01-03-2007 - Traces, n. 3 Within Reality Love God’s eros for man is also totally agape. This is not only because it is bestowed in a completely gratuitous manner, without any previous merit, but also because it is love which forgives.... God’s passionate love for his people–for humanity–is at the same time a forgiving love.... God is the absolute and ultimate source of all being; but this universal principle of creation–the Logos, primordial reason–is at the same time a lover with all the passion of a true love.... The real novelty of the New Testament lies not so much in new ideas as in the figure of Christ Himself, who gives flesh and blood to those concepts–an unprecedented realism. In the Old Testament, the novelty of the Bible did not consist merely in abstract notions but in God’s unpredictable and in some sense unprecedented activity. This divine activity now takes on dramatic form when, in Jesus Christ, it is God Himself who goes in search of the “stray sheep,” a suffering and lost humanity. When Jesus speaks in His parables of the shepherd who goes after the lost sheep, of the woman who looks for the lost coin, of the father who goes to meet and embrace his prodigal son, these are no mere words: they constitute an explanation of His very being and activity. His death on the Cross is the culmination of that turning of God against Himself in which He gives Himself in order to raise man up and save him. This is love in its most radical form. By contemplating the pierced side of Christ (cf. Jn 19:37), we can understand the starting point of this Encyclical Letter: “God is love” (1Jn 4:8). It is there that this truth can be contemplated. It is from there that our definition of love must begin. In this contemplation the Christian discovers the path along which his life and love must move. (Deus Caritas Est, 10-12) Giovanni Reale (Professor of History of Ancient Philosophy at the Philosophy Department of the Università Vita-Salute San Raffaele of Milan) The most acute observations on eros, are the ones expressed by Plato in the dialogues Symposium and Phaedrus. Eros is a mediating force that helps man to elevate himself from the sensible to reach the intelligible. This force is generated by the “need” to search for and possess the beautiful (and the good) that man lacks, and for which, therefore, he feels a strong desire. Eros can’t be a god, because a god doesn’t lack anything and, therefore, doesn’t feel the need or the desire for what he has always possessed and will possess forever. Eros is a great demon, who never fully owns that which he searches for; because of this, he is never satisfied, and always strives to reach higher levels. Christian love as agape is antithetical to the ancient Hellenistic conception of love as eros, and has been interpreted this way by most. In fact, agape does not coincide with “acquiring–with the attempt to reach and possess a good–but with “giving,” While eros is a force ascending from below, agape is a force descending from above. This implies an uprooting of the conception of God, that for the Christian coincides with love itself, intended as “absolute donation.” God loves man first, giving His Son to him, to redeem him. Therefore, agape is not an “acquiring” force, but a “giving” one; it is not an “achievement” of man, but it is a “grace” bestowed by God to man. Furthermore, eros is “desire,” while agape is “sacrifice.” The bigger the object of love, the bigger eros is, while agape is in an inversely proportional relationship with the object of love. The smaller the man, the bigger God’s love for him is–the suffering, the sick, the weak, the oppressed, and the rejected are the ones that are loved the most. Some thought eros and agape so irreconcilable that they scolded Augustine for his insistence on that “desire” of man for God, on that particular feeling of man that doesn’t find peace until it rests in Him. This would be an incorrect resumption of the platonic concept of eros as orexis, and therefore a deceptive compromise. Actually, Augustine’s affirmations do not at all imply a compromise between the two interpretations of love: the desire for God is a gift of God Himself. Not only does Benedict XVI continue on this Augustinian line of thought, but he builds a new hermeneutical paradigm of love. Indeed, in addition to the paradigm of love as “acquiring eros,” and the paradigm of “love as donation”–intended in a restrictive meaning and excluding each other (as many think)–a third hermeneutical paradigm of love, intended as agape inclusive of eros, imposes itself. This third paradigm implies some of the essential characteristics of the Hellenistic eros (for example, “desire,” which we examined above) to be amplified, transfigured, and valued within the dimension of agape, from the point of view of the conception of God as “love as donation” par excellence. Love is indeed one reality that manifests itself in two forms, that not only do not exclude each other, but that imply each other. God Himself loves man not only in the form of agape, but also in the form of eros. I was particularly struck by the biblical image that Benedict XVI uses to illustrate the mediation of the two paradigms. He writes: “Yet eros and agape–ascending love and descending love–can never be completely separated. The more the two, in their different aspects, find a proper unity in the one reality of love, the more the true nature of love in general is realized.” And he specifies: “In the account of Jacob’s ladder, the Fathers of the Church saw this inseparable connection between ascending and descending love, between eros which seeks God and agape which passes on the gift received.”