then he heard a voice saying, “Get up, Peter; kill and eat.” But Peter said, “By no means, Lord; for I have never eaten anything that is profane or unclean.” The voice said to him again, a second time, “What God has made clean, you must not call profane.” This happened three times, and the thing was suddenly taken up to heaven.

Yet by the time Christianity became a tolerated, and then the official, religion of the Roman Empire, much of its antinomian character had gone underground. Such behavior could not be tolerated from an official state religion. Where did it go? Antinomianism did not disappear; it went into the Nitrian desert of Egypt and other haunts of those Christian tantric masters called the desert elders (or desert fathers and mothers), those mystics who kept alive the tantric reality of Jesus, who followed in the Vamachara path of Peter and Paul.

The desert elders were notorious for following a “different law,” a Law of Love, a law that made little sense to the good people of the Eastern Roman Empire but made perfect sense in the monastic communities and hermitages of the desert. This different law caused Abba Moses to travel with a heavy bag of sand with a hole in it when he was called to sit on a council of judgment over a badly behaved monk. Arriving at the place of judgment with a now-empty bag, he exclaimed, “Look! My own sins trail behind me like a stream of sand, and you expect me to sit in judgment of another?” The other monks repented of their desire to discipline the recalcitrant monk.

Another story from the desert tells us of a solitary abba who has his book of the gospels stolen. Such a book, handmade in those times, would have been very valuable. The abba, walking through the market days later, sees the thief selling the book. The abba, rather than calling the authorities, lets the man know that he is not asking enough for the book: its value is greater than his asking price. The thief, wondering who this knowledgable person is, finds out that he is indeed the rightful owner of the book! The thief repents and becomes a monk of the desert. This is the logic of the desert tradition in Christianity, and it meshes well with the logic of left-handed Tantra. This is the logic of Jesus. This is the logic of unitive consciousness, the golden tantric thread that flows from him even today.

A SHOOT FROM THE FOURTH ROOT

Erotic Power and the Path to Justice

As part of its prophetic inheritance from Judaism, there is a powerful stream of antinomianism in Christianity that supports the Law of Love above any secular law. This Law of Love is not a code governing behavior but rather is a foundational description of the God’s eros as the deep divine desire oriented toward human flourishing and the flourishing of all creatures. We have seen that Jesus’s violations of the Sabbath were in service of human flourishing: to let the hungry eat, and to restore to wholeness those who were broken in body and spirit. His great antinomian act of cleansing the Jerusalem Temple and overturning the tables of the Temple money changers contains a social commentary, as the poor were not able to afford the better grade of sacrificial animals available to the wealthy. His act of power provides a shocking picture of the force of eros, of deep love, motivated toward justice and social transformation.

Jesus’s parables often have an edge that moves us toward violation of taboos. There is the forgiving father who demeans himself and breaks social convention by running to his repentant (prodigal) son; there is the Samaritan, scapegoated and despised by Jews of Jesus’s time, portrayed as an exemplar of divine compassion. This stream of storytelling both paints the contours of a new world and helps shift our consciousness toward it. We have already seen that this stream of subversive storytelling continues beyond Jesus’s own time through the tales of the Christian desert elders. All of these stories, we note, carry a strong social component and move us toward a horizon that lies beyond any past or current codes of justice.

Advocacy of social justice is one of the main arenas in which Christians throughout history have exercised subversive and antinomian behavior in service to the divine vision, the Law of Love. Jesus in the Beatitudes (Gospel of Matthew 5:1–12; Gospel of Luke 6:17–26) lays out a vision of person and world that stands in opposition to the Greco-Roman values of power, honor, and pride. Many scholars and historians interpret Jesus’s vision as revealing the preferential option for the poor innate in the divine eros,^*11 following the witness of the Hebrew prophets:

Is not this the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke? Is it not to share your bread with the hungry, and bring the homeless poor into your house; when you see the naked, to cover them, and not to hide yourself from your own kin? (Isaiah 58:6–7)

In the Gospel of Luke, Jesus begins his Sermon on the Plain with “Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God” (Luke 6:17). This vision originally attracted many to the early Jesus groups who were themselves disempowered members of the Greco-Roman world. Early critics mocked the Christian movement as a religion of women and slaves. Jesus’s subversive social vision was often at odds with the world order of the various empires of history and led many faithful Christians to radical and criminal acts of civil disobedience. We can understand this quest for justice, especially when it trespasses over the boundaries of the legal code, as a social manifestation of the tantric root of eros-driven antinomianism.

One way to understand ritual is as a practice space for our lives in the world. The ritual trespass of engaging in the five Ms of Eastern Tantra, and the history of social taboo violation bound up with the Christian Eucharist, can both be seen as practice fields for the subversive work of justice making in the world in addition to being seen as channels of power for the transformation of individual consciousness. We see this evidenced in many of the newer Eucharistic Prayers used by churches today. Fueled and inspired by such prayers, the Christian tantrika reenters the world after such ritual engagement with taboo, ready to put his or her own power of deep desire in the service of social transformation. In the Christian case, we can say that the tantric process of divinization that lacks a social component is not a balanced or complete process.

