Pope Benedict on Love and Justice

Benedict’s first encyclical, Deus Caritas Est—“God Is Love”—is dated the Feast of the Nativity but was not issued until late January. There has been so far surprisingly little commentary on the substance of the argument that the pope advances. Most of the initial response has to do more with the politics or even with what might be described as the public relations of the encyclical. “God is Love” sounds like a warm and fuzzy sentiment aimed, as many news reports said, at accenting the “kinder and gentler” side of a pontiff who has a reputation as a hard-edged enforcer of orthodoxy.

News reports also highlighted the claim that the second part of the document, which addresses the differences between the Church’s works of charity and secular politics, is in fact a reworking of notes for an encyclical that Benedict’s predecessor, John Paul the Great, had in mind. In truth, both the first and second parts are in striking continuity with Joseph Ratzinger’s writings over the decades, bearing the signature themes of his well-known critiques of political theologies that, he is convinced, distort the distinctiveness of the biblical message.

Deus Caritas Est is short, at least by comparison with encyclicals of recent pontificates, with forty-two sections under two headings. The first is “Unity of Love in Creation and in Salvation History,” and the second is “The Practice of Love by the Church as a Community of Love.” One might say the first is more purely theological, even speculative, while the second is more practical, but that distinction should not be pressed too hard. Throughout the document, theology and practice, theory and application, are in conversation with one another.

The argument—and it is a sustained argument—begins with and repeatedly returns to 1 John 4:16: “God is love, and he who abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him.” Benedict notes the many and sometimes contradictory ways in which the word “love” is used, and then asks, “Are all these forms of love basically one, so that love, in its many and varied manifestations, is ultimately a single reality, or are we merely using the same word to designate totally different realities?” He answers that question by coming down strongly on the side of the unity of love.

In the Greek, there are three words for love: eros, agape, and philia. He notes that the Greek translation of the Old Testament uses eros only twice, while the Greek New Testament doesn’t use it at all. While philia, meaning friendship, occurs in John’s Gospel, the biblical texts typically speak of love as agape, a word infrequently used in the Greek literature of the time.

While the pope does not mention it explicitly, he knows that he is on well-traveled turf. Many readers will be familiar with C.S. Lewis’ discussion of “the four loves.” More influential in the world of theology is the work of Anders Nygren, a Swedish theologian, who in the last century posited agape against eros. Nygren’s analysis is (too briefly stated) that eros is the essentially pagan dynamic of human aspiration toward the ecstatic or divine, while agape is the utterly gratuitous love of God preeminently exemplified in the Son of God’s gift of himself for our salvation.

Benedict’s purpose is to rehabilitate a Christian understanding of eros. He says that Friedrich Nietzsche and other moderns held that Christianity, with all its emphasis upon sin, sacrifice, and commandments, had “poisoned” the understanding of eros. They asked, “Doesn’t [the Church] blow the whistle just when the joy that is the Creator’s gift offers us a happiness which is itself a certain foretaste of the divine?” The pagan world, the pope says, saw eros as a kind of intoxicated longing, a “divine madness,” that found expression in fertility cults and the “sacred” prostitution that flourished in their temples. The Old Testament rejected such cults as incompatible with monotheistic faith, but it did not reject eros as such: “An intoxicated and undisciplined eros is not an ascent in ‘ecstasy’ toward the divine but a fall, a degradation of man.”

There is, Benedict says, a certain relationship between love and the divine. “Love promises infinity, eternity—a reality far greater and totally other than our everyday experience.” But the attainment of the promise is not through succumbing to instinct but through a purification by renunciation that heals eros and restores its true grandeur.

Of critical importance is the understanding of the human being as both body and soul. “Should he aspire to be pure spirit and reject the flesh as pertaining to his animal nature alone, then spirit and body would both lose their dignity. On the other hand, should he deny the spirit and consider matter, the body, as the only reality, he would likewise lose his greatness.”

The body should be neither denigrated nor exalted. The latter is the cultural tendency today when eros is reduced simply to sex and becomes a commodity, with the result that the person becomes a commodity. Thus “the apparent exaltation of the body can quickly turn into a hatred of bodiliness.” The Song of Songs in the Old Testament shows the way in which love “becomes concern and care for the other.” Love’s growth advances as it becomes ever more definitive in the sense of exclusivity (this person alone) and is directed to the eternal (it is “forever”). Such love is ecstasy, not as a moment of intoxication but as a continuing journey, “an ongoing exodus out of the closed inward-looking self” and toward the other, and finally toward God.

