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Saving Love
I've taken a short time to read an encyclical that will be pored over a hundred years from now--but here are a few thoughts on Deus Caritas Est, Benedict's XVI's first encyclical:
First of all, it's beautifully written (of course, I am reading it in English translation), a bonus in a day when so many Church documents are written in bureaucratese. The encyclical has been called "surprising:" some were expecting a stern rebuke from Benedict.
Instead we have an encyclical that goes to the heart of what our lives are all about: the love God gives us and the love we share with others. If love goes wrong, we are in a mess. Benedict writes:
"In a world where the name of God is sometimes associated with vengeance or even a duty of hatred and violence, this message is both timely and significant. For this reason, I wish in my first Encyclical to speak of the love which God lavishes upon us and which we in turn must share with others. That, in essence, is what the two main parts of this Letter are about, and they are profoundly interconnected."
This is destined to be one of the most quoted lines: "Eros, reduced to pure 'sex,' has become a commodity, a mere 'thing' to be bought and sold, or rather, man himself becomes a commodity." It is closest to the expected rebuke. It is an important point to make in today's world--but Benedict goes much deeper into the nature of the various kinds of love, including eros, "that love between man and woman which is neither planned nor willed, but somehow imposes itself upon human beings."
Benedict notes that the Old Testament tends to avoid the word eros:
"The tendency to avoid the word eros, together with the new vision of love expressed through the word agape, clearly point to something new and distinct about the Christian understanding of love. In the critique of Christianity which began with the Enlightenment and grew progressively more radical, this new element was seen as something thoroughly negative. According to Friedrich Nietzsche, Christianity had poisoned eros, which for its part, while not completely succumbing, gradually degenerated into vice. Here the German philosopher was expressing a widely-held perception: doesn't the Church, with all her commandments and prohibitions, turn to bitterness the most precious thing in life? Doesn't she blow the whistle just when the joy which is the Creator's gift offers us a happiness which is itself a certain foretaste of the Divine?"
In an excellent critique of the encyclical, Amy Welborn of Open Book writes:
"Benedict's first task is to rescue eros, to help us look at it clearly and understand the ultimate direction of its energy and yearning, and to see how it becomes destructive when left undirected. This, he points out, is the gift of Biblical faith, beginning in the Old Testament and culminating in Christ, showing how eros and agape are two dimensions of love, fulfill each other and become skewed without each other."
I think the encyclical goes a long way towards rescuing eros. He rejects the pre-Christian, Greek version of eros, "a kind of intoxication, the overpowering of reason by a 'divine madness.'" A Christian eros requites discipline and must provide something beyond "fleeting pleasure."
Benedict asks a root question: Is God's love something different from human love or are their points in common? Benedict embraces the latter proposition:
"Two things emerge clearly from this rapid overview of the concept of eros past and present. There here is a certain relationship between love and the Divine: love promises infinity, eternity--a reality far greater and totally other than our everyday existence. Yet we have also seen that the way to attain this goal is not simply by submitting to instinct. Purification and growth in maturity are called for; and these also pass through the path of renunciation. Far from rejecting or 'poisoning' eros, they heal it and restore its true grandeur."
I do hope I'm not making this sound dour--this is a joyous document that talks of the "bold" sexual imagery in the Old Testament. It is about saving love. In the Benedictine view, the way to save human love is to unite it with divine love. He writes:
"Even if eros is at first mainly covetous and ascending, a fascination for the great promise of happiness, in drawing near to the other, it is less and less concerned with itself, increasingly seeks the happiness of the other, is concerned more and more with the beloved, bestows itself and wants to 'be there for' the other. The element of agape thus enters into this love, for otherwise eros is impoverished and even loses its own nature. On the other hand, man cannot live by oblative, descending love alone. He cannot always give, he must also receive. Anyone who wishes to give love must also receive love as a gift. Certainly, as the Lord tells us, one can become a source from which rivers of living water flow. Yet to become such a source, one must constantly drink anew from the original source, which is Jesus Christ, from whose pierced heart flows the love of God."