We find a consummate example of how the dissident power of eros can serve the divine longing for human and world flourishing is the Baptist minister and American icon of the Civil Rights movement, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. On April 16, 1963, King wrote an open letter from a Birmingham jail, from which came some of his most powerful words (just as with St. Paul). In part of this letter, King lamented the atrophy of what we would call the tantric antinomianism of the early church:

Wherever the early Christians entered a town the power structure got disturbed and immediately sought to convict them for being “disturbers of the peace” and “outside agitators.” But they went on with the conviction that they were a “colony of heaven” and had to obey God rather than man. . . . Things are different now. The contemporary Church is so often a weak, ineffectual voice with an uncertain sound. It is so often the archsupporter of the status quo.⁴²

King went on to show that this ancient witness means that the Christian today “has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.”⁴³ In the eyes of the establishment, his subversive words and actions were dangerous and destabilizing.

Hearing recordings of his speeches and sermons leaves no doubt that the energy driving his civil disobedience was deep eros channeled in service to a sacred social vision, a tantric vision, in which the taboos around race would be trespassed in service to the Law of Love. King’s justice work was informed by the holy wisdom of Howard Thurman, Mohandas Gandhi, and above all Jesus, each of whose antinomian protest was marked by a commitment to nonviolence and integrity of spirit. King’s faithfulness to the gospel brought him in direct conflict with government and other power players who sought to maintain the ethical travesty of segregation.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German Lutheran pastor with a promising career as an academic theologian, was one of the first and loudest church voices in Germany voicing opposition against Hitler and the atrocities of the Third Reich. Bonhoeffer became a founding member of the illegal Confessing Church, a branch of the German Lutheran Church that stood against the Nazi regime, and ran an underground seminary to train its pastors. He spoke out unequivocally against the policies of Hitler, even as many of his colleagues sought (at least temporary) compromise in the interest of safety, either personal or institutional. Attributed to Bonhoeffer is the following: “Silence in the face of evil is itself evil: God will not hold us guiltless. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.”^*12

Although silenced theologically, Bonhoeffer became a member of the Abwehr (a German military intelligence organization) and used his membership there to help resistance movements trying to depose Hitler. After much thought and prayer, he agreed to take part in a plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler as a final attempt to bring about change. He writes, “We are not to simply bandage the wounds of victims beneath the wheels of injustice, we are to drive a spoke into the wheel itself.”⁴⁴ This represents an extreme case of Christian antinomianism. For Bonhoeffer, faithfulness to the tantric Law of Love pushed him to not only violate the legal system of the Third Reich, but also to violate a central teaching of his religion itself: one of the Ten Commandments is that you shall not murder (Exodus 20:13). Bonhoeffer’s radical decision remains a matter of debate today. Yet he is recognized as a holy person (a saint) by a number of denominations, affirming the social sense of tantric antinomianism in Christianity.

As in the case of Jesus, faithfulness to the Law of Love through dissident activity cost both King and Bonhoeffer their lives. King was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee, on April 4, 1968, and Bonhoeffer was stripped naked and executed by hanging at dawn on April 9, 1945. Both lived lives of extraordinary courage and strength and vision and power. Such lives are possible for those committed to the path of Christian Tantra, to the path of transformation through channeling the energy of the eros of Christ.

There are many current examples of those who channel this power of eros today toward justice work and engage in subversive activity in service of the divine longing. There are those who seek to trespass over boundaries of class, race, religion, and ethnicity through their work of advocacy and relationship building, such as Rev. Waltrina Middleton, a minister of the United Church of Christ who works to connect young Palestinian and Jordanian artists with those in the American Black Lives Matter movement. There are those like Kentucky’s Green Catholics who would trespass against the brutal but socially sanctioned advance of “progress.” These Green Catholics work to uphold the integrity of the land of Kentucky, including land held by the Sisters of Loretto and the Trappist monks of Gethsemani, against the powerful energy companies seeking to scar it through laying the Bluegrass Pipeline.

There are those like retired Bishop Gene Robinson, the first openly gay bishop elected in the Episcopal Church, and Rev. Rodney McKenzie, Jr., who is an openly “out” clergy person serving as the director of the Academy for Leadeership and Action of the National LGBTQ Task Force, who in coupling their Christian identity with their nonheteronormative sexual orientation represent for many a violation of taboo in their very identity, in addition to their work of advocacy and justice. Others, like Rev. William Barber II, have created antinomian movements that draw on the power of deep eros in fighting for justice. Barber’s “Moral Mondays” movement began as “a protest movement dedicated to resisting the regressive efforts of the Tar Heel state’s hyper-conservative legislature”⁴⁵ and has swelled to rallies of thousands, leading to nearly one thousand arrests for civil disobedience.

From the perspective of a Christian Tantra, such disobedience and the breaking of taboos and boundaries is to be expected and celebrated, as there will always be new awakenings to areas of injustice, deeper understandings of how we can affirm and include, and revelatory ways of co-creating wholeness and holiness for all the inhabitants of this sacred body, Earth. Yet just as the concept of love had been drastically reduced in recent centuries (remember Nygren’s book Agape and Eros), antinomianism has likewise been dismantled in certain rooms of the Christian household. There are some who are blind to this deep root of Christian Tantra, who have been miseducated to believe that social engagement and concomitant subversive behavior and advocacy is something modern, or unique to a given political outlook, that has been grafted onto Christianity.

As Christian tantrikas, we can celebrate eros-powered antinomian-ism as one of the roots of Tantra, including its Christian expression. We understand that social transformation is a holy and necessary expression of that root, and affirm that the work of social justice is in fact inherent in the Christian impulse, as it has been from its beginnings in Jesus’s teachings and witness. In 2010 when radio commentator Glenn Beck advised Christians to leave churches committed to social justice, Jim Wallace, president of Sojourners, responded, “What [Beck] has said attacks the very heart of our Christian faith.”⁴⁶ Yes, indeed it does.