'composed of Eros and of dust'

Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleagured by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

—W.H Auden, from "September 1, 1939," lines 99-110 (1939)

The Eros of God

Why is it, however, that theologians sometimes refer to God as Yearning (Eros) and Love (Agape) and sometimes as the yearned-for and the Beloved? On the one hand he causes, produces, and generates what is being referred to, and, on the other hand, he is the thing itself. He is stirred by it and he stirs it. He is moved to it and he moves it. So they call him the beloved and the yearned-for since he is beautiful, good, and, again, they call him yearning and love because he is the power moving and lifting all things up to himself, for in the end what is he if not Beauty and Goodness, the One who of himself reveals himself, the good procession of his own transcendent unity? He is yearning on the move, simple, self-moved, self-acting, preexistent in the Good, flowing out from the Good onto all that is and returning once again to the Good.

–Dionysius the Aeropagite, The Divine Names (510)

Every Desire for the Beautiful...

And so every desire for the Beautiful which draws us on in this ascent is intensified by the soul’s very progress towards it. And this is the real meaning of seeing God: never to have this desire satisfied. But fixing our eyes on those things which help us to see, we must ever keep alive in us the desire to see more and more. And so no limit can be set to our progress towards God: first of all, because no limitation can be put on upon the Beautiful, and secondly because the increase in our desire for the Beautiful cannot be stopped by any sense of satisfaction.

—St. Gregory of Nyssa, The Life of Moses (390)

The Erotic Aspect of Gift

In simple human terms, a love that is inseparable from an interest in the other is always more commendable, more truly selfless, than the airless purity of disinterested expenditure, because it recognizes the otherness and delights in the splendor of the other. The Christian thought of God’s creative agape has nothing to do with the sublime and sublimely disinterested abyss of the One, but belongs to the thought of the Trinity: it is a love always of recognition and delight, desiring all and giving all at once, giving to receive and receiving to give, generous not in thoughtlessly squandering itself, but in truly wanting the other.

—David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite (2003)