* * *
1. The Two Faces of Love
With the homilies of this Lent I would like to continue in the same vein
that I began in Advent, to make a small contribution vis-à-vis the
reevangelization of the secularized West, which at this moment is the main
concern of the whole Church and in particular of the Holy Father Benedict XVI.
There is a realm in which secularization acts in a particularly pervasive and
negative way, and it is the realm of love. The secularization of love consists
in detaching human love in all its forms from God, reducing it to something
purely "profane," in which God is out of place and even an annoyance.
However, the subject of love is not important just for evangelization, that
is, in relation with the world; it is also important first of all for the
internal life of the Church, for the sanctification of her members. It is the
perspective in which the Holy Father Benedict XVI's encyclical "Deus Caritas
Est" is placed and in which we also place ourselves in these reflections.
Love suffers from ill-fated separation not only in the mentality of the
secularized world, but also in that of the opposite side, among believers and
in particular among consecrated souls. Simplifying the situation to the
greatest extent, we can articulate it thus: In the world we find eros without
agape; among believers we often find agape without eros.
Eros without agape is a romantic love, very often passionate to the point of
violence. A love of conquest which fatally reduces the other to an object of
one's pleasure and ignores every dimension of sacrifice, of fidelity and of
gift of self. There is no need to insist on the description of this love
because it is a reality that we see daily with our own eyes, propagated as it
is in a hammering way by novels, films, television fiction, the Internet, the
Gossip magazines. It is what common language understands, moreover, by the
word "love."
It is more useful for us to understand what is meant by agape without eros. In
music there is a distinction that can help us to form an idea -- the
difference between hot and cool jazz. I read somewhere about this
characterization of two kinds of jazz, although I know it is not the only one
possible. Hot jazz is passionate, ardent, expressive jazz, made of outbursts,
feelings, and hence of runs and original improvisations. Cool jazz is that
which one has when one passes to professionalism: feelings become repetitive,
inspiration is replaced by technique, spontaneity by virtuosity.
This distinction having been made, agape without eros seems to us a "cold
love," a loving "with the tip of the hairs" without the participation of the
whole being, more by imposition of the will than by an intimate outburst of
the heart, a descent into a pre-constituted mold, rather than to create for
oneself something unrepeatable, as unrepeatable is every human being before
God. The acts of love addressed to God are like those of certain poor lovers
who write to the beloved letters copied from a handbook.
If worldly love is a body without a soul, religious love practiced that way is
a soul without a body. The human being is not an angel, that is, a pure
spirit; he is soul and body substantially united: everything he does,
including loving, must reflect this structure. If the component linked to
affectivity and the heart is systematically denied or repressed, the result
will be double: either one goes on in a tired way, out of a sense of duty, to
defend one's image, or more or less licit compensations are sought, to the
point of the very painful cases that are afflicting the Church. It cannot be
ignored that at the root of many moral deviations of consecrated souls there
is a distorted and contorted conception of love.
We have therefore a double motive and a double urgency to rediscover love in
its original unity. True and integral love is a pearl enclosed within two
valves, which are eros and agape. These two dimensions of love cannot be
separated without destroying it, as hydrogen and oxygen cannot be separated
without depriving oneself of water.
2. The Thesis of Incompatibility Between the Two Loves
The most important reconciliation between the two dimensions of love is the
practice that happens in the life of persons, but precisely for it to be
rendered possible it is necessary to begin by reconciling eros and agape also
theoretically, in the doctrine. This will enable us among other things to know
finally what is intended with these two terms that are so often used and
misunderstood.
The importance of the question stems from the fact that a work exists which
has made popular in the whole Christian world the opposite thesis of the
irreconcilability of the two ways of love. It is the book of the Swedish
Lutheran theologian Anders Nygren, entitled "Eros and Agape." [1] We can
summarize his thought in these terms. Eros and agape designate two opposite
movements: the first indicates the ascent of man to God and to the divine as
to one's good and one's origin; the other, agape, indicates God's descent to
man with the Incarnation and the Cross of Christ, and hence the salvation
offered to man without merit and without a response on his part, which is not
faith alone. The New Testament has made a precise choice, using the term agape
to express love and systematically rejecting the term eros.
