A few scattered thoughts, roughly around
Deus caritas est – Benedict XVI

 
Rev. MacGarry, Brian SJ
Zimbabwe


The Greeks did have four words for different kinds or aspects of what we call 'love':

eros     = sexual love,
philia    = friendship,
sztorgé = for family feeling and loyalty to kin,
agape   = used little in classical literature, but very much in the New Testament, usually translated by 'charity'.

The word 'eros', on the other hand, does not appear in the New Testament and occurs only rarely in the Old. It looks as if the biblical writers want to emphasise that they mean something rather different from the common pagan view of erotic love when they speak of man-woman relationships. The Bible is not silent about the love between man and woman, nor does it take a negative attitude to it (there are many examples, from Gen 2,18: “. . God said 'it is not good for man to be alone' “ to the lyrical heights of the Song of Songs and the tenderness of the prophet Hosea's imagery, based on his love for a constantly unfaithful wife).

Pagan eroticism, especially among the neighbours of ancient Israel, recognised that eros was divine, but interpreted that in an introverted way: man (especially man as male) experienced the divine in the ecstasy (Greek for 'being taken out of yourself') of orgasm. This tended to exaggerate the distinction between eros and the other kinds of love. These 'loves' tended to be understood as different things. A Christian, and more explicitly Jewish, take on this would be that the 'four loves' are all aspects of one love, which is a broad category, an experience that has many forms and shades. In this view, eros leads us to experience God by growing in love for one partner.

Making the different aspects separate 'loves' is not just evidence of a defect in paganism, Greek, Phoenician or Canaanite. It is a constant temptation human nature is subject to. The Old Testament uses adultery and prostitution as images of unfaithfulness to God, testifying to the attraction the Israelites found in the fertility cults of their neighbours, who used ritual prostitution to offer a 'short cut' to divine ecstasy – eros dissociated from agape. Christian history has been blighted by the recurrence throughout the centuries of a tendency to separate the different aspects of love. The most marked example of this is an exaggerated distinction between body and spirit and what is proper to each. The influence of Manicheeism lasted through groups such as the Albigensians and the Bogomils and has had an influence in mainstream christianity, both Catholic and Protestant. Many blame this on Augustine of Hippo. It is true that Augustine was a Manichee for a while in his youth. Before his conversion he lived in a 'not quite marital' relationship and fathered a son. It is strange, to say the least, that, as far as I am aware, the name of that son's mother is nowhere recorded, but we place too much of a burden on Augustine if we make him carry the full blame for our unbalanced attitudes to our sexuality.

From this introduction, it is clear that the most obviously exaggerated split in our understanding of the four loves (four aspects of love) is that between eros and agape.
 

Eros – agape

I was rather unpleasantly surprised recently to hear a friend, who is usually a good, wise and perceptive spiritual guide to many people, saying that the activities and attitudes of young people courting were 'merely animal' and that if real christian love is to develop from that, it can only do so later. I deny that sexual activity is always or in its purpose 'merely animal'. It was reassuring to find that Pope Benedict insists in his encyclical on much the same point.

For a start, biologists tell us we are the sexiest species on the face of the earth. We may not be the only species that copulates when the female is not on heat, but if we aren't, there are very few others. We may or may not be more sexually active than other species (someone passing by just now immediately said 'What about baboons?'), but we are more clearly designed than any other creatures to get the maximum pleasure out of sexual activity. This is not a disordered result of anything Adam and Eve did in that garden. It is the way God made us, for which we should be thankful. If we follow Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas in seeking a natural law to guide our actions, then we should find that natural law in the normal way that healthy creatures operate naturally for the benefit of the species. If we observe this, we see it is clearly part of the divine plan that sex should be more fun for us than it is for cats, rabbits or even monkeys (the idea of fish finding it fun at all is surely ridiculous), because pair bonding is more important for us. Our young need their parents around them for longer than do the young of any other animal and they need more intense care for a longer period than any other species, so parents have to be given as strong an incentive as possible to stay together 'for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, till death do us part'.

So when my spiritual friend I quoted at the start made his pronouncement, I was reminded of a young man who had spent some years in the jesuit training about twenty years ago. He was the sort of youth of whom many people would say that he obviously had a priestly vocation: neat, polite, always kind and cheerful, devout… some can add to the list of virtues wrapped up in that statement. He had them. But he went to study theology in the Philippines and, as seems to happen more often there than most places, he met a young lady who changed his mind about celibacy. I met them shortly after this and was pleased to see the young man had not changed, unless he was even more obviously the nice and good person he had always been. One thing upset me briefly, though. He could not keep his hands off her. I reflected on my reaction to this and realised that I was probably still seeing him as the neat and polite young man who used to wear a black suit and a Roman collar. He was still just as neat and polite, but he was not that young man any more. When I let that realisation sink in, I could feel pleased at their obvious enjoyment of each other – though our nature also tells us that there is something very special going on between two people in this situation which the rest of us should not intrude into. This was their way to realising the love of God in loving each other.

