CrossCurrents A Catholic Reflects on Faith in Our Times

Bernard F. Swain, Ph.D. www.CrossCurrents.us

Benedict: Back to Basics

Catholics sometimes can feel overwhelmed by the richness of Catholic tradition. One hundred generations of Catholics have left us a vast legacy: hundreds of saints, thousands of customs, a wealth of ideas and practices, symbols and beliefs, teachings and traditions – not to mention a world-full of wondrous art, architecture, music, and literature. The flood of our faith’s details can sometimes drown it out its central message.

Now Pope Benedict XVI has issued the first encyclical of his papacy, dated Christmas Day 2005. Many observers expected him (especially given his pre-election reputation as “Vatican Watchdog”) to aim his sights on the controversial issues besetting contemporary Catholicism: priestly vocations, scandal, abortion, same-sex marriage, stem-cell research, dissent in the church, contraception, etc. Instead, he has taken aim at the core of Catholicism. His letter, titled “God is Love,” is a clear call to get “back to the basics” of Catholic faith and life.

The heart of Christian faith, he says, is “the Christian image of God and the resulting image of mankind and its destiny.” He considers this topic especially timely “in a world where the name of God is sometimes associated with vengeance or even a duty of hatred and violence,” and divides his letter into two parts: Part I affirms and clarifies what Catholics believe about love; Part II part spells out the implications for our life as Church. I’ll review Part I this time, and Part II next time.

Part I: The Unity of Love

Benedict admits at the outset that “love” is a slippery term in our time, when it “has become one of the most frequently used and misused words, a word to which we attach quite different meanings.” So he embarks on an almost scholarly survey of the history of the notion of love.

Historians and scholars have often claimed the Christian idea of love, expressed in Greek as “agape,” destroyed an older Greek idea of love as “eros.” Benedict has his own opinion.

Eros, he says, meant “a kind of intoxication, the overpowering of reason by a ‘divine madness.’ ” In English, of course, we still speak of “falling in love,” being “head over heels,” being “swept off our feet.” Benedict says our tradition did not reject this idea of love outright, but called for it to be disciplined and purified in order to “heal it restore its true grandeur.” That grandeur, he says is that “love promises infinity, eternity.” In other words, while eros falls short of fully Christian love, it does give “a certain foretaste of the pinnacle of our existence.”

Reading this, barely two pages into a 30-page letter, I can’t help thinking that, 50 years ago, such papal praise of erotic love would have been, if not quite unthinkable, certainly shocking.

Benedict admits that Christian history has sometimes tended to oppose celebrating the body, but he believes our time has gone to the opposite extreme, relegating eros to merely “the purely biological sphere”—mere sex, a commodity “to be bought and sold.” He argues we should see that erotic ecstasy leads beyond ourselves, beyond the body, and points to the divine itself.

He calls this “ascending” love, and he says what perfects it is another kind of “descending” love which comes from God and unites us to him. This is “agape,” and Benedict opposes all past attempts to pit these two loves against one another (as if Classical Greek culture favored worldly love while Christianity favored an other-worldly love):

Eros and agape--ascending love and descending love—can never be completely separated. The more the two, in their different aspects, find a proper unity in the one reality of love, the more the true nature of love in general is realized. 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 [sic] cannot live by…descending love alone. He cannot always give, he must also receive. Anyone who wishes to give love must also receive love as a gift.

Benedict is emphatic here: our faith does not set up a parallel universe that leaves worldly love behind. Rather, it regards the whole of human love as a single reality.

This distinctively Christian view of love is rooted in the biblical view of a loving God. Benedict notes that the prophets’ portrait of God’s passion for humanity uses “boldly erotic images.” Yet God’s love is also agape, for God’s love is constantly forgiving.

But if this image of God is “the first novelty of biblical faith,” the second novelty is the biblical image of humanity. The Genesis account opens the Bible by depicting humanity as an incomplete creation, who finds wholeness “only in communion with the opposite sex.” Benedict even argues this analogy: just as biblical monotheism is the only complete image of God, monogamy is the only complete image of humanity.

In Jesus, Benedict sees one “who gives flesh and blood to these concepts” because in Jesus “it is God himself who goes in search of the ‘stray sheep’, a suffering and lost humanity.” This searching love is what Jesus takes to be the root of all the Commandments. The Cross proves that Jesus’ search means surrendering even life itself in the name of love. The Eucharist, which unites us with his search, has two effects: it bonds us to Christ but also to each other. So Christian spirituality can never be a private bond between “Jesus and me”:

Union with Christ is also union with all those to whom he gives himself. I cannot possess Christ just for myself; I can belong to him only in union with all those who have become, or who will become, his own. Communion draws me out of myself towards him, and thus also towards unity with all Christians.

Notice: the Pope speaks of “the unity of all Christians.” For anyone afraid Benedict would turn the Catholic clock back to a previous era, this letter is a hopeful sign: its whole tone—modest and personal and open, inviting rather than commanding—reflects the renewal of Catholicism since Vatican II (1962-1965). No pre-Vatican II Pope could have written this.

Above all, our core faith as Catholics is no longer seen as something that separates us from others who are baptized in Christ. Instead, this Pope sees the bonds that unite the Body of Christ extending beyond Catholicism to the whole of Christianity:

We become “one body,” completely joined in a single existence. Love of God and love of neighbor who are now truly united: God incarnate draws all to himself. We can thus understand how agape also became a term for the Eucharist: there God’s own agape comes to us bodily, in order to continue his work in us and through us.

For Benedict, this is the crux of Christian faith: “The unbreakable bond between love of God and love of neighbor.” This means that, for Christians, loving God cannot happen without loving neighbor. And since for Jesus the “neighbor” includes anyone in need anywhere, Christian love must search out the whole human family.

It’s natural, then, that Part II of Benedict’s encyclical spells out how love of neighbor actually happens.

Next Time: Part II: The Practice of Love by the Church, as a “Community of Love.”

© Bernard F. Swain PhD 2006

Send Your Comments and Questions to bfswain@juno.com

Dr. Swain’s opinions do not represent the views of this parish or any other official body.

Bernie Swain has devoted more than 30 years to adult spiritual formation in dioceses in the US, Canada, and France. Since 1991 he has maintained a private practice as trainer, teacher, and consultant to leaders in parishes and other religious organizations. He holds degrees in theology and political science from Holy Cross, Harvard, The University of Paris, and The University of Chicago.

His writings include Liberating Leadership (Harper & Row, 1986) and more than 200 articles in periodicals such as The National Catholic Reporter, Commonweal, The Miami Herald, The Catholic Free Press, The Pilot, Harvard Theological Review, and Liturgy.

A lifelong layperson, he lives in Boston with his wife and three children. Visit his website at:

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