Recording of a lecture delivered on December 9, 2026, by Annapolis Assistant Dean Ron Haflidson, as part of the Formal Lecture Series.

Mr. Haflidson offers the following description of his lecture: "In Genesis, when the Man first meets the Woman, he says: 'This one at last, bone of my bones/ and flesh of my flesh…'. Then, the narrator adds, 'Therefore does a man leave his father and his mother and cling to his wife and they become one flesh.' In The Symposium, Aristophanes offers this pithy summary of the origin of love: 'Before…we were one, but now, because of our injustice, we have been split up and scattered by the god…We were whole, and the name for our yearning for and pursuit of wholeness is Love.' Both stories identify three moments in eros. First, in the present, there is an encounter with another with whom one feels an immediate and intense unity. Second, that experience of unity is partially explained by a strange, forgotten past. And then, third, that experience becomes a task for the future, as the lovers labor to make it an ongoing, sustained reality. Despite this cluster of similarities, there is also a difference with much at stake: in Genesis, the erotic heroes are a married man and woman, while Aristophanes most praises the intergenerational male couple. In terms of what it’s like to be in love, these two stories share much in common, but when it comes to judging which couple best fulfills the potential of eros, they diverge. A guiding question of this inquiry, then, is what criteria are at work in making these judgments?"