If there is any disorder that came from nibbling or noshing that fruit in Eden, we see it, not in the young man who can't keep his hands off his fiancée or his newly-wedded wife, but in the older man who can't keep his hands off women, regardless of who they may be. The former is using and enjoying a God-given gift as it was meant to be used. That builds up his love for another person and her love for him. Since 'God is love' God is in this. The other is concentrating on his own pleasure as an end, not a means to a greater end. There is something immature and, I feel, pitiable in this kind of arrested development. It is immature behaviour, more akin to a teenager's first reaction when exposed to sexual excitement or any other powerfully enjoyable sensation. The teenager who experiences any strongly pleasant sensation for the first time is tempted to seek a constant repetition of that isolated sensation. After all, he or she was, not long before, a child who would stuff him- or herself full of sweets until he or she became sick unless some adult limited the supply of sweets. That which is why there is so much risk that they can become addicted to alcohol or other intoxicating drugs. The person who is fixated on his or her own pleasure can very easily become addicted to sex, alcohol or other drugs. The point of sex is that it is meant to bind two people together and draw each one to pay more attention to their partner and the partner's needs. That is one way of saying that agape grows from and with eros.

This is ancient wisdom. The Bible values eros as the cement that binds a couple in marriage. For example, in the long list of additional prescriptions and elaborations on the Law which are attributed to Moses, we find:

If a man is newly married, he shall not join the army nor is he to be pestered at home; he shall be left at home free of all obligations for one year to bring joy to the wife he has taken.
- Deuteronomy 24,5

I heard some time ago about an old couple who celebrated the wife's ninetieth birthday with a very special meal and afterwards had what they described as the best sex of their lives. That sounds like celebrating a triumph of the divine plan. It also implies that we are not talking about the mechanics of the performance or

'technique', but an example of where these two people had passed beyond concern with that, making their eros a true way to agape. It was still eros at 90 years of age, eros with a different tone to it than when they were 21 or whenever they first met, but still eros. Equally, the enjoyment and benefits they got from their erotic love at 90 include the flowering of an agape that must have been there in that love in their youth.

This mature love is a beautiful thing to see. I remember an old man I worked with some years ago, Moses Ayema. He and his wife remained together although they were childless for some forty years. In this part of the world, that is truly extraordinary, but to illustrate my point I need to give more of his background. He grew up in a very politically active segregated African 'township' in what was then colonial Rhodesia and took a full part in the agitation of that time. He was jailed for years without trial for his trouble. When one of his fellow prisoners, who became a government minister after independence was finally gained, wrote his memoirs, Moses got an honourable mention. The minister recalled a time when the political prisoners decided as a protest to make life as difficult as they could for their warders “and “ he added, “Moses Ayema was the roughest of the lot of us.” That says something, as the writer of these words was himself known as a pretty rough character. That's the background. Now for a small illustration of the quality of that tough man Ayema's marriage. One morning at work during his wife's final illness (she had a particularly painful cancer) he looked more than usually depressed, so I asked him “How is she today?” and got the reply “Oh, much the same. But one thing is worrying me. She needs a new nightdress, and I can't find the frilly kind she likes anywhere” That is the roughest of a rough bunch of political prisoners speaking!

Or, to take another example, my father was a journalist, for many years a roving foreign correspondent for a national newspaper, so when we were young we could never be sure when he would be at home. When he retired after 26 years of that, he remarked to me one day “You know, your mother is a marvellous woman. I am having to learn to live in the home she made, and it is like falling in love all over again.” If a man can say that at 65 year of age, they must both have been working hard on their marriage through all the difficulties created by the demands of his work. All too soon, they needed the strong bond they had built over the years. When his final illness set in, it made him so difficult that my mother must have needed all her memories of the man he had been to carry her through. The tenderness he showed in some of his letters to her early in their marriage, which I only saw after both of them had died, was an eye-opener to me.

Unfortunately, both the official church and their most vociferous opponents do seem to be hung up on the mechanics. The teaching church (meaning a bunch of, mostly elderly, celibates) tells us precisely what we may do and what we may not; the secular media, and especially our e-mail inboxes, are full of offers of aids to 'better performance'. Both are missing the point and I am not interested in the details that used to seem so important to teenagers, of 'how far you can go', the awe attached to those who would 'go the whole way' and the air of guilt attached to these externals. If anyone reading this could tell me what it is that lesbians do that breaks that code of laws about what they may do with their bodies and how far you can go, please do not bother. That is not the point. What is important is not what you do or what it does to you, but who you do it with, and why and when. Since I am only another elderly celibate, don't expect me to unwrap that statement.

