First we had a Polish pope who told the people of Eastern Europe “Be Not Afraid.” Now we have a German pope, and the first words out of his mouth, in a papal encyclical, is “Deus Caritas Est” or God is Love.
And it is telling that the first thing he does, as he renews the Christian message for a new generation, is deal with the challenge of Nietzsche, the German philosopher who accused Christianity of having “poisoned eros” and the Church of turning “to bitterness the most precious thing in life.”
Benedict accepts the challenge and writes unflinchingly about the two forms of love, eros and agape. He admits that the distinction between the two forms of love, ascending love and descending love, have been “radicalized to the point of establishing a clear antithesis between them.”
But he protests that the Church Fathers saw a “connection between ascending and descending love, between eros which seeks God and agape which passes on the gift received.”
The point of the Christian reciprocity where the love of God is reciprocated by God’s love for mankind is symbolized, for the pope, in the purification of eros by agape.
Love of God and love of neighbour are thus inseparable, they form a single commandment. But both live from the love of God who has loved us first. 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. Love grows through love. Love is “divine” because it comes from God and unites us to God.
We shall hear more from this German pope, and it may be that just as the rude courage of John Paul II transformed the world, the German scholarship of Benedict XVI will work a complementary if no less mysterious miracle.
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