THE MYTH
There was once a god named Erotodotes, the Giver of Love, and his seat was in the high country where the hills go soft and gold in the evening. To him came the lovesick and the lonely, the widowed and the betrothed, and they asked of him what mortals have always asked of such gods: to be wanted, to be chosen, to be held.
But Erotodotes gave nothing freely. Before he granted any petition he laid his hand upon the breast of the one who asked, and he weighed the heart beneath it. He weighed it as a moneychanger weighs silver, and he knew its intent, whether it sought to love or only to be fed. To the one who came with an honest heart he gave sweetly. To the one who came with a crooked heart he gave also, for he refused no petition. But what he gave, he gave crooked. Men called him just. The wiser called him only exact. For the god himself was not clean. Long ago, before the hills had names, he had stood among those who lifted their hands against the One who made them. They did not seek His throne. They hated Him, and that was enough. What light yet remained in Erotodotes was borrowed, and it was dimming. He weighed the hearts of men, but no man weighed his.
In those days there lived a young man named Anaides, which is to say Shameless, and he was in the strength of his twentieth year. He was fair of face and quick of tongue, and he had learned early that a soft word could open what a strong hand could not. He had lain with many and loved none. He promised marriage to the potter’s daughter and was gone before the season turned. He wept false tears before a widow and took both her comfort and her coin. He spoke of forever to women whose names he had forgotten by morning. To him a woman was a cup: lifted, drained, set down, and another lifted. And the cups he set down, he never looked upon again.
Yet he was not filled. The more he drank, the drier grew his mouth. So he climbed into the high country and stood before Erotodotes and said: “Giver of Love, grant me this. Let there be no woman under heaven who will refuse me. Whatsoever I desire of her, let me have it. Let every door be opened unto me.”
And the god laid his hand upon the breast of Anaides. He felt there the potter’s daughter, and the widow, and the many whose names were lost. He felt the young man’s hunger, and it was not a hunger for love, nor for a wife, nor for a hearth. It was the hunger of a mouth that wishes only to consume. He looked upon every woman on the earth through the young man’s eyes, and not one of them had a face.
Then Erotodotes smiled, and it was not a kind smile. “It is granted,” he said. “Every woman under heaven shall say yes to you. She shall walk with you, and sit at your table, and take your hand, and look upon you with longing. No door shall be shut.”
Anaides laughed and bowed low, and turned to go down. “But hear now the binding,” said the god, and his voice fell like a stone into a well. “Never again shall you know a woman. Not one. Not all the days of your life. You shall have all of them, and none of them. This is the repayment for the potter’s daughter, and for the widow, and for every one you poured out and set aside. You wished only to take. Now you shall only look.”
Anaides cried out and cursed him, but the god had already turned his face away, and the hills were empty.
At first he did not believe it. He went down into the city and found that it was so. Every woman he beckoned came to him: the merchant’s wife and the priestess, the maiden and the handmaid of the queen. They came gladly and sat with him and gazed upon him as though he were the sun. But when he reached for them in the old way, his hand would not close. His body would not answer him. Something held him, cold and fixed, as an iron band about his loins. And the women went on smiling at him, not knowing, while he sat among them like a starving man chained at a feast.
He tried again, and again, and in every city he came to. The binding did not break.
Then a sickness came upon him. What he had called love curdled within him. He began to hate them, the very sight of them, for every one that smiled upon him was a mockery, and every one that took his hand was the binding spoken over again. He had never loved them, but now he loathed them, and the loathing was greater than his desire had ever been. He cursed them in the streets. He spat upon the doors of women who had done him no wrong. And still they looked upon him with longing, for the god’s gift did not fail. This was the cruelest thing of all.
In time he ceased to call them. He shut himself in a room of his father’s house and would not come out. His lamp went dark and he did not kindle it again. Bread was set at his door and he did not take it. For a mouth that had only ever consumed had found nothing left that it could consume, and so it would receive nothing at all.
He wasted in the dark. He spoke to no one but the walls, and what he said to them no one could understand. In the end they found him upon the floor with his face turned toward the door, as though he had been waiting for someone to come in who never came. He had not yet seen thirty years.