St. Paul is the one who with the greatest purity formulated this doctrine of
love. After him, always according to Nygren's thesis, such radical antithesis
was lost almost immediately to give way to attempts of synthesis. No sooner
Christianity entered into cultural contact with the Greek world and the
Platonic view, already with Origen, there was a re-evaluation of eros, as
ascensional movement of the soul toward the good, as universal attraction
exercised by beauty and the divine. In this line, Pseudo Dionysius the
Areopagite would write that "God is eros," [2] substituting this term for that
of agape in the famous phrase of John (1 John 4:10)
In the West a similar synthesis was made by Augustine with his doctrine of
caritas understood as doctrine of descending and gratuitous love of God for
man (no one has spoken of "grace" in a stronger way than he!), but also as
man's longing for the good and for God. His is the affirmation: "Thou hast
made us for yourself, O God, and our hearts are restless until they rest in
Thee" [3]; his also is the image of love as a weight that draws the soul, as
by the force of gravity, toward God, as the place of one's repose and
pleasure. [4] All this, for Nygren, inserts an element of love of self, of
one's own good, hence of egoism, which destroys the pure gratuitousness of
grace; it is a falling again into the pagan illusion of making salvation
consist of an ascent to God, instead of the gratuitous and unmotivated descent
of God toward us.
For Nygren, prisoners of this impossible synthesis between eros and agape,
between love of God and love of self, include St. Bernard, when he defines the
supreme degree of the love of God as a "loving God for himself" and a "loving
oneself for God" [5]; St. Bonaventure with his ascentional "Journey of the
Soul to God"; and St. Thomas Aquinas who defines the love of God poured out in
the heart of the baptized (cf. Romans 5:5) as "the love with which God loves
us and with which he makes us love him" ("amor quo ipse nos diligit et quo
ipse nos dilectores sui facit"). [6]
This in fact would mean that man, loved by God, can in turn love God, give him
something of his own, which would destroy the absolute gratuitousness of the
love of God. On the existential plane the same deviation, according to Nygren,
is had in Catholic mysticism. The love of mystics, with its very strong charge
of eros, is, for him, nothing other than a sublimated sensual love, an attempt
to establish with God a relationship of presumptuous reciprocity in love.
The one who broke the ambiguity and brought to light the clear Pauline
antithesis was, according to the author, Luther. Basing justification on faith
alone he did not exclude charity from the founding moment of Christian life,
as Catholic theology reproaches him; he has rather liberated charity -- agape
-- from the spurious element of eros. To the formula of "faith alone," with
the exclusion of works, would correspond, in Luther, the formula of "agape
alone," with the exclusion of eros.
It is not for me to establish here if the author has interpreted correctly on
this point Luther's thought who -- it must be said -- never posed the problem
in terms of opposition between eros and agape, as he did instead between faith
and works. Significant, however, is the fact that Karl Barth also, in a
chapter of his "Ecclesial Dogmatics," arrives at the same result as Nygren of
an unreconcilable opposition between eros and agape: "When Christian love
comes on the scene," he writes, "the conflict immediately begins with the
other love and this conflict has no end." [7] I say that if this is not
Lutheranism, it is however certainly dialectical theology, theology of the "aut
- aut," of antithesis at any cost.
The repercussion of this operation is the radical worldliness and
secularization of eros. While in fact a certain theology was busy expelling
eros from agape, secular culture was very happy, for its part, to expel agape
from eros, namely every reference to God and to the grace of human love. Freud
furnished this with a theoretic justification, reducing love to eros and eros
to libido, to pure sexual drive which fights against any repression and
inhibition. It is the state to which love has been reduced today in many
manifestations of life and culture, especially in the world of entertainment.
Two years ago I was in Madrid. The newspapers did no more than speak of a
certain art exhibition taking place in the city, entitled "The Tears of Eros."
