Reflections 2006
God’s eternal love affair with mankind

The first Encyclical of Pope Benedict XVI, released on 25 January, is a powerful refutation of the claim that the Church is ‘anti-sex.’

The topic of the new Encyclical has surprised many. It is a simple statement of the essence of what it means to be a Christian: to be one who lives a life of love in response to the overwhelming love of God experienced in Jesus Christ.

Pope Benedict acknowledges that ‘love’ is an abused and overused word with many meanings. In ancient times, a variety of separate words for ‘love’ conveyed these different meanings. Philia was the word the ancient Greeks used to describe love between friends. Eros was used for the madness that seemed to take control of individuals when they fell in love with another person. Agape was the word used for self-sacrificing love; it was rare among the Greeks but common in the New Testament. The apostles chose agape to describe the love God showed for human beings in Jesus, that love which all Christians are to show toward one another and their neighbours. Agape has traditionally been translated as caritas in Latin, and in English as ‘charity.’

“Amid the multiplicity of meanings,” the Pope writes, “one in particular stands out: love between man and woman, where body and soul are inseparably joined and human beings glimpse an apparently irresistible promise of happiness.”

In the 20th Century, a number of prominent Christian theologians reflected on the relationship between ‘selfish’ erotic-love and ‘self-sacrificial’ agape-love, believing these loves to be opposed to one another. At the same time, one theologian (the ecumenist W.A. Visser t’Hooft) declared that “we have not yet done our homework on the question of what can and must be the place of Eros in the lives of men and women who want to be instruments of the God-given Agape... Until we have a clear word on this deeper issue, we cannot deal helpfully with the acute moral issues of our time. One wonders why this crucial issue has not been taken more seriously at the ecumenical level.”

Perhaps now it will be, for in Deus Caritas Est, Benedict XVI gives us that “clear word.” He takes the position that all the various kinds of love have an essential unity – they are not opposed to each other after all – because God is love and God is One. Eros-love is therefore true, authentic love, although it reaches its perfection to the degree that it is one with agape-love.

What, then, is the proper relation between sexual love (eros) and Christian charity-love (agape)? Our German Pope acknowledges the objection of the German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, who claimed that Christianity had “poisoned” eros, or, in the everyday language of the streets, that the Church is ‘anti-sex.’

Benedict takes a profoundly biblical approach to the question. He compares ancient polytheistic idolatry (which utilised sexual intercourse – temple prostitution – as part of its rites) to the emerging monotheistic faith of Israel. The opposition of the two cults was the focus of much of the preaching of the Old Testament prophets. In the fertility cults, the gods and goddesses were in an erotic relationship with one another and therefore had no real concern for human beings. The prophets of the Lord declared that Israel’s God desired to love them and had entered into a covenant with them in a way that was very much like a marriage.

God in love with humanity? Yes, indeed; God has thrown Himself into a total, passionate, eternal love affair with human beings, so complete that it is ultimately a self-sacrificing love affair. “God’s eros for man,” says Pope Benedict, “is also totally agape.” “Greater love has no man than this,” Jesus said, “that a man lay down his life for his friends.” (John 15:13)
The love God has for humankind is no mere ‘platonic’ love, divorced from the realities of flesh and blood. On the contrary, the Holy Father points to the great feast of love, the agape-meal, of the Eucharist, where Jesus gives His own Body and Blood – His “laid-down life” – for His beloved. In His sacrifice for her, Christ enters into a new covenant relationship with the Church, and she becomes His Bride.

The Church has always taught that, just as Eve was created from the side of Adam as he slept, so the Church was created from the side of her Divine Spouse, Jesus, as He slept in death upon the Cross. (cf. Catechism §766) “The pierced side of Christ,” writes Benedict, is “the starting point” for contemplating the truth that “God is love.”

And so, the Pope points out, “eros directs man towards marriage, to a bond which is unique and definitive; thus, and only thus, does it fulfil its deepest purpose. Corresponding to the image of a monotheistic God is monogamous marriage. Marriage based on exclusive and definitive loving becomes the measure of human love. This close connection between eros and marriage in the Bible has practically no equivalent in extra-biblical literature.”

The ‘anti-sex’ label derides the Church for seeming to deny individuals the momentary thrill of the brief erotic encounter. Benedict XVI’s first Encyclical promises that the human longing for love will find a much greater satisfaction in the life-long encounter between one man and one woman, where eros-love never loses its passion, but develops roots in the firm soil of commitment and grows upward toward a perfect agape-love such as that which God has shown to mankind in Christ.

+ Denis J. Hart,
Archbishop of Melbourne.