When in January 2006 came the first encyclical of Pope Benedict XVI - Deus Caritas est - the Catholic philosopher Giovanni Reale said, "The new philosophy of the encyclical is that rewrote a new paradigm that includes eros and agape. You may not give, if we do not receive before. You can not love if you are not loved. So we have to give love to others, but receiving it first from God." In this brief revival of the original nucleus of the encyclical, I tried /groped three steps: first to explore what was there before the encyclical; then what it is breathed around both ad extra and ad intra of the Church; and try to get into it. Finally I will try relinquishing a relapse in the vocation and mission of consecrated life.

The vocabulary of love

   In the  Christian Catholic morality, love is at the center, for the simple fact that it is the center of Christian faith: identifies God ("God is love") and, consequently, the human person, created in the image of God. This focus on the centrality of love in the history of moral theology there has been entered since Vatican II. Before the Council, Catholic morality was set according to the scheme of the commandments, returning the category love (charity) to asceticism and mysticism. The Vatican II has not produced any document, explicitly and directly dedicated to moral theology. However, there are passages where the Council, speaking of this branch of theology,  recommended to unite all Catholic morality based on the category of love-agape (cf. OT 16).

   But what is meant by love, according to Scripture? If you look at the entry in the Dizionario dei concetti biblici del Nuovo Testamento /Dictionary of the biblical concepts of the New Testament (EDB 1976), states that the greek has three words for love. The first and philia, and it shows the love of friendship. The second is eros, to say, in its “low” meaning, passionate love, longing for, sensitive attraction, sensual pleasure, while in its “high” meaning, expresses the desire of beauty, the attractiveness of the divine. The third is agape, favorite word from greek Bible, particularly in the New Testament, to express benevolent and freely love of God, and, consequently, fraternal charity.

   In the encyclical Deus Caritas est (hereinafter, DCe), the Pope noted that the Old Testament in greek language uses the word eros only twice, while the New Testament does not use it. Of the three Greek words for love, New Testament writers prefer agape, which in greek language was rather infrequently (n. 3). The fact that the New Testament carefully avoided the term eros, using instead only and ever agape, has led some to support the thesis of the absolute incompatibility, in the Christian conception, between eros and agape.

Agape against Eros

   Bearer of this position was Anders Nygren, Swedish Lutheran theologian, in his book entitled Eros and Agape, published in the original in 1930, and arrived in Italy in 1971. In it the author contrasted so unyielding love-eros and love-agape. The first is centripetal, concerned and possessive, and indicates the human love for God; the second is centrifugal, completely pure and free and shows God's love for man. The New Testament did - according to this author - a deliberate choice, preferring, to express love, the term agape and systematically refusing the term eros. St. Paul would be the author that more faithfully made this radical antithesis, but as soon as Christianity came into contact with the greek world, would immediately contrived attempts at synthesis.

   Origen already has a re-evaluation of eros, to the Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, who will end up writing: "God is eros," replacing this term to that of agape in the famous phrase of St. John (1 Jn 4:16). In this line,  Saint Augustine places: "You have made us, Lord, for yourself, and our heart is restless until it has calmed down in you" (Conf. 1.1); St. Bernard, when  defines the highest degree of love of God as a "loving God for Himself" and a "loving yourself for God," St. Bonaventure, with its upward Route of the soul to God; St. Thomas, which defines God's love poured out in the heart the baptized as "the love with which God loves us and that makes that we love Him."

   But before Luther and then Karl Barth have instead supported an insanable contrast between eros and agape. "Where enters Christian love - writing the evangelical theologian of Basel - begins immediately the conflict with the other love and this conflict has no more end." Nygren is placed in this path, because according to him the Catholic vision - that on this point coincides with the Orthodox one - destroys the absolute gratuity of God's love. The counter-check you have is by the experience and reflection of the mystics: according to the Evangelical theologian, human love for God, with its very strong drive of eros, is nothing more than a sublimated sensual love, an attempt to establish a relationship with God of presumptuous reciprocity in love.

Aut Eros aut Agape?
 
   Christianity, according to Friedriech Nietzsche, poisoned the eros, which, while not succumbing, would gradually degenerated into vice. Says the Pope, "So the German philosopher was expressing a widely-held perception: the Church with her commandments and prohibitions, does’t turn to bitterness the most precious thing in life? Does not she put road sign and ban just where the joy, promoted by the Creator for us, offers us a happiness that gives us a foretaste of the Divine?" (DCe 3).

   Freud went all the way in this line, reducing the love to eros and eros in libido, in instinctive sexual drive. It is the tip of the secularization of love: shutting out God from love and the love from eros, up to coincide Eros and Thanatos, love and death, as shown, for example, from The Flowers of Evil by Beaudelaire, or Rimbaud's A Season in Hell, or as it is described in pitiless novel of  Mauriac as a Man Loves a Woman.