It was an exhibition of artistic works of an erotic nature -- pictures,
designs, sculptures -- which intended to bring to light the indissoluble bond
that there is, in the experience of modern man, between eros and thanatos,
between love and death. One comes to the same observation, reading the
collection of poems "The Flowers of Evil of Baudelaire" or "A Season in Hell"
of Rimbaud. Love which by its nature should lead to life, leads now instead to
death.
3. Return to the Synthesis
If we cannot change with one strike the idea of love that the world has, we
can however correct the theological vision that, unwittingly, fosters and
legitimizes it. It is what the Holy Father Benedict XVI has done in an
exemplary way with the encyclical "Deus Caritas Est." He reaffirms the
traditional Catholic synthesis expressing it in modern terms. "Eros and
agape," one reads there, "ascending love and descending love -- do not ever
allow themselves be separated completely from one another [...] Biblical faith
does not construct a parallel world or an opposite world in regard to that
original human phenomenon which is love, but it accepts the whole man
intervening in his search for love to purify it, revealing to him at the same
time new dimensions" (Nos. 7-8). Eros and agape are united to the source
itself of love which is God: "He loves," continues the text of the encyclical,
"and this love of his can be qualified without a doubt as eros, which however
is also and totally agape" (No. 9).
One can understand the favorable reception that this papal document had also
in the more open and responsible secular environments. It gives hope to the
world. It corrects the image of a faith that touches the world tangentially,
without penetrating in it, with the evangelical image of the leaven that makes
the dough ferment; it replaces the idea of a kingdom of God come to "judge"
the world, with that of a kingdom of God come to "save" the world, beginning
from the eros which is the dominant force.
To the traditional vision, whether of Catholic or Orthodox theology, one can
contribute, I believe, a confirmation also from the point of view of exegesis.
Those who hold the thesis of the incompatibility between eros and agape base
themselves on the fact that the New Testament carefully avoids the term eros,
using in its place always and only agape (apart from a rare use of the term
philia, which indicates the love of friendship).
The fact is true, but the conclusions drawn from it are not. One supposes that
the authors of the New Testament knew both, the meaning that the term eros had
in common language -- the so-called "vulgar" eros -- and the lofty and
philosophical meaning it had, for example, in Plato, the so-called "noble"
eros. In the popular meaning, eros indicated more or less what is indicated
also today when one speaks of eroticism or of erotic films, namely,
satisfaction of the sexual instinct, a degrading of oneself rather than a
raising of oneself. In the noble meaning it indicated love of beauty, the
force that holds the world together and pushes all beings to unity, namely,
that movement of ascent towards the divine that dialectical theologians hold
incompatible with the movement of descent of the divine towards man.
It is difficult to maintain that the authors of the New Testament, addressing
simple people without any education, intended to put them on guard in regard
to Plato's eros. They avoided the term eros for the same reason that today a
preacher avoids the term erotic or, if he uses it, does so only in a negative
sense. The reason is that, now as then, the word evokes love in its most
egotistical and sexual sense. [8] The suspicion of early Christians in
comparisons of eros was ultimately aggravated by the role that it had in the
orgiastic Dionysian cults.
No sooner Christianity entered into contact and dialogue with the Greek
culture of the time, every preclusion fell immediately, we have already seen,
in comparisons of the eros. It was used often, in Greek authors, as synonym of
agape and was employed to indicate the love of God for man, as well as the
love of man for God, love for the virtues and for every beautiful thing.
Moreover, to be convinced suffice it to give a simple look at Lampe's "Greek
Patristic Lexicon. [9] Nygren's and Barth's system hence is constructed on a
false application of the so-called argument "ex silentio."
4. An Eros for the Consecrated
The rescue of eros helps first of all human couples in love and Christian
spouses, showing the beauty and dignity of the love that unites them. It helps
young people to experience the fascination of the other sex not as something
torbid, to be lived taking cover from God, but on the contrary as a gift of
the Creator for their joy, if lived in the order willed by Him. To this
positive function of eros on human love the Pope also makes reference in his
encyclical, when he speaks of the path of purification of eros, which leads
from momentary attraction to the "forever" of marriage (Nos. 4-5).
