VATICAN - “God himself comes to fill our eros with his agape” : A reflection on Pope Benedict XVI’s first Encyclical, Mgr Massimo Camisasca founder and superior general of the Priestly Fraternity of the Missionaries of St Charles Borromeo

Wednesday, 25 January 2006

Vatican City (Fides Service) - What is surprising is not that the first Encyclical written by Pope Benedict XVI is about charity and love. Love is the name of God as St John writes in his letter and as the encyclical says in the first three words. What is surprising is the return to a debate, ancient and at the same time most modern: the debate on the relation between love and desire. «Desire» is a word dear to Joseph Ratzinger and it reveals the moments to which he turns his attention: the Fathers, and in particular, Augustine, and the men and women of today.
Augustine made desire one of the pillars of his philosophy and theology. And it could not be otherwise. He, as few other men, experienced the vibration of the chords of every human desire and lived the whole of his search for truth and goodness as an anguished and restless pilgrimage towards a place, another “you” in whom to find the answer. Desire in fact or, eros, is love since it experiences a longing for the loved one: it is love which desires to possess what it lacks, which sets out on a journey, which accepts the struggle.
We men and women of today are profoundly aware of the experience of desire, we are deeply shaken by it, we fear it. On the one hand we wish to put a limit on our desires, to censor them, but on the other we are slaves of them. So here is what the Pope proposes: not the elimination of eros, but rather its conversion, its transcription in the circular movement of eros and agape. On the one hand we experience a deep impulse to become whole in someone or something which we do not yet possess; on the other we feel the impossibility of becoming complete, the inadequacy of any response. Some are even ready to die to fuse themselves in someone or something else. They may strive to do this through wild and selfish use of sexuality, drugs, other escapes from life. There exits another way for eros the Pope says: we can make it one with agape, by recognising that our desire which ascends towards the Other is filled with a love which descends, God’s love for us who descends - as St Paul says - does not regard equality with God something to be grasped, but assumes our human nature and all the consequences of sin, although not a sinner himself. God himself comes to fill our eros with his agape, teaching us that the true fulfilment of desire is love which is gratuitous, which gives itself to the point of dying, which loves the other not to possess but to respect and raise to the proper dignity. (Agenzia Fides 25/1/2006)


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