To submit news, send e-mail to the contact team. To submit your own photos, photopost newliturgicalmovement. In his encyclicals Deus caritas est and Caritas in veritate , Pope Benedict XVI discusses the relationship between two different aspects of love, which he refers to using the Greek terms agape and eros. Prior to reading these encyclicals, I had always thought of agape as the higher love in which the person makes a gift of himself to the other. A loving or covenantal relationship, therefore, is one of mutual self-gift.
Eros, on the other hand, is a lower, self-serving desire for the other. In the Christian life, I thought, we are offered the possibility through grace of raising up our natural tendency to eros into one by which we are capable of self-gift - agape - in a new way. Benedict offers us something different. He describes how Christianity does not eradicate eros at all. Rather, it raises it up into a desire for the other which is consummated in an ordered acceptance of the gift of the other.
He makes the point that a gift cannot be given if it is not received by the one to whom it is given. Thus, in the loving interaction, both agape and eros are happening simultaneously in a dynamic process. Each is giving themselves to the other, while accepting the gift of the other in an ordered way. Furthermore, this being the case, the reception of the gift of love is our first act of love, for we cannot love others or love God without first accepting love from God.
This is not passive, it occurs to me, but an action, an assent of the will; it is the spirit reaching out, so to speak, and grasping that hand of God that is offered to us every moment of the day. Suddenly eros seems vitally important. By this we participate in the transfigured Christ and become capable of taking the light of Christ out into the world.
If I were the devil, therefore, I would make it a priority to subvert the capacity for an ordered eros in mankind. The second is one that is perhaps as powerful, acedia. As I understand it, acedia is a sloth or inertia against doing what is right, that arises through a lack of faith or trust in God.