However, the rescue of eros should also help us, consecrated men and women. I
made reference at the beginning to the danger that religious souls run, which
is that of a cold love, which does not descend from the mind to the heart,
much like a winter sun that shines but does not give warmth. If eros means
impulse, desire, attraction, we must not be afraid of feelings, much less so
scorn and repress them. When it is a question of the love of God," wrote
William of St. Thierry, "the feeling of affection (affectio) is also a grace;
it is not in fact nature which can infuse in us such a feeling." [10]
The psalms are full of this longing of the heart for God: "To you, Lord, I
raise my soul," and "My soul thirsts for God, for the living God." "Pay
attention then," says the author of the "Cloud of Unknowing," "to this
wonderful work of grace in your soul. It is nothing other than a sudden
impulse that arises without any warning and points directly to God, as a spark
given off from the fire ... It strikes this cloud of unknowing with the sharp
arrow of the desire of love; do not move from there, no matter what happens."
[11] Enough to do so is a thought, a motion of the heart, a short prayer.
However, all this is not enough for us and God knows it better than us. We are
creatures, we live in time and in a body; we are in need of a screen on which
to project our love which is not only "the cloud of unknowing," namely, the
veil of darkness behind which God hides himself.
We know well the answer given to this problem: precisely for this reason God
has given us our neighbor to love! "No man has ever seen God; if we love one
another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us ... He who does not
love his brother whom he has seen, cannot love God whom he has not seen" (1
John 4:12-20). However, we must be careful not to omit a decisive fact. Before
the brother that we see there is another that we also see and touch: It is the
God made flesh; it is Jesus Christ! Between God and our neighbor there is now
the Word made flesh who has reunited the two extremes in one person. It is in
Him, moreover, that love of neighbor itself finds its foundation: "You did it
to me."
What does all this mean for the love of God? That the primary object of our
eros, of our search, desire, attraction, passion must be Christ. "Pre-ordained
to the Savior is human love since the beginning, as its model and end, almost
as a casket so large and wide as to be able to receive God [...]. The desire
of the soul goes only to Christ. Here is the place of its rest, because he
alone is the good, the truth and all that which inspires love." [12]
This does not mean to reduce the horizon of Christian love from God to Christ;
it means to love God in the way He wishes to be loved. "The Father himself
loves you, because you have loved me" (John 16:27). It is not a question of a
mediated love, almost by proxy, by which whoever loves Jesus "is as if" he
loved the Father. No, Jesus is an immediate mediator, loving him one loves,
ipso facto, also the Father. "He who sees me, sees the Father," who loves me
loves the Father.
It is true that not even Christ is seen, but he exists; he is risen, he is
alive, he is close to us, more truly than the most enamored husband is close
to his wife. Here is the crucial point: to think of Christ not as a person of
the past, but as the risen and living Lord, with whom I can speak, whom I can
even kiss if I so wish, certain that my kiss does not end on the paper or on
the wood of a crucifix, but on a face and on the lips of living flesh (even
though spiritualized), happy to receive my kiss.
The beauty and fullness of consecrated life depends on the quality of our love
for Christ. Only this is able to defend our heart from going off the rails.
Jesus is the perfect man; in him are found, to an infinitely higher degree,
all those qualities and attentions that a man seeks in a woman and a woman in
a man, a friend in a friend. His love does not subtract us necessarily from
the call of creatures and in particular from the attraction of the other sex
(this is part of our nature that he has created and does not wish to destroy);
he gives us, however, the strength to overcome these attractions with a much
stronger attraction. "The chaste one," writes St. John Climacus, "is he who
drives out eros with Eros." [13]
Does all this destroy, perhaps, the gratuitousness of agape, pretending to
give God something in return for his love? Does it cancel grace? Not at all,
rather it exalts it. What in fact do we give God in this way if not what we
have received from him? "We love, because he first loved us" (1 John 4:19).
