Benedict XVI could have chosen, in his first papal encyclical, to engage with such modern dilemmas as bio-ethics. He has, instead, broadened out and thus transformed a consideration of the Church’s charitable mission — work that was in progress under Pope John Paul II — to write a lyrical and impassioned meditation on the multiple dimensions of love, erotic as well as divine, and on love’s powers to heal and to inspire. In style and in content, this encyclical is mystical, almost pointedly other-worldly; yet it is also, and explicitly, a text for our times.
In “a world where the name of God is sometimes associated with vengance or even a duty of hatred and violence”, it begins, the Pope’s purpose is “to call forth in the world renewed energy and commitment in the human response to God’s love”. But it is in his recognition of the claims of eros that this encyclical is boldest.
The Church must not, he says, “be detached from the vital relations fundamental to human existence”; and must move to address the “widely held perception” that the Church is hostile to the body, that its strictures on sexual love “turn to bitterness that most precious thing in life”, a “happiness which is itself a certain foretaste of the Divine”.
The papal response, socially conservative but refreshingly modern in its readiness to celebrate the joys of sexual love, is that “Man is truly himself when his body and soul are intimately united” and if he denies either, “both lose their dignity”. Thus, “self-seeking” sexual enjoyment is “hardly Man’s great ‘yes’ to the body”, rather its exploitation. Eros leads us towards the Divine only through “a love which becomes a real discovery of the other”, uniting body with spirit, and seeking to be definitive, in two ways: by attaching to one particular person, for life. Then, “Love embraces the whole of existence in each of its dimensions, including the dimension of time”.
Benedict XVI makes no claims to the charisma of his predecessor, but a message that could be paraphrased as “love is too good to waste: go for the real thing, not the caricature” has evident charismatic potential, not least among the young. It is further developed by the encyclical’s meditation on God as “a lover with all the passion of true love”, love of Whom can be “commanded because it has first been given” — and also in the second part of the encyclical which reviews Christianity’s charitable vocation.
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The Pope describes these charitable activities as “the practice of love”. This encyclical has no time either for political activism or for Marxist critiques of charity as a diversion from the issue of social justice. “One does not make the world more human by refusing to act humanely here and now”; and no State is so perfectly ordered as to eliminate loneliness, suffering and want. The State cannot, indeed should not, reach into every corner of life. Equally, the Church must never be “just another form of social assistance”. What it has to add is, yet again, the love “that can always illuminate a world grown dim”. It is a warm, even opti-mistic, yet ultimately an uncompromisingly orthodox theological message.