"In the account of Jacob's ladder, the Fathers of the Church saw this inseparable connection between ascending and descending love, between eros which seeks God and agape which passes on the gift received, symbolized in various ways. In that biblical passage we read how the Patriarch Jacob saw in a dream, above the stone which was his pillow, a ladder reaching up to heaven, on which the angels of God were ascending and descending (cf. Gen 28:12; Jn 1:51). A particularly striking interpretation of this vision is presented by Pope Gregory the Great in his Pastoral Rule. He tells us that the good pastor must be rooted in contemplation."
It is not surprising, as Amy notes before me, that the New York Times would regard this most Catholic of documents as an encyclical that "Shuns Strictures of Orthodoxy." Yikes, these people are really ignorant. The Times says the encyclical "presented Roman Catholicism's potential for good rather than imposing firm, potentially divisive rules for orthodoxy." If the ignoramuses read more carefully, they might glean that this is the ultimate statement of orthodoxy.
Andrew Sullivan provides doses of brilliance and stupidity in interpreting the encyclical: Noting that the encyclical is a "beautifully written document: humane, outward, subtle and exactly, in my view, what the Church needs right now."
Andrew goes on to comment on "Benedict's Augustinian realism that heaven on earth is impossible, that ideologies that pretend to solve all human suffering are lies, that we should not attempt 'what God's governance of the world apparently cannot: fully resolve every problem' -- all these are profound truths at the center of our faith."
But then he ruins it:
"I see no conflict between the love of two homosexual men or women for each other and the mystery of heterosexual love. One day, it would be wonderful to see this doctrine of love extend to all God's creatures."
God's love extends to all his creatures--but there is nothing in this encyclical to even hint that Benedict is abandoning the Church's teaching on homosexuality. In fact, if you read it, really read it, it seems to me that it is explicit that that form of love is out of bounds.
Andrew also praises Rocco Palmo's piece on Beliefnet. Rocco says that this encyclical will set the tone of Benedict's pontificate. I'll be interested to see how it is being received among the Latin Mass set when I partake of coffee and donoughts after Mass this coming Sunday.
First of all, it's beautifully written (of course, I am reading it in English translation), a bonus in a day when so many Church documents are written in bureaucratese. The encyclical has been called "surprising:" some were expecting a stern rebuke from Benedict.
Instead we have an encyclical that goes to the heart of what our lives are all about: the love God gives us and the love we share with others. If love goes wrong, we are in a mess. Benedict writes:
"In a world where the name of God is sometimes associated with vengeance or even a duty of hatred and violence, this message is both timely and significant. For this reason, I wish in my first Encyclical to speak of the love which God lavishes upon us and which we in turn must share with others. That, in essence, is what the two main parts of this Letter are about, and they are profoundly interconnected."
This is destined to be one of the most quoted lines: "Eros, reduced to pure 'sex,' has become a commodity, a mere 'thing' to be bought and sold, or rather, man himself becomes a commodity." It is closest to the expected rebuke. It is an important point to make in today's world--but Benedict goes much deeper into the nature of the various kinds of love, including eros, "that love between man and woman which is neither planned nor willed, but somehow imposes itself upon human beings."
Benedict notes that the Old Testament tends to avoid the word eros:
"The tendency to avoid the word eros, together with the new vision of love expressed through the word agape, clearly point to something new and distinct about the Christian understanding of love. In the critique of Christianity which began with the Enlightenment and grew progressively more radical, this new element was seen as something thoroughly negative. According to Friedrich Nietzsche, Christianity had poisoned eros, which for its part, while not completely succumbing, gradually degenerated into vice. Here the German philosopher was expressing a widely-held perception: doesn't the Church, with all her commandments and prohibitions, turn to bitterness the most precious thing in life? Doesn't she blow the whistle just when the joy which is the Creator's gift offers us a happiness which is itself a certain foretaste of the Divine?"
