Thanatos and Eros

Jonathan Dollimore argues in Death, Desire and Loss in Western Culture that the West has been defined by a particular linking of thanatos and eros, which is associated with the problem of mutability. He quotes Yeats to the effect that we love what vanishes, and there is no more to be said. This can lead in a hedonistic (eat, drink, be merry; carpe diem ) direction or toward a kind of grim Stoic resignation, but in either case the problematic is the same.

Dollimore says that this concern with mutability comes to clearest expression in the Renaissance. That rings true, but it also raises the question of whether this is part of the rebirth of paganism in the Renaissance. It seems that so long as mutability is seen as the dominant dynamic of life, then to that extent the gospel has not penetrated.

After all, if change is the story of creation, and it is the story from the first words of the creation account (darkness is broken by light, and then they alternate), then change is good. Mutability is not a difficulty in the least. it is something to celebrate rather than mourn. Or we can start at the other end: What we love dies, but for the Christian there is also resurrection, restoration, and complete final joy. That future hope throws the changeability of the world into a new light, and strengthens the Preacher’s exhortation to “eat, drink, be merry, rejoice with the wife of your youth, and tell yourself your work is good” in the face of life’s “vaporous” character.

To the extent that Dollimore is correct, to that extent the Western world has remained a mish-mash of Hellenic despair and puzzlement in the face of change on the one hand and Christian hope in resurrection on the other. But I’m not convinced that Dollimore is correct about the whole of the Western tradition. Or was this the result of the particular intervention of the Renaissance? Was mutability the problem for Chaucer that it was for Spenser?