2:6:23

In a 1972 lecture about the three forms of Greek love (eros, philia, and agape) given at UC Berkeley on March 3, the Archbishop and theologian, Fulton J. Sheen, offers a brilliant take on modern love:

“After Freudianism, Eros became the erotic. Then it was no longer so much the love of a person, it was the love of a pleasure that a person gave…If there is a symbol for it, it might be the fig leaf. The fig leaf in Greek sculpture, covered up the secret parts of man and woman. Today the fig leaf has been put over the face. It doesn’t make a great deal of difference who gives the pleasure. The person does not matter. You drink the water and you forget the glass.”

I thought of two things when Sheen spoke about the fig leaf and its removal and transfer to the face—the eradication of the mystery of female sex by removing all pubic hair via laser, and the perma Covid-mask that now adorns—hides—the face. Of course, there is Adam and Eve too.

In a sermon on “Good and Evil” (from “Life is Worth Living.” Not sure of the year), Sheen, opens by saying no one starts out an atheist, no one starts out a skeptic, “that is to say, one who doubts the possibility of ever discovering the truth.” So how does skepticism and cynicism take hold of us? “These attitudes are made, and they are made less by the way one thinks then by the way one lives. We do not live as we think. We soon begin to think as we live.”

We do not live as we think.