In philosophy and theology, a sharp antithesis is proposed between agape as the “oblative” love that unconditionally gives and eros as the love that seeks to possess. “Were this antithesis to be taken to extremes,” the pope writes, “the essence of Christianity would be detached from the vital relations fundamental to human existence and would become a world apart, admirable perhaps, but decisively cut off from the complex fabric of human life.” The more that agape and eros find “a proper unity in the one reality of love, the more the true nature of love is realized.” Deus Caritas Est aims to reclaim the lived experience of love in all its complexity for a Christian understanding of human possibility. “Biblical faith does not set up a parallel universe or one opposed to that primordial human phenomenon which is love, but rather accepts the whole man.” For the Christian, love is more than, but not something other than, what the non-Christian means by love.

The new thing in biblical faith is the image of God and image of man. Israel’s Shema (“Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord”) establishes that all reality has its source in the one God whose creation is dear to Him. At the height of Greek philosophy, the divine power is the object of desire and love and moves the world, but this divine power “in itself lacks nothing and does not love.” Here Benedict draws on Old Testament images such as Hosea’s depiction of “God’s passion for his people using boldly erotic images.” The language of the encyclical is itself bold, and could be misread as suggesting that God is not impassible and self-sufficient. But there is in fact a subtle trinitarian turn in which the unity of eros and agape is effected in the incarnation of the Son of God.

In the Old Testament depiction of the passion of God, “Christians can see a dim prefigurement of the mystery of the cross: So great is God’s love for man that by becoming man he follows him even into death, and so reconciles justice and love.” This passion is so great that it “turns God against himself, his love against his justice.” The Logos, the primordial reason that is the source of all being, is at the same time a passionate lover. “Eros is thus supremely ennobled, yet at the same time it is so purified as to become one with agape.” (In the second part of the encyclical, this distinction between love and justice—God turned against Himself—is key to Benedict’s understanding of politics as the realm of justice and the Church as the community of love.)

For a papal encyclical, the document is unusually attentive to the history of philosophy. The pope’s interlocutors include Nietzsche, Aristotle, and Plato in rehabilitating our understanding of love. There is a strong element of truth, says Benedict, in the myth, in Plato’s Symposium, of man having been split in two by Zeus, with the result that he longs for his other half. In the biblical narrative, “man is somehow incomplete, driven by nature to seek in another the part that can make him whole, the idea that only in communion with the opposite sex can he become ‘complete.’” Thus it is that “corresponding to the image of a monotheistic God is monogamous marriage.”

The novelty of the New Testament is in the understanding that, in Jesus Christ, “it is God himself who goes in search of the ‘stray sheep,’ a suffering and lost humanity.” “His death on the cross is the culmination of that turning of God against himself in which he gives himself in order to raise man up and save him…. By contemplating the pierced side of Christ, we can understand the starting point of this encyclical letter: ‘God is love.’ It is from there that our definition of love must begin. In this contemplation, the Christian discovers the path along which his life and love must move.”

This is not an individual but a communal path. We are in sacramental communion with the crucified Christ, for it is as St. Paul says: “Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread” (1 Corinthians 10). “Communion,” the pope writes, “draws me out of myself toward him and thus also toward unity with all Christians…. We can thus understand how agape also became a name for the Eucharist: There God’s own agape comes to us bodily in order to continue his work in us and through us…. Here the usual contraposition between worship and ethics simply collapses. ‘Worship’ itself, eucharistic communion, includes the reality both of being loved and of loving others in turn.”

Benedict then turns to the question of love of God and love of neighbor, asking whether we can love God without seeing him and whether love can be commanded. To the first question, scripture teaches that “closing our eyes to our neighbor also blinds us to God.” As to whether love can be commanded, there is in Christ, and for those who are in Christ, a “communion of will” between God and man. “God’s will is no longer for me an alien will, something imposed on me from without by the commandments, but it is now my own will, based on the realization that God is in fact more deeply present to me than I am to myself.”

And again: “No longer is it a question, then, of a ‘commandment’ imposed from without and calling for the impossible, but rather of a freely bestowed experience of love from within, a love which by its very nature must then be shared with others.” In his speeches and audiences since becoming pope, few themes have been stressed so insistently by Benedict as the truth that the will of God is not an alien will, that God’s will is not a heteronymous imposition that constricts the self but an invitation to the fulfillment of the self by living a life of love in response to the gift of love. Thus is eros purified and fulfilled.

II

The second section of the encyclical, “The Practice of Love by the Church as a Community of Love,” engages the similarities and differences between love and justice—but mainly the differences. Jesus “gave up his Spirit” on the cross, which anticipates the gift of the Spirit to the “ecclesial community” in serving as the Lord served. “The entire activity of the Church is an expression of a love that seeks the integral good of man.” This is the calling of every individual Christian and of the ecclesial community. “Love needs to be organized if it is to be an ordered service to the community.” Charity is constitutive of being the Church. “Within the community of believers there can never be room for a poverty that denies anyone what is needed for a dignified life.”

