Deus Caritas Est (DCE): 7-11

We have elected to make a series of sermons on the Holy Father’s first encyclical, Deus Caritas Est, God is Love. Today’s is our second reflection on this document.

After having made a distinction between two fundamental senses of love, the one sensual, and the other spiritual, the Pope then considers how they are actually related and even unified. The ‘possessive’ kind of love that we identified by the Greek word eros, can develop into a more selfless kind of love when one becomes concerned with the welfare of the person who is loved. In this way, what may have begun less admirably, becomes ennobled. As for the other ‘Christian kind’ of love: while we readily may recognize its superiority, we cannot say that a human being can live only on it without any human expression of love as well. No one is so totally giving in love that he does not also want to receive love. Even the most spiritual person can easily recognize this, at least in the sense that he wants to be loved by God. We express this in the common saying that ‘no one can give what he doesn’t have.’ In this context this means that only someone who has been loved can become a loving person. (By the way: in the case where someone was deprived of love in his childhood, this does not necessarily mean that he will become a hateful and bitter adult; good experiences of love from others, and especially the discovery that one is loved immensely by God, can compensate for the deficiencies of one’s childhood.)

Does the bible help us to gain a better understanding of love? The Pope obviously believes that it does and he sets out to show this by pointing out how the bible portrays both the image of God and the image of man.

Now, having never been pagans, we perhaps don’t readily see what a great difference our Christian faith makes in our outlook on things, especially on the question who is God. We are well accustomed to think of God not as some impersonal creative force nor as a plurality of gods, but, rightly, as the Creator of heaven and earth who loves the things He has made. This ‘kindliness’ of God towards His creation, is especially evident when He created man as the high point of his visible creation. There is something especially endearing about God in His relation to the human race, and, in particular in His special love for the people of the Old Testament. If you’ve never noticed, you should reflect that, according to the writings of the prophets, God loved Israel like a husband loving his wife. It’s bold erotic language that the bible employs here to make a point. If the love of God for his people is a kind of marriage, then idolatry (the worship of other gods) must be the equivalent of infidelity, prostitution and adultery. It’s significant that in pagan religions there is not only the worship of false gods, but the inevitable consequence of this: rampant immorality. Pure religion and pure human conduct go together, just as false religion and impurity go together. Thus, just as we are witnessing in our time the falling off of Christianity and the adoption of paganism, witchcraft, and the broad world of the occult, so there is a huge surge in impurity, deviancy, pornography and related evils. The connection between religion and conduct is always consistent.

You can see from this relation of religion and morals that the bible, besides depicting the true image of God, also reveals the true image of man. For example, when we know that we were created by God because He loved us and that we can be eternally happy by loving Him in return, then we have found life’s most basic orientation and our purpose in being. In other words, if we didn’t know that we were made in order to love God (which of course includes obedience to His laws), then we’d be intellectually confused and psychologically disoriented; we’d also make a huge number of practical errors in our decisions and in our conduct. Faith then helps put our life on course, giving meaning and direction to our lives.

Biblical love also shows us something that we would probably overlook without the bible: namely, that love has to include forgiveness. When God, the so-called husband, forgave Israel, His so-called wife, after her many sins, God was showing us that we too have to be forgiving. We could say that sin is the violation of love. If there were no forgiveness, sin would have the last word and we would all be doomed. We have only to think about the crucifix for a moment to remember that forgiveness and love go together. Hence the expression, ‘to err is human, to forgive is divine.’

The bible’s image of man is found in the very first pages of the Old Testament. When God created Adam he was alone and none of the many creatures God made was a suitable helper for him until God created the woman. The Pope comments that man by himself was incomplete and thus made to seek in another person that part which would make him whole. Here is the idea that communion with the opposite sex in marriage is the human counterpart to humanity’s marriage to God. We are incomplete without our divine Spouse, God; we are meant to be in union with Him. Here again we see a relation between a right sense of sensual human love and that spiritual religious kind of love. The bible often speaks of both because they are–rightly considered–related to one another.

We have yet to say anything about the coming of Jesus in this exposé because, up to this point, the Pope has been laying the foundation for it. We will yet have to see the crucial difference Christ makes for our understanding of love and the difference His incarnation has meant in the achievement of the very summit and perfection of love: more to speak of in subsequent sermons.