If Pope Benedict did, as we have heard, consult married people before writing that encyclical, it is good that he is listening and that this listening has led him a long way from the traces of Manicheeism which still remain among church leaders. How long must it be before church teaching on sex catches up with the authors of the Book of Genesis, who say that

God saw all that he had made, and indeed it was very good.
Gen 1.31

The teaching church church, as usual, is way behind the field, but for once the pope is moving in the right direction.

In the middle of thinking over this, I was struck by the first reading for the Mass on the feast of St. Mary Magdalen, from the Song of Songs:

By night on my bed
I sought him whom my soul loveth:
I sought him, but I found him not.
I said, I will rise now, and go about the city;
In the streets and in the broad ways
I will seek him whom my soul loveth:
I sought him, but I found him not.
The watchmen that go about the city found me;
To whom I said, Saw ye him whom my soul loveth?
It was but a little that I passed from them,
When I found him whom my soul loveth:
I held him, and would not let him go,
Until I had brought him into my mother’s house,
And into the chamber of her that conceived me.
I adjure you, O daughters of Jerusalem,
By the roes, or by the hinds of the field,
That ye stir not up, nor awake my love,
Until he please.
Song of Songs, 3,1-5

You don't have to be Dan Brown to notice that one of the world's great love poens is being put into her mouth.

There are two levels of meaning in this:

– the literal and
– the 'allegorical' level on which many church Fathers have used the Song of Songs as a way of speaking of the mystical relationship of the human being with God.
Both need some unwrapping.
 

The literal meaning

In the light of St.John's version of the visit of the women and Mary Magdalen to the tomb of Jesus on the first Easter morning, she becomes the first witness to meet the risen Christ (John 20,11-18), and her reaction on recognising Him is that of a fond friend, or why should He tell her “do not cling to me” (v.17)? She was privileged to be the first witness, 'apostle to the apostles' as one of the early Fathers says. This chapter also testifies to the fact that Jesus did have warm human friendships, with both men and women. These verses speak of Mary Magdalen, while in v.2, after she has told Peter about the empty tomb, Peter is accompanied to the tomb by 'the disciple Jesus loved', who is taken to be the author of this Gospel – a close male friend. This shows that Jesus was, as the First Council of Nicea defined, fully human as well as fully divine. If so, it would be strange if there wasn't that texture in some of his relationships with women that is different from friendships among the same sex. That is clearer than, and separate from the question of whether he entered the exclusive relationship that is the normal aim of healthy eros.

There is no way, at this distance in time, that we could expect any more evidence to emerge on that issue, so it seems more sensible to leave an open verdict. This is not the place to go into all the stir over the Da Vinci Code, which I find excessive. I found the book a gripping thriller, however implausible some of the story might be, but, to judge by the derision with which the film of the novel was met at the Cannes Film Festival in May, all these ecclesiastics who get so hot under the collar about the suggestion that Jesus (defined as fully divine and fully human) was that fully human are doing is to create audience demand for a badly made film.

One thing I am sure of, from my reading of the Gospels, is that if Jesus did found a family He would not have wanted the movement he started to become a family business, like the Jerusalem temple under Annas and Caiphas, so we should not have expected to know any descendants He might have had. But that is an aside. What is clear from the Gospels, especially St.Luke's but also a couple of passages like this one in St.John's, is that Jesus did have an extraordinary sympathy for women, including 'disreputable' women. He probably got a lot of this from his mother. Being 'immaculate' would not be admirable to christians if she was not sympathetic to her less fortunate sisters – and read her 'Magnificat' (Lk 1,46-55) for a further indication of her identifying herself with the outcast and the oppressed. But why should Jesus not have learned some of this from other women friends? The Gospels testify to enough of them and Mary Magdalen was certainly one of them, hoever little we may know of her. (Scholars still debate whether she is Mary of Bethany, Martha's sister, and/or the 'woman who was a sinner' who anointed Jesus' feet in the house of Simon the Leper).