The choosing of the deacons in Acts has permanent importance. “With the formation of this group of seven, diaconia—the ministry of charity exercised in a communitarian and orderly way—became part of the fundamental structure of the Church…. The Church can no more neglect the service of charity than she can neglect the sacraments and the word.” Benedict notes that, when Julian the Apostate (d. 363) tried to abolish the Church and reestablish the pagan cults, the one thing he wanted his old-new religion to emulate was the Church’s ministry of charity. Thus, it is suggested, has the Church taught the world, including those who think of themselves as the enemies of the Church, the meaning of charity.

The nature of the Church is expressed at the deepest level by her threefold ministry of proclamation (kerygma), celebration of the sacraments (leitourgia), and works of charity (diakonia). “For the Church, charity is not a kind of welfare activity which could equally well be left to others but is part of her nature, an indispensable expression of her very being.” While the Church’s love is universal, she is also God’s family and has a particular responsibility to members of the family. Here the pope cites Galatians 6:10: “So then, as we have opportunity, let us do good to all, and especially to those who are of the household of faith.”

Since the nineteenth century, and especially in Marxist doctrine, it has been said that charity must give way to justice; indeed that charity, by taking the edge off the consequences of injustice, is the enemy of justice. “It must be admitted,” writes Benedict, “that the Church’s leadership was slow to realize that the issue of the just structuring of society needed to be approached in a new way.” He then points to the body of modern social doctrine from Leo XIII in the late nineteenth century to “my great predecessor John Paul II.” This social doctrine provided the alternative to the Marxist notion that revolution and the collectivizing of the means of the production would establish a just society in which charity is superfluous. Of the Marxist claim, he says, “This illusion has vanished.”

Justice is the proper business of the state. “Fundamental to Christianity is the distinction between what belongs to Caesar and what belongs to God.” The Church, as affirmed by the Second Vatican Council, supports “the autonomy of the temporal sphere.” Between the Church and the state, “the two spheres are distinct yet always interrelated.” Then this reflection on the meaning of politics:

Justice is both the aim and the intrinsic criterion of all politics. Politics is more than a mere mechanism for defining the rules of public life. Its origin and its goal are found in justice, which by its very nature has to do with ethics. The state must inevitably face the question of how justice can be achieved here and now. But this presupposes an even more radical question: What is justice? The problem is one of practical reason; but if reason is to be exercised properly it must undergo constant purification, since it can never be completely free of the danger of a certain ethical blindness caused by the dazzling effect of power and special interests.

At this point “politics and faith meet.” Politics is the realm of reason, and faith can help liberate reason from its blind spots and enable it to be more fully itself. “This is where Catholic social doctrine has its place: It has no intention of giving the Church power over the state. Even less is it an attempt to impose on those who do not share the faith ways of thinking and modes of conduct proper to faith. Its aim is simply to help purify reason and to contribute, here and now, to the acknowledgment and attainment of what is just.” The Church teaches “on the basis of reason and natural law … but it is not the Church’s responsibility to make this teaching prevail in political life.” The last point is reiterated in several ways. “As a political task,” building a just social and civil order “cannot be the Church’s immediate responsibility.” “The Church cannot and must not take upon herself the political battle to bring about the most just society possible.” “A just society must be the achievement of politics, not of the Church.”

Readily recognizable here are the themes of John Paul II and Ratzinger pressed in response to political theologies—particularly the liberation theology so prominent a few decades ago. “Love—caritas—will always prove necessary even in the most just society,” Benedict writes. “There is no ordering of the state so just that it will eliminate the need for the service of love.” “The state which would provide everything, absorbing everything into itself, would ultimately become a mere bureaucracy incapable of guaranteeing the very thing that the suffering person—every person—needs: namely, loving personal concern.” The claim that just social structures would make charity superfluous “masks a materialist conception of man: the mistaken notion that man can live ‘by bread alone’—a notion that demeans man and ultimately disregards all that is specifically human.”

“Ecclesial charity” is an opus proprium, a work integral to the very nature of the Church. In the work of charity, the Church may cooperate with the state and others, but her work must never lose its Christian distinctiveness grounded in the love of God in Christ. “She does not cooperate collaterally but acts as a subject with direct responsibility, doing what corresponds to her nature.” Implicit in this understanding is that the Church is never simply an agent of society; she is a distinct society, doing what, by the grace of God, she does naturally.