The god did not mourn him. It is said that when word of it reached the high country, Erotodotes only turned his hand over and looked a long while at the palm of it, and said nothing. And some say that he, too, was hungry, and had been for a very long time.
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THE CASE STUDY
Erotodotes is an invented name, from the Greek erōs (love, desire) and dotēs (giver): the Giver of Love. Anaides is from anaidēs, shameless. The god is fiction and so is the man. Scripture tells no such tale. But the thing the myth points at is not fiction.
I. HE GAVE THEM THEIR REQUEST
When Israel lusted in the wilderness and demanded flesh, God gave it to them until it came out of their nostrils (Numbers 11). The psalmist looks back on that day and says: “And he gave them their request; but sent leanness into their soul.” (Psalm 106:15)
This is the first lesson of Anaides. A man can be given the very thing he asked for and be left emptier than before. The request was never the problem to be solved. The heart that made the request was. “Hell and destruction are never full; so the eyes of man are never satisfied” (Proverbs 27:20). Anaides drank from a hundred cups and his mouth only grew drier. Had the god given him every woman without the binding, he would have died thirsty all the same, only slower.
II. THE CORDS OF HIS OWN SINS
The binding in the myth is fiction, but Solomon describes a binding that is not: “His own iniquities shall take the wicked himself, and he shall be holden with the cords of his sins. He shall die without instruction; and in the greatness of his folly he shall go astray.” (Proverbs 5:22–23)
Solomon writes this of the man who gives himself to strange women, and a few verses earlier he warns that such a man will “mourn at the last, when thy flesh and thy body are consumed” (Proverbs 5:11). Sin does not merely earn a sentence handed down from outside. It knots itself around the one who commits it. What Anaides used to devour others became the thing that devoured him.
“Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap. For he that soweth to his flesh shall of the flesh reap corruption.” (Galatians 6:7–8)
And Paul says plainly that the use of another for lust is not a private matter between a man and his appetite. It is fraud, and God answers it: “That no man go beyond and defraud his brother in any matter: because that the Lord is the avenger of all such.” (1 Thessalonians 4:6)
The potter’s daughter and the widow have no one in the story to speak for them but a corrupt god. In the real world they have the Lord, and He is the avenger of all such.
III. WHAT A MAN WAS MADE FOR
Scripture sets the man as head of his house (Ephesians 5:23), but it defines that headship by the cross, not by appetite: “Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church, and gave himself for it” (Ephesians 5:25). The pattern is a man who gives himself up. Anaides is its exact inversion: a man who takes and gives nothing. Peter commands husbands to give honour to the wife as unto the weaker vessel (1 Peter 3:7). Anaides looked upon every woman on earth and not one of them had a face. That is what godless rule looks like. It is not leadership. It is tyranny wearing a smile.
IV. WHERE THE MYTH AND THE TRUE GOD PART
Erotodotes is exact, but he is not good. His justice is spite with a measuring hand. He gives the crooked heart a crooked gift and smiles, and when the man is dead he does not mourn. The last line of the myth hints why: he is fallen, and hungry himself. He weighs the hearts of men, but no one weighs his.
The true God is not like him. “Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord” (Romans 12:19). His repayment is holy, not petty. And there is a thing the true God does that Erotodotes never could: He takes the repayment upon Himself. Among the sins Paul lists in 1 Corinthians 6 are fornication and adultery, and then he writes to the church at Corinth: “And such were some of you: but ye are washed, but ye are sanctified, but ye are justified in the name of the Lord Jesus, and by the Spirit of our God.” (1 Corinthians 6:11)
Anaides had no gospel. He had only a god who weighed him and cursed him. A man like Anaides in the real world has something the myth could not give him: a door that is not shut, and a Christ who gave Himself up for a people who had only ever taken.
One word to the tender conscience. If you read this and fear that you are Anaides because you have struggled with lust, look again at what the god weighed. It was not a man who fought and fell and grieved. It was a man who never once looked back at the cups he set down. The one who mourns his sin is not the one this story is about. Go to the One who washes.