In an excellent critique of the encyclical, Amy Welborn of Open Book writes:
"Benedict's first task is to rescue eros, to help us look at it clearly and understand the ultimate direction of its energy and yearning, and to see how it becomes destructive when left undirected. This, he points out, is the gift of Biblical faith, beginning in the Old Testament and culminating in Christ, showing how eros and agape are two dimensions of love, fulfill each other and become skewed without each other."
I think the encyclical goes a long way towards rescuing eros. He rejects the pre-Christian, Greek version of eros, "a kind of intoxication, the overpowering of reason by a 'divine madness.'" A Christian eros requites discipline and must provide something beyond "fleeting pleasure."
Benedict asks a root question: Is God's love something different from human love or are their points in common? Benedict embraces the latter proposition:
"Two things emerge clearly from this rapid overview of the concept of eros past and present. There here is a certain relationship between love and the Divine: love promises infinity, eternity--a reality far greater and totally other than our everyday existence. Yet we have also seen that the way to attain this goal is not simply by submitting to instinct. Purification and growth in maturity are called for; and these also pass through the path of renunciation. Far from rejecting or 'poisoning' eros, they heal it and restore its true grandeur."
I do hope I'm not making this sound dour--this is a joyous document that talks of the "bold" sexual imagery in the Old Testament. It is about saving love. In the Benedictine view, the way to save human love is to unite it with divine love. He writes:
"Even if eros is at first mainly covetous and ascending, a fascination for the great promise of happiness, in drawing near to the other, it is less and less concerned with itself, increasingly seeks the happiness of the other, is concerned more and more with the beloved, bestows itself and wants to 'be there for' the other. The element of agape thus enters into this love, for otherwise eros is impoverished and even loses its own nature. On the other hand, man cannot live by oblative, descending love alone. He cannot always give, he must also receive. Anyone who wishes to give love must also receive love as a gift. Certainly, as the Lord tells us, one can become a source from which rivers of living water flow. Yet to become such a source, one must constantly drink anew from the original source, which is Jesus Christ, from whose pierced heart flows the love of God."
"In the account of Jacob's ladder, the Fathers of the Church saw this inseparable connection between ascending and descending love, between eros which seeks God and agape which passes on the gift received, symbolized in various ways. In that biblical passage we read how the Patriarch Jacob saw in a dream, above the stone which was his pillow, a ladder reaching up to heaven, on which the angels of God were ascending and descending (cf. Gen 28:12; Jn 1:51). A particularly striking interpretation of this vision is presented by Pope Gregory the Great in his Pastoral Rule. He tells us that the good pastor must be rooted in contemplation."
It is not surprising, as Amy notes before me, that the New York Times would regard this most Catholic of documents as an encyclical that "Shuns Strictures of Orthodoxy." Yikes, these people are really ignorant. The Times says the encyclical "presented Roman Catholicism's potential for good rather than imposing firm, potentially divisive rules for orthodoxy." If the ignoramuses read more carefully, they might glean that this is the ultimate statement of orthodoxy.
Andrew Sullivan provides doses of brilliance and stupidity in interpreting the encyclical: Noting that the encyclical is a "beautifully written document: humane, outward, subtle and exactly, in my view, what the Church needs right now."
Andrew goes on to comment on "Benedict's Augustinian realism that heaven on earth is impossible, that ideologies that pretend to solve all human suffering are lies, that we should not attempt 'what God's governance of the world apparently cannot: fully resolve every problem' -- all these are profound truths at the center of our faith."
But then he ruins it:
"I see no conflict between the love of two homosexual men or women for each other and the mystery of heterosexual love. One day, it would be wonderful to see this doctrine of love extend to all God's creatures."
God's love extends to all his creatures--but there is nothing in this encyclical to even hint that Benedict is abandoning the Church's teaching on homosexuality. In fact, if you read it, really read it, it seems to me that it is explicit that that form of love is out of bounds.
Andrew also praises Rocco Palmo's piece on Beliefnet. Rocco says that this encyclical will set the tone of Benedict's pontificate. I'll be interested to see how it is being received among the Latin Mass set when I partake of coffee and donoughts after Mass this coming Sunday.
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