In the Church’s work of charity, professional competence and effectiveness in meeting needs is not enough. “Charity workers need a ‘formation of the heart’: They need to be led to that encounter with God in Christ which awakens their love and opens their spirits to others.” Further, “Christian charitable activity must be independent of parties and ideologies.” Especially must it be free from ideologies that deride charity as a stop-gap measure or even as the servant of an unjust status quo. Benedict’s language is strong: “What we have [in such ideologies] is really an inhuman philosophy. People of the present are sacrificed to the moloch of the future…. One does not make the world more human by refusing to act humanely here and now.”

Must the Church’s work of charity be directly related to evangelization, to what is today commonly called proselytizing? Benedict answers: “Those who practice charity in the Church’s name will never seek to impose the Church’s faith on others…. A Christian knows when it is time to speak of God and when it is better to say nothing and to let love alone speak.” Here he does not, but he might have, cited the maxim of St. Francis of Assisi that we should preach the gospel always, using words when necessary. Always, Benedict insists, Christian charity is rooted in and bears witness to the love of God in Christ.

The commitment to charity, if it is to be sustained and open-ended, must be free from delusions. “[We] are only instruments in the Lord’s hands; and this knowledge frees us from the presumption of thinking that we alone are responsible for building a better world. In all humility we will do what we can, and in all humility we will entrust the rest to the Lord.” If we would help others, we ourselves must be changed. “It is time to reaffirm the importance of prayer in the face of the activism and the growing secularism of many Christians engaged in charitable work.”

Confronted by perduring injustice, our prayer takes the form of crying out with Job, and is ultimately joined to the prayer of Jesus on the Cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Such prayer, says Benedict, is not an expression of despair but “is the deepest and most radical way of affirming our faith in God’s sovereign power.” As for the ideologists who claim to know the way to a perfectly just society and who “build a case against God in defense of man, on whom can they depend when human activity proves powerless?”

Caritas is the way, the only way, of the Church. Benedict points to the history of monasticism and the saints—Anthony, Francis, Ignatius, Vincent de Paul, Teresa of Calcutta—who are “the true bearers of light within history, for they are men and women of faith, hope, and love.” And, above all, he points to Mary, for whom “the Word of God becomes her word, and her word issues from the Word of God.” That Word and that word is always and forever the word of caritas discovered in the truth that “God is love, and he who abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him.”

III

Deus Caritas Est is not only a brief encyclical, as encyclicals go. It is also unusual in that there are few footnotes, thirty-six to be precise, and only two refer to earlier papal teaching. More substantively, one is struck by the determination to reclaim for Christian thought and life the human experience of eros, purified and fulfilled by agape. This should be grist for the mills of contemporary theologians.

I do not know what to make of the fact that the discussion of the fulfillment of the human person through being joined with a person of the opposite sex in marriage is not followed by a discussion of celibacy. In recent years, and notably in the teaching of John Paul the Great, there has been much attention paid to the nuptial character of priestly celibacy. The absence of that theme in a discussion where it might have been expected is not without interest. Perhaps the explanation is simply that not everything can be treated in one encyclical.

Particularly striking is what some may see as Benedict’s realistic, antiutopian, and even dour view of the possibilities of justice in a fallen world. Benedict is very much in the Augustinian tradition, and St. Augustine is repeatedly cited in Deus Caritas Est. He is also known to be a sympathetic student of the theology of the Augustinian-formed Martin Luther, and I expect some theologians will see elements of Luther’s concept of the “twofold kingdom of God” in this encyclical.

In the treatment of the relation between justice and love, in which “God turns against himself,” there is something of the “paradoxical” way in which God exercises his sovereignty. Justice is the “alien” or “left-hand” rule of God through temporal powers, while love is the “proper” or “right-hand” rule of God through the Church and the gospel she proclaims and lives. The parallels with Luther’s conceptualization are intriguing. At the same time, however, Luther was not entirely original, and a similar conceptualization could no doubt be developed from the teaching of Thomas Aquinas. But that is a subject for another time.

Arresting, too, is Benedict’s understanding of the collapse of the contraposition between worship and ethics. The emphasis on the ecclesial community, the Church, as a distinct society or, as he repeatedly says, as a “family” suggests that leitourgia, and especially the Eucharist, is, in fact, the enactment within history of the new politics for which the human heart yearns. We are rightly outraged by injustice and hungry for justice. In an anticipatory way, recognized by faith, the crucified and risen Christ satisfies that hunger in the celebration of agape that is the Eucharist. The Eucharist is in this way the anticipated new politics of the Kingdom in which justice and love will be again and forever one.

Here I am, admittedly, going beyond what the encyclical explicitly says—but not beyond what it suggests. One thing is manifestly clear: Far from being an anodyne document aimed at putting a friendly face on this pontificate, the encyclical is a radical call for the Church to be the Church in a world in which unsentimental candor continues to compel the cry, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” The answer to that cry is that, despite all and in all and through all, Deus caritas est.