This may be the place to refer to philia: Friendship is more than 'Love without his wings', but the poet has a point there. Philia does not convey the intensity feeling that can be the height of eros or of agape, but I find it impossible to imagine it totally dissociated from either. Friendship is not real friendship if it isn't primarily a seeking of the friend's good, however much it may also help me. That means it can't be dissociated from agape and remain true to itself. I find it hard to imagine a relationship between man and woman that isn't coloured by the fact that they are man and woman, which implies some flavour of eros however faint. But eros has the right to make overriding demands: if you do not claim from your friend the full expression of eros in marriage, then true friendship demands that you respect your friend's right to find this elsewhere. History shows some examples of celibate saints who were supported on their way to God by such friendships: Francis and Clare of Assisi, Francis de Sales and Jeanne de Chantal (Timothy Radcliffe op pointed out a letter in which he told her in so many words he loved her without the usual 'spiritual' addition of 'as a sister'), Patrick and Brigid, Benedict and his sister Scholastica… even that crusty old character Jerome comes across at his most human in his letters to Paula and Eustochium, mother and daughter and the centre of a group of pious women who formed around him in Jerusalem and, in our own day, Peter Maurin and Dorothy Day. Such true friendships require delicate attention to grow aright; it is like the juggler trying to keep one more ball in the air.

I suppose we would all agree that rich, fully developed eros/agape in the elderly is also friendship, but it might be difficult to identify anything of philia in it that not also an aspect of eros or agape. That underlines the point that they are all aspects of one thing we call 'love'. Thus, to speak of loving inanimate things like our favourite food or more abstract things like our work is using the word in a metaphorical sense.
 

Eros as allegory

I have referred to the use that some of the church Fathers (St.Bernard is perhaps the most notable example) make of the Song of Songs as an image of, not only human love of man for woman and vice versa, but of the mystical relationship between human being and God. Pope Benedict says in the encyclical “Deus Caritas est”:

… “love” is a single reality, but with different dimensions:
at different times, one or other dimension may emerge more clearly.
Yet, when the two dimensions are cut off from each other, the result is
a caricature or at least an impoverished form of love.
(§8)

I find this vividly illustrated in a theme much used by medieval painters, the temptation of St.Antony (Antony of Egypt, the founder of christian monasticism). These paintings are not just excuses for portraying, in a more puritanical age than ours, alluring naked women. This great spiritual athlete is shown pestered by sexual images, some of them beautiful women, but others grotesque creatures which underline the fact that, although and perhaps also because eros is divine, there are some powerful and convincing counterfeits around. The beauties speak to me of the beauty of eros integrated with agape. The grotesques are the caricature referred to by the pope.

And, if it is not inappropriate to speak in erotic terms of human union with God, because both experiences take us beyond the limitations of language and can only be properly expressed in poetry, it is also true that when intense spiritual experiences which bring a heightening of sensitivity to one's own feelings, this very often includes sexual feeling, leading to what is recorded, often as a period of temptation, in the lives of many saints – hence, once again, the images of both the beauty and the grotesquery of the erotic in those paintings of the temptations of St.Antony. If, as St.John says in his first epistle,

God's love for us was revealed
when God sent into the world His only Son
so that we could have life through him;
this is the love I mean,
not our love for God,
but God's love for us when He sent His Son
to be the sacrifice that takes our sin away.
I John 4,9-10

God's love for us is, as the Pope says, fully eros and fully agape. Our love for God in response is the greater the more closely it approaches this integration of the two.
 



 

A different, final thought:

The encyclical is clearly divided into two parts. The first part is devoted to discussion of love between man and woman. The second deals with the social applications of christian love, in what are conventionally called works of charity and the extension of social concern into work for economic development and social justice.

It does put an emphasis on relief and development work as works of love. This means people undertaking these works must beware beaurocracy and not only bureaucracy. I have enough experience of the 'development', 'aid' and 'human rights' industries to know that they are industries, with any industry's concern for the continued employment of its workers. The workers, too, are concerned to keep their jobs. Some are concerned to keep their perks, in the form of generous expense accounts, foreign travel and maybe more. This means that professionals in these areas are tempted by the programmes and activities that look good in an annual report, rather than those that go at whatever pace, often slower than that, necessary to do people good. The short-term good that fits the timescale imposed by the annual report and the two- or three-year funding cycle can easily prevent the achievement of the real good that grows more slowly from the people themselves and will probably only reach fruition when their particular concern is no longer fashionable with the development industry.

Given this situation, it is good that Pope Benedict pointed out that these are valid activities for christians and should be an expression of our love for our neighbours. If we do act out of love, the way we act is likely to be a much-needed challenge to those who undertake these activities just as a job.

On the positive side, I have observed, and I am far from being the first to do so, that people who do undertake these activities as an expression of love, sooner or later come to the point where they are aware of the need to deepen their own spiritual lives. No-one gives what they don't have and large-scale works demand more love than one human being has in himself or herself. We need to become, in the words of the famous prayer of St.Francis of Assisi, channels of the divine love.