Divine Charity
God Is Love
by Pope Benedict XVI
Ignatius, 2006
(108 pages, $14.95, hardcover)
reviewed by Robert Hart
The trumpet gives no more uncertain sound than does the word “love” to modern ears. In the 1960s John Lennon learned to “say the word love,” and soon became the inventor of a new doctrine we may (charitably) call sola caritas or maybe, more accurately, simply sola amor. We have no greater example of the confusion about how to define love than the spectacle of this man who, for the sake of a new “love,” abandoned his wife and son.
Nonetheless, meaning may still be made of his words, “All you need is love,” as long as that meaning is defined by a theologian, specifically a theologian who begins with the words of St. John, “God is love; and he that abides in love abides in God, and God in him,” and who understands them in terms of the specific love (in Greek agape, in Latin caritas) St. Paul describes in his classic and unequaled passage on charity.
Eros in Its Place
In his first encyclical, published last year on the Internet and now available in book form, Deus Caritas Est (God Is Love), Pope Benedict XVI begins by addressing the need for a clear understanding of what the Church means by the word “love.”
After a brief introduction, the first part of the encyclical addresses a “problem of language” with “one of the most frequently used and misused of words,” defining that word through the four biblical words translated “love.” (It is impossible to read this without thinking back to C. S. Lewis’s The Four Loves, a book for which the pope has long been known to have a high regard.)
In doing so, he provides a deep insight into the whole reality of man, placing the psychology and even the body of man and woman in the context of our relationship with each other and with God, seen in light of salvation as revealed in Jesus Christ. He does not shy away from the subject of eros, noting the presence of this word, howbeit infrequently, in the Septuagint (the Greek translation of the Old Testament quoted in the original New Testament and used by the ancient Church), though pointing out that it never appears in the New Testament.
He places eros in the context of agape and philia. It is not right, he argues, to give it priority above all else, which the ancient Greeks did, and modern Westerners do, as “a kind of intoxication, the overpowering of reason by a ‘divine madness’ which tears man away from his finite existence and enables him, in the very process of being overwhelmed by divine power, to experience supreme happiness.”
It is far from the Christian understanding to treat the body in this way, as an object detached and elevated above the soul. While “nowadays Christianity of the past is often criticized as having opposed the body . . . the contemporary way of exalting the body is deceptive,” Benedict writes.
Eros, reduced to pure “sex,” has become a commodity, a mere “thing” to be bought and sold, or rather, man himself becomes a commodity. This is hardly man’s great “yes” to the body. . . . Christian faith, on the other hand, has always considered man a unity in duality, a reality in which spirit and matter co-penetrate, and in which each is brought to a new nobility.
Robert Hart is rector of St. Benedict's Anglican Catholic Church in Chapel Hill, North Carolina (Anglican Catholic Church Original Province). He also contributes regularly to the blog The Continuum. He is a contributing editor of Touchstone.
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