by Kerry Tankard.
This is the third in a series of articles about theology and music culture…[1]
Previously, I rejected the idea of the profane as a space somehow apart from God. I will touch on that theme again by exploring the reconciliation of eros and agape in Nick Cave’s song Brompton Oratory.[i] The album The Boatman’s Call explores themes of love, loss, faith, and God, as songs reflect variously on the end of his marriage to Viviane Carneiro, the end of his short intense relationship with the singer/songwriter P J Harvey, and another of his stays in rehab to address his heroin addiction. This weft of experiences is woven onto the warp of the divine, and the tapestry created became one of the most significant albums in Cave’s extensive catalogue.
In an amusing interview in the film 20,000 Days on Earth,[ii] Cave reflected on how he would go to church on a Sunday morning to pass the time as he was waiting for the heroin dealers along the Portobello Road to be up. The song, Brompton Oratory, captures something of that unorthodox balance of the good and bad in his life at the time, while threaded with the end of his relationships and his shifting engagement with the idea of God.
In his lecture, The Secret Life of the Love Song,[iii] he writes:
Though the Love Song comes in many guises – songs of exultation and praise, songs of rage and of despair, erotic songs, songs of abandonment and loss – they all address God, for it is the haunted premises of longing that the true Love Song inhabits…It is the cry of one chained to the earth, to the ordinary and to the mundane, craving flight; a flight into inspiration and imagination and divinity.[iv]
That longing is echoed in these words from Brompton Oratory where the encounter of the sacred and the seemingly profane reveals something of the relationship of desire, eros, and agape.
The blood imparted in little sips
The smell of you still on my hands
As I bring the cup up to my lips[v]
Cave recalls receiving the sacrament from the cup and so also recalls the smell of his lover as he touches the chalice, the holy and the seemingly profane meet. Some will find this moment disturbing, even offensive. Here it appears sex, often the greatest taboo of the profane, and the sacrament, the most sacred of Church celebrations, meet in one man’s actions. This raises the question of whether these hands are ‘contaminated’ not only by the body of another, but morally and spiritually as well?
The answer to the first part of that question could be yes, and literally so. His hands could really still be perfumed with the scent of the woman he has lost. Obviously, the words could be a poetic construction, but that is secondary to the intent they convey. He wants us to know that he carries her on his hands, that what they have shared is now part of holding this cup of salvation; one longing is being responded to by a quite different gift. This meeting of the seemingly profane with the sacred is powerful and profound. It invites us to ask of ourselves, what hidden things do we each bring to the table of Christ, and do we genuinely believe they will be received there? With such hidden things, are we free to receive from Christ? Can we enjoy still this means of grace and this converting ordinance? And, crucially here, what desire are we coming to Christ with?
Nick Cave brings these questions to the foreground with a deliberate invocation of erotic events to remind us of our yearning, of eros itself. Kneeling by the side of us, he calls us to hold eros and agape together, and not see them as divided or opposed forms of love – to recover a sense of the relationship between them.
This thinking is not new. Dionysius suggested something similar in the 5th/6th Century when arguing, “in my opinion, the sacred writers regard ‘yearning’ (eros) and love (agape) as having one and the same meaning”.[vi] Desire and longing are manifest in eros, but this desire and longing finds itself ultimately fulfilled by God, and in God’s agape. This is different to a tradition in the Church which elevated agape against eros. Agape was portrayed as drawing us upwards, a form of heavenly and holy loving, while selfish eros was an earthlier and material thing which dragged us down. This divided love, rather than seeing these expressions as intimately linked parts of the singularity of love that is shared within the Trinity, and by the Trinity with the world. Andrew Davison concludes that agape is not the end of eros, but that agape is about the reception of eros as love manifest in passion and desire. Invoking Sarah Coakley he says, ‘the way to bring the right ordering of human erotic desire is not to cover it up but to uncover its relation to God. We must “turn Freud on his head”’.[vii] Or as Coakley puts it herself, ‘Instead of “God” language ‘really’ being about sex, sex is really about God.’[viii]
What Nick Cave captures, intentionally or not, is our ultimate desire for God. The desires we feel for good things, are analogous indicators of the deep desire we have for God. In holding the chalice in Brompton Oratory, with scented hands, Cave lays a symbol of that truth before us. His desire for his lost lover is merging with his desire for God, as he sips from the cup. One desire is potentially being renewed by the revelation of the deeper desire for God, all part of what Cave sees as the longing of the true love song.
Twenty five years later, after so much more life experience, that yearning would find profoundly beautiful expression in his recorded Seven Psalms. I leave you with the words of the 3rd of those:
My heart, my love, my Lord, my one true bride
Sanctuary where the eternal yearning[ix] rest
Unpetal me and burst me open wide
Lay your shining head upon my breast[x]
Amen.
[1] The goodness of (profane) worship & King Gizzard, AstroTurf, and John Wesley!
[i] A live performance is available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_esUexstdbg; the lyrics here: https://www.nickcave.com/lyric/brompton-oratory/
[ii] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8kiDJarn0hM
[iii] Nick Cave, The Secret Life of the Love Song, published in Nick Cave: The Complete Lyrics 1978-2022, pp.1-19.
[iv] Ibid., p.7
[v] Ibid., p.278
[vi] Divine Names, IV.12 as quoted in Sarah Coakley, God, Sexuality, and the Self: An Essay ‘On The Trinity’, p.313.
[vii] Andrew Davison, Why Sacraments?, p.112
[viii] Sarah Coakley, Op. Cit., p.316.
[ix] My emphasis.
[x] Nick Cave, Op. Cit., p.609 from Seven Psalms released in 2022.
Theology Everywhere 
I am grateful for this piece. I have never heard of Nick Cave so my knowledge has increased. I could however see that the blending of eros and agape in Cave would lead, as it did, to Sarah Coakley. Her book is far more complex and detailed than I can explain here. If I read her correctly (a) desire comes from and is perfected in God in the first place who has longing towards us and (b) our expression of desire in which eros and agape combine can be corrupted by us humans and so needs discipline which is where Coakley brings in ascetism and contemplation. Today’s article suggests to me that poetic lyrics and music may express or even go well beyond what is intended.
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Interesting ideas! A reconciliation of agape and eros in desire is difficult to see in the context of the perversion of eros into abusive relationships where there is no love, no ethical regard for the other who is invariably treated as a object. Sarah Coakley is certainly aware of this. However, I feel that her suggestion that asceticism and contemplation will bring the discipline to deal with this is flawed: Asceticism and contemplation are essentially individualistic, about self-concern and inward-looking. Love is not inward-looking but a call to responsibility, a recognition of the humanity and uniqueness of the person before us. Love, and therefore God, arise in the context of our ethical concern for each other.
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Been thinking about theology and music culture. I was deeply moved by the words and music of Faithless, particularly the one about the events of 9/11 (forgot the name) and “God is the DJ”. Certainly an outward-looking, event driven, ethical spirituality.
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