The love we give to Christ is his same love for us that we return to him, as
the echo does the voice.
Where, then, is the novelty and the beauty of this love that we call eros? The
echo returns to God his own love but enriched, colored and perfumed by our
liberty and gratitude. And it is all that he wishes. Our liberty pays him back
for everything. And not only that, writes Cabasilas, "receiving from us the
gift of love in exchange for all that he has given us, he holds himself our
debtor." [14] The thesis that opposes eros and agape is based on another
well-known opposition, that between grace and liberty, and even on the
negation itself of the freedom of fallen man (on the "servant will").
I tried to imagine, venerable fathers and brothers, what the Risen Jesus would
say now if, as he did in his earthly life when he entered on the Sabbath into
a synagogue, he came to sit here in my place and explained to us in person
what the love is that he desires from us. I want to share with you, with
simplicity, what I think he would say to us; it will serve to make our
examination of conscience on love:
Ardent love:
Is to put Me always in the first place;
Is to seek to please Me at every moment;
Is to live before Me as friend, confidant, spouse and to be happy;
Is to be troubled if you think you are ar from Me;
Is to be full of happiness when I am with you;
Is to be willing to undergo great sacrifices so as not to lose Me;
Is to prefer to live poor and unknown with Me, rather than rich and famous
without Me;
Is to speak to Me as your dearest friend in every possible moment;
Is to entrust yourself to Me in regard to your future;
Is to desire to lose yourself in Me as end of your existence.
If it seems to you, as it does to me, that you are very far from this aim,
we must not be discouraged. We have one who can help us reach it if we ask
him. Let us repeat with faith to the Holy Spirit: "Veni, Sancte Spiritus,
reple tuorum corda fidelium et tui amoris in eis ignem accende" (Come, Holy
Spirit, fill the hearts of thy faithful, and enkindle in them the fire of Thy
love).
NOTES
[1] Original Swedish version, Stockholm 1930, trans. Ital. "Eros e Agape:
The Christian Notion of Love and Its Transformations, Bologna," Il Mulino,
1971.
[2] Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, I Nomi Divini , IV, 12 (PG, 3, 709 ff.).
[3] St. Augustine, Confessioni, I, 1.
[4] Commento al vangelo di Giovanni, 26, 4-5.
[5] Cf. St. Bernard, De diligendo Deo, IX, 26 -- X, 27.
[6] St. Thomas Aquinas, Commento alla Lettera ai Romani, chapter V, lesson 2,
n. 392-293; cf. St. Augustine, Commento alla Prima Lettera di Giovanni, 9, 9.
[7] K. Barth, Dommatica ecclesiale, IV, 2, 832-852; trans. Ital. K. Barth,
Dommatica ecclesiale, Anthology by H. Gollwitizer, Bologna, Il Mulino 1968,
pp. 199-225.
[8] The meaning given by the early Christians to the word eros is deduced
clearly from the known text of St. Ignatius of Antioch, Lettera ai Romani, 7,
2: "My love (eros) was crucified and there is not in me a fire of passion ...
I am not attracted by the nutriment of corruption and the pleasures of this
life." "My eros" does not indicate here Jesus crucified, but "love of myself,"
attachment to earthly pleasures, in the line of the Pauline "I have been
crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live" (Galatians 2:20 f.).
[9] Cf. G.W.H. Lampe, A Patristic Greek Lexicon, Oxford 1961, pp. 550.
[10] William of St. Thierry, Meditazioni, XII, 29 (SCh 324, p. 210).
[11] Anonymous, The Cloud of Unknowing, published by Ancora, Milan, 1981, pp.
1356.140.
[12] N. Cabasilas, Vita in Cristo, II, 9 (PG 88, 560-561).
[13] St. John Climacus, La scala del paradiso, XV, 98 (PG 88, 880).
[14] N. Cabasilas, Vita in Cristo, VI, 4.
[Translation by ZENIT]