To love someone means that the happiness and the well being of the one I love is my happiness and well being.

The Encyclical written by Pope Benedict has two parts. The first part is about understanding. The second part is about putting things into practice. This analysis is exclusively about this matter of understanding.

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The first part is presented in 18 sections. Here I list these sections by summarizing the meaning of each in a few sentences. The texts in smaller font size are my inquiries and observations.

1. “God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them” (1 Jn4:16). We have the commandment of love from Deuteronomy: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might” (6:4-5), and from Leviticus: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” (19:18). (See also Mark 12:29-31). God’s love comes first, we respond to it.
Yes.

2. The problem of language. Many kinds of love. I am freely adding to Benedict’s list. Love of country, art, sports, work, profession, friends, parents and children, relatives, neighbor, Church, God.

And on the other side of things not mentioned, the love of money, power, pleasure, food, and so on.

3. Eros and agape. Difference and unity. Three are listed. Eros, philia, and agape. Eros is used twice in the Old testament, and not at all in the New, where we find agape. Philia is mostly in the writings of John.

In other words, the three forms of love are given relative importance determined by scriptural usage. In this sense, there were three but now there may be only two, but really there is only one. Agape is the winner. By the way, is eros sexual? Is friendship asexual? This is not a matter of words, but of the experiences expressed by words.

What are those experiences? Is the connection between eros and agape a matter of unity, or dominance in favor of agape? In marriage, there may be unity because both, eros and agape have their sphere of life, and these are completely interwoven. How does eros improve agape in the lives of celibates? How would I define the christian and natural agape? If I am in love, the happiness and well being of the beloved is my happiness and well being. This is a love of caring, and self giving. This is a love in relationship where it acquires the support of mutuality. Benedict does not give any idea about the meaning of eros in this relationship for those who are not married, such as celibates, homosexuals, friends, neighbor.

4. Did Christianity destroy eros? Christianity is opposed to the abuses of eros. Eros must be disciplined and purified if it is to provide not just a fleeting pleasure, but a foretaste of the pinnacle of our existence, of that beatitude for which our whole being yearns.

For heaven’s sake be more specific! These are words without meaning if you do not put the context of experience into them. According to this paragraph, Christianity is opposed to the abuses of eros. OK. But what is the disciplined and purified eros? Something we yearn for? What is that, and can we attain it? How? We must be very truthful here. The physical aspect of all this unknowing is mostly torture and pain and a sense of futility and hopelessness. We discipline eros out of existence, and we purify eros until there is nothing left of it. That is why many may think that all this is a path from eros to agape, a one-way street. The more eros fades the stronger agape becomes. But then we have destroyed eros in favor of agape. So do not say, there is a unity between eros and agape. I am not married.

5. Passing through the path of renunciation, eros is not rejected but healed and restored.

I do not believe a word you say until you clearly describe what this healed eros is like? That I really would like to know. Is being transformed into something else healing? I do not think so. Healing is taking away what is destructive and becoming fully what we really are according to our created nature, to which God said, it is good. In this framework what is the healed eros like?

6. What is this path of purification?

Good question. A path is a way that takes us from one place to another as we are dedicated to make the journey to reach something there that is not here. We start and we arrive and we are better off than we were before the journey. Unity is coexistence in time, and not the succession into something else. See human development from zygote to a new born child. It is about the very same, from hope in the given to realization of the possible. It is not that something is destroyed for the sake of the other. The opening of the flower is the fulfillment of the seed. The seed is still there in the flower. Jesus said that the seed must die to become the flower. Yes, in the sense that hope dies in fulfillment. The same way as a yearning dies in the attaining, or the plan of a building dies when the building is finished. In all these examples there is the process of being and becoming according to being. I do not become what I am not but I become myself in the hands of a creating God.

To become exclusive and for ever. This means to reach higher levels and inward purification.

To reach higher levels one must be at a lower, and to be purified one must be first dirty. Do you mean that eros is low and dirty, while agape is high and pure? If not, then please describe to me a high and pure eros and a low and dirty agape so that I really know where I am to go and from where I am coming. It is important to describe unity in functional terms of mutual support and need and satisfaction. I really would like to see this between eros and agape.

7. Eros is worldly love and agape is shaped by faith. Ascending love and descending love.

We must be very practical and precise and show these in actual examples. I wish Benedict would write a story to illustrate this. The only example I know is given by a rather idealized passionate and loving marriage. What happened to me? I have been called by God for loving service for the Body of Christ whose happiness and well being is my happiness and well being. I know, this is a tremendous gift and honor. I could never have done anything like that on my own. But I gently ask about my body, my physical and emotional needs and my needs for pleasure. Because I do need this sense of well being. Otherwise I sink into deep depression and become sick one way or another. In other words, I do experience agape at the loss of eros. You see in statement 7 eros is worldly love, and agape is shaped by faith. That is not unity of two. That is opposition, one fighting the other. I would like to know what eros is like if shaped by faith. I can see that in marriage but not in my life being single by vocation. That is why I also would like to know what agape is like shaped by eros. That I really would like to see.

8. Love is a single reality but with different dimensions emerging more clearly at different times, yet remaining inseparable.

Words, words, words. Be very concrete! If the different dimensions are eros, friendship and charity, illustrate how these coexist in life’s examples, how these are present in an inseparable fashion, each with its contribution to the one reality of love in the life of a celibate priest, or in the life of a homosexual person. Otherwise we are nowhere but in the platonic ideals of imagination.

9. There is only one God, the Creator of heaven and earth.
Yes.

10. God’s eros for us is also totally agape.

Explain. What is God’s eros? What is God’s agape? How do we experience them?

11. The close connection between eros and agape in marriage.

What about those who are not married?

12. Jesus Christ - the incarnate love of God.

Yes, but it is not enough to state it. Put on it blood and flesh and tears and laughter. I know, the New Testament is precisely that. But as it has been said, the word eros does not occur at all in the New Testament writings.

13. Jesus’ enduring presence in the Eucharist.

Very wonderful.

14. Union with Christ is also union with all who partake in the one bread. (1 Cor 10:17)

The Church as a community. The body of Christ. The only legitimate use of power is for service. That means being a caring person.

15. The universal concreteness of neighbor.

This is very important. We must be down to earth. There is no such thing as an ‘ideal’ neighbor.

16. The bond between love of God and love of neighbor.

Yes. We do find God in the ordinary. The holiness of the ordinary.

17. The invisible God is revealed to us in Jesus Christ.
Yes.

18. Your friend is my friend.

Both ways? I think so. But my friend is loved by God much more than I ever could. That is why I pray: I know that you love them. Bless them and protect them, so that they may grow in your grace, loving you and each other more and more. Amen.

 

(For the answer see the next article: “A few scattered thoughts, roughly around: Deus caritas est – Benedict XVI”  – note by editor)