Odd, perhaps, that
at the very start of his pontificate, Pope Benedict (in his new
encyclical "Deus Caritas Est") would choose to take
on Cole Porter's old question. Or maybe not.
Scroll through the
newspaper. Oh, another dead child in New York City, killed by
her mother's boyfriend. A middle-aged mother, hearing her husband
is about to divorce her, fails at suicide but succeeds in suffocating
her three young children. America's 34th richest man serves divorce
papers unexpectedly on his (fourth) wife, apparently to avoid
an imminent hike in the prenupped price of divorce. A 41-year-old
child protective services worker is arrested for raping his two
adolescent daughters "at least 100 times," according
to the New York Post. He remorsefully tells police "he couldn't
help it. He would fight the urges for a while and it just became
a thing."
And that's just in
the last few days. Stories of disturbed desire and failures of
love -- some criminal, others merely depressing -- are the stories
of too many of our lives. The rapist's desires, for example, are
unusually disgusting, but his internal logic is not unusual: "I
couldn't help it" is pretty much the way every husband or
wife who has ever confessed to adultery has explained it to me.
Sometimes it feels like the alternative to eros is death.
And then there's the
experience of being on the receiving end: "I saw you there,
one wonderful day. You took my heart and threw it away. That's
why I ask the Lord in heaven above, what is this thing called
love?" Sing it, Cole.
I knew Pope Benedict
was a brilliant intellect, a German academic theologian of some
note. But nobody told me the man has the soul of a poet. This
pope writes of our longing for the "apparently irresistible
promise of happiness" glimpsed in the love "between
man and woman which is neither planned nor willed, but somehow
imposes itself upon human beings."
"All other kinds
of love," Pope Benedict acknowledges, "immediately seem
to fade in comparison."
How can we trust ourselves
to love? How can love ever be commanded (as Jesus commands us)
or even promised (as we all do in marriage)?
The classic Catholic
answer is to say that love is an act of the will. We can choose
to act in loving, faithful and benevolent ways even if we do not
particularly feel like it. In this sense, love can be both commanded
and promised.
But that is not enough
for this pope, because it is not enough for the human heart. Nobody
wants to be loved as an act of the will. Yet the promise of eros
is notoriously unreliable. One currently popular solution is to
downgrade our expectations, to pretend that our sexual desire
is merely bodily appetites, "enjoyable and harmless."
"An intoxicated and undisciplined eros" is not ecstasy;
it is instead "a fall, a degradation of man. Evidently, eros
needs to be disciplined and purified." Evidently.
Yet selfless love
is not possible for human beings. "He cannot always give,
he must also receive. Anyone who wishes to give love must also
receive love as a gift."
Pope Benedict is a
poet because he can name the deepest longing of our soul. He's
a prophet because he writes like a man who knows the answer: "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."
We can love because
we are first loved. Love is the cause of our being.
Knowing that, the
pope tells us (convincingly, like a man who knows) we can still
believe in hope, faith and charity.
But the greatest of
these is love.
Copyright
2006 Maggie Gallagher
