This reflection is inspired by Through Holy Week with Mary Magdalene, guided by the teachings of Cynthia Bourgeault. In that series, Holy Week is not treated as a courtroom drama about guilt and acquittal, but as an initiation into conscious love. When Mary Magdalene is restored to her rightful place at the foot of the cross, the meaning of crucifixion shifts decisively. What had long been framed as cosmic bookkeeping is revealed instead as love demonstrating its own inner logic to the end.
The False Split: Eros vs. Agape
Modern theology often assumes a clean division between eros and agape. Eros is longing, ache, hunger, desire. Agape is selfless, benevolent, detached charity. Eros reaches upward from lack. Agape descends from fullness. One is human. The other divine.
But this division is historically recent and spiritually costly. When Anders Nygren formalized the split in the twentieth century, he gave intellectual weight to a suspicion already in the air: that desire contaminates love. If agape is pure, eros must be renounced. If divine love gives without needing, human love must be purified by subtraction.
The mystics never accepted this.
Surmounting Love by Love
John Climacus observed that those who had burned fiercely in physical eros were often capable of deeper interior conversion. They “surmounted love by love.” The early tradition did not discard eros. It transfigured it.
As Bourgeault notes in her reflection on substituted love, what unfolds in the Paschal Mystery is not the appeasement of an angry deity but voluntary self-giving crossing the lines of kenosis and exchange. Love lays itself down freely. No one compels it.
Kenosis is the hinge.
Kenosis does not amputate desire. It relinquishes control of it.
The false alternative says: indulge eros or suppress it. The Paschal pattern offers a third way. Eros is carried through surrender. Desire is not denied; it is yielded. Love hangs its longing in the “cloud of unknowing” and refuses to collapse back into self-protection.
Mary at the Cross
Mary Magdalene becomes the icon of this movement.
In the medieval imagination she embodies intensity and excess—passion, longing, fire. Yet at the cross she does not bargain, grasp, or retreat. She remains. She stands in the place where desire is stripped of possession.
This is eros passing through death without ceasing to love.
Agape is not love emptied of desire. It is desire that has died to self-reference.
If eros says, “I want you,” and fear says, “I will lose you,” agape says, “I give myself into the mystery that holds us both.” The energy remains the same. The direction shifts from grasping to offering.
The fire is still fire. It simply burns differently.
The Cross: Payment or Fulfillment?
In atonement theology, the cross is payment. Debt is satisfied. Justice is balanced. The emphasis falls on transaction.
In the trajectory of love, the cross is culmination. Love follows its own momentum. It gambles away every gift. It risks everything and asks for nothing. What happens on Calvary is not divine wrath appeased but love refusing to contract under pressure.
The grape does not despise its juice. It ferments. What emerges as wine is not the negation of the grape but its intensified form. So too with desire. In surrender, eros ferments into agape.
The cost of this fermentation is the ego’s demand for control.
The product is a larger personhood.
Love Softens Theology
Where Mary stands in the tradition, the language shifts. Forgiveness comes to the foreground. Judgment loosens its grip.
Even in distorted portrayals of her as repentant prostitute, she remains a sign that love—not fear—is the primary lens. She keeps alive the possibility that transformation comes not by punishment but by participation in love’s alchemy.
She reminds the Church that the deepest sorrow is not moral failure but separation from love.
The Paschal Arc
At the foot of the cross, love is not triumphant. It is faithful.
Mary’s longing does not disappear. It changes texture. It is no longer trying to secure the beloved. It abides. It waits. It remains open.
The resurrection is not a reward for correct belief. It is the flowering of love that has passed through kenosis without shutting down.
If eros and agape are not rival species but stages on a single arc, then the Paschal Mystery is love evolving rather than debt being paid. Love begins in longing, passes through loss, and matures into gift.
Mary Magdalene stands as weather vane and witness.
She shows that love, when left free, moves toward its own fullness.
The cross is not cosmic bookkeeping.
It is love becoming what it always was.
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Here it is: "Kenosis does not amputate desire. It relinquishes control of it." That's the crux (pun intended) of the work.
This is so powerful. “love refusing to contract under pressure.” Do you think the second power of craving was saying this? It is not sin to lust, to want, to long, but various forms of eros and agape on the arc? The suppression of eros has been a disaster.