Eros and Agape
by Fr. Roger J. Landry - February 10, 2006
In his first encyclical, Pope Benedict XVI takes us to the "heart of the Christian faith" and presents us with a "summary of the Christian life." He described who God is, who we are, and who we're called to become: God is love, we're made in the image and likeness of that love, and our vocation is to love others as God has loved us.
Pope Benedict notes that in order for us to understand God, ourselves and morality, we first have to grasp accurately what real love is. That's a problem, he says, because love is one of the most used and misused words in our lexicon. The Greeks had four words for love: storge, the deep affection we have for family members, pets, and familiar things; philia, the deep bond between friends based on a common interest; eros, the passionate desire for self-completion, most normally shown in the desire for union with a person of the opposite sex; and agape, the unselfish willingness to sacrifice oneself for the sake of another. Benedict says that love is a single reality with these diverse dimensions that emerge at different times. But he also states if we misunderstand one of these expressions, it can distort our notion of love, God and ourselves as a whole.
That distortion, he says, has happened because of a misunderstanding of what most consider the "epitome" of love, eros. God gave us the capacity for erotic love to draw us out of ourselves into communion with others, but sometimes this innate drive can turn "warped and destructive," and lead us to use others selfishly for our own pleasure and satisfaction. This "counterfeit" form of erotic love strips it of its dignity and dehumanizes it, as it strips loved ones of their dignity and dehumanizes them. For eros to lead us to true happiness, it first needs to be healed through discipline and purification by agape. This path becomes an "ongoing exodus out of the closed inward-looking self towards its liberation through self-giving, and thus towards authentic self-discovery and indeed the discovery of God."
The Moses leading us on that exodus is Christ, who Benedict says enfleshes the true bond between passionate and selfless love. The first icon of that bond between eros and agape is Christ's passion, in which the Lord shows the depth of his desire for union with those he loves by unselfishly "turning against himself" and laying down his life to save their lives. The second image is the Eucharist, which Christ "earnestly desired" to eat with his disciples and left us as the means by which we can enter into his act of self-oblation. The Eucharist is the consummation of the long-prophesied marriage between God and his people, when Christ's bride takes within herself the flesh and blood of the divine bridegroom and they become one flesh. It is in the Eucharist that man and woman receive agape and eros in their most divine and divinizing way. It is in the Eucharist that they are strengthened and moved to share that passionate, selfless love toward others, where they learn how to say, "this is my body… given for you" and to love others as Christ has loved them. It is in the Eucharist that the words "God is love and he who abides in love abides in God and God in him" become flesh.
Rather than stifling eros, Christ and the way of love he indicates ennobles it and restores it to its true grandeur.
The relevance of Pope Benedict's theological and philosophical reflections on the importance of appropriately understanding eros in order to grasp accurately who God is, who we are, and how we're called to live is seen readily in two articles in this issue.
On the front page, there is a story on the Massachusetts Comprehensive Health Curriculum Framework. If this framework becomes mandatory, it would mean that children in public schools would be forced to learn about the meaning of sex and love within a context in which eros is entirely distorted. The curriculum mandates that kids from pre-k to fifth grade learn not just the alphabet, but among other things, how to "define sexual orientation using the correct terminology (such as heterosexual, gay and lesbian)." In order to receive a high school diploma, older students would need to pass this core program, which is heavily endorsed and promoted by Planned Parenthood. The harmful consequences would be enormous, because if young people learn a "destructive form" of eros, they will have far greater difficulty in coming to discover who God is and who they are.
Likewise, on page six Dale O'Leary begins a series examining the scientific evidence about homosexual activity, which is based on a false form of eros and therefore necessarily brings with it harmful consequences. This evidence is something to which the mainstream media gives scant attention. Catholics in our Commonwealth, called by Christ to respond in a truly loving way to those with same-sex attractions, will discover in this series the scientific truths that will enable them to become sincerely compassionate.
Father Roger J. Landry is pastor of St. Anthony of Padua in New Bedford, MA and Executive Editor of The Anchor, the weekly newspaper of the Diocese of Fall River.