   A quick reference to the first of these three French writers. At the voluptuousness and the pleasures of the flesh, even when they were searched with mad greed, Charles Beaudelaire (1821-1887) has always looked like a surrender to the decay and death. He said that he was "intoxicated only by the pleasant, in a continuous excitement," but behind the thrill of flesh into a frenzy he has always seen the sadness, decay, decomposition, rot. At the end of his poem, entitled symptomatic Une charogne, the French poet turns to the woman he loved and, through her, to the feminine beauty: all will be reduced to a dunghill on which the flies buzzing and a swarm of black larvae. Here is the dismal efflorescence of corruption and vice. The love, the most precious thing in life - because it comes from life and should only generate life - now instead ends to lead inevitably to death.

   But we must honestly admit that this secular culture that expels the love from eros, that is  every reference to God and grace, is the backlash of certain theology that, by contrast, had ousted eros from agape. "The agape without eros appears to us as a "cold love”, to love "with the top of his head”, more for imposition of the will that for intimate impulse of the heart;  diving into a preconceived mold, instead of creating just own and unrepeatable, as every human being is unique before God. If human love is a body without a soul, religious love so practiced is soul without a body" (R. Cantalamessa). If the component linked to emotion and the heart is systematically deleted or frozen, the result will be twofold: either you go into automatic in the experience of love, for ‘to have to’ or pure voluntarism (but what love would a love "automatic"?), or you go in search of compensation more or less legal. It is perhaps, this, the case of some bad stories of consecrated persons, in which there is the sad syndrome of "Nun of Monza"?

Eros and Agape

   The encyclical Deus Caritas est offers a theology and an anthropology in which love appears as the first theological principle and, therefore, as an ethical principle: the truth that God is love founds and organizes the entire Christian morality, both of experience’s level that theoretical reflection. Therefore love is not a commandment, even more important than others, but the commandment, of which the others are not that determination and concrete realization. But even before that love is an event: it is the event of the Incarnation of the Son of God who is love made flesh, comes to live among us, and in the end gives his blood for our sake; then is raised by the Father to be alive and to intercede for us. Love is the specific Christian: it connotes being and the Christian way of life in the Church and in the world.

   But the "novelty" of the encyclical is to reaffirm the traditional Catholic synthesis by expressing it in a modern language, "Eros and agape - ascending love and descending love - can never be completely separated from each other [...]. Even if eros is at first mainly covetous and ascending, - a fascination for the great promise of happiness - in drawing near to other, it is less and less concerned with itself, increasingly seeks the happiness of the other, is concerned more most beloved, will bestow itself and will want to "be there for" the other. So the moment of agape fit into it, otherwise eros is impoverished and even loses its own nature. On the other hand, man can not exclusively live by oblative, descending. He can not always give, he must also receive. Who wishes to give love must also receive the gift of [...]. 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 intervening in his search for love in order to purify it and to reveal new dimensions" (DCe 7 - 8). It is in God that eros and agape are fully merged into a total and harmonic synthesis: "He loves - says the encyclical - and his love can be qualified as eros, yet it is also totally agape" (No. 9).

   So, no irreducible opposition between eros and agape, or total separation, but synthesis: a synthesis integrated and inclusive. For without the agape, eros is cloudy; without eros, love is lukewarm. Eros is the flame, agape is the oxygen. Grace - the gratuitous  and passionate love og God- gives to agape the intensity burning of eros, and to eros the tender gratuity of agape. In God this summary is perfect and blessed, in us is and remains unfinished and perfectible: always to invoke and receive, never to be neglected and disperse.

In the consecrated life

   What impact has this message on the consecrated life? And what has the consecrated life to say about it? The consecrated life has to say the highest word in history, the world's strongest, the sweetest of life: Jesus Christ. In Jesus God's love for man and the human love for God intertwine. In Christ, God has loved us with a human heart: this is typical and specific to Christianity than Judaism, Islam, the Buddhism and all religions. In Deus Caritas est it speaks explicitly only in the dedication of consecrated life, as the encyclical is addressed as "consecrated persons" and then we will get back implicitly to n. 40, where the Pope lists a long 'litany' of saints - almost all monks and religious brothers and nuns – that they did shine the agape as love of neighbor. This charity, of course, is the first and most direct impact of love to God. But the encyclical committed consecrated life to revive its specific message: exclusive love - but because this is not "exclusionary"! – to Jesus. Before the brother you see, there is the love of and for the Brother, you see and touch: the God made flesh, Jesus Christ! The beauty and the fullness of religious life depend on the purity and intensity of love for Christ. "Absolutely nothing to put before the love of Christ," said the father of Latin monasticism, St. Benedict (and before him said St. Cyprian).

   Here now we should mention the endless songbook of in love with Jesus, what are the saints religious and the great  mystics: from Francis of Assisi and Ignatius of Loyola, the three "Terese" - d'Avila, Lisieux, Calcutta – to Charles de Foucauld and many, many more. That this strong and sweet Song of Songs of the Bride with her Bridegroom never be extinguished under the sky!

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