When Joseph Ratzinger became Pope Benedict XVI in 2005, he knew that the world he was asked to engage with was one of doubt, atheism, material acquisition, hate, violence, and war. Thus, he began his encyclical Deus Caritas Est with these words:
In a world where the name of God is sometimes associated with vengeance or even a duty of hatred and violence, this message is both timely and significant. For this reason, I wish in my first Encyclical to speak of the love which God lavishes upon us and which we in turn must share with others.
Love, not hate. Love, not possession. Love, not politics. Love, not war. Love, not doubt. Benedict began his pontificate in a world in which billions live for the moment. But as his encyclical teaches, God takes on human flesh so that He can teach humans overwhelmed with hate how to love. He teaches love through the example of His life. He loves even those who torture and kill him. He teaches love not just through words but with actions.
God’s blessings are ubiquitous, everywhere one looks, everywhere one goes. The glory of God is manifest in Nature: who can delude themselves into thinking that Nature, including human events, are products of contingency, of chance, of a natural process without the Transcendent Being behind them?
This series on the History of Love during the past several months has stretched from the ancient Greeks to the Hebrews, to Jesus and the disciple whom Jesus loved, to Paul and Augustine, to the Medieval mystics, to St. Francis of Assisi and his followers. We have learned of Benedict’s theory of ascending and descending love, of eros and agape, of Jesus’ healing through empathetic love, of John’s teaching that perfect love knows no fear, of Paul’s simple yet profound understanding that love is patient, of the visions of love of Julian of Norwich, and of the simple, self-sacrificing love of St. Francis and the Franciscans.
I am a college professor. Every year I teach students about Western Civilization and American Civilization. The history that I teach is not filled with love; it is filled with hatred, violence, oppression, barbarism, and war. How can the history of the 20th century, for example, World War I, World War II, Fascism, Communism, the Holocaust, the Cold War, Terrorism, etc., be squared with the history of Love? Conscientious humans face these same questions every day. How does love exist with hate, lust, consumption, bigotry, aggression, selfishness, and acquisitiveness? How can any teacher, whether secular or religious, inform their listeners, their readers, of a history of love when it contradicts the present reality of fear, violence, and death?
For many years I asked myself these questions. In my university experience when I was young I allowed the secularists to convince me that there is no real answer to the burning questions in my mind: What is love? Why is love trampled upon by hate? Why do the answers of the great theologians and the great philosophers seem so wonderful, and yet so unrealistic? For decades I was cast about in the boat of life, hugging the coast, afraid to venture away from the nearest lighthouse for fear that the waves of doubt and hate would cause my boat to founder and I would drown.
Then I discovered the Church.
What I discovered is succinctly stated by Pope Benedict in Deus Caritas Est:
The entire activity of the Church is an expression of a love that seeks the integral good of man: it seeks his evangelization through Word and Sacrament, an undertaking that is often heroic in the way it is acted out in history; and it seeks to promote man in the various arenas of life and human activity. Love is therefore the service that the Church carries out in order to attend constantly to man’s sufferings and his needs, including material needs.
Love. That is what the Church represents. I discovered it when I went to Mass. The feeling of Love overwhelmed me and helped to assuage my doubts to venture from the coast into the broad deep of God’s love. My perspective as a professor changed. I began to realize that how I approached history, focusing on the history of love (not hate), would teach students that there is hope in time, that there is something to hold onto in life. To show human compassion and charity is to show love. And when you show love, you show God—even if the student is just as doubtful and agnostic as I was when I was at university.
I discovered as well the treasure trove of love in the writings of the Catholic Church, in the great Catholic minds of the past, such as Augustine, Bonaventure, Francis, Teresa, Montaigne, Loyola, Caussade, Merton, Wojtyla, Ratzinger, and Bergoglio. Pope Benedict and Pope Francis have taught me much about love. Francis’ autobiography, published shortly before his death, is a document of love. Likewise, Benedict’s many writings on theologians and theology, on Christ and Paul, as well as his encyclicals constantly beat the drum of love. As he said in Deus Caritas Est:
The Church is one of those living forces: she is alive with the love enkindled by the Spirit of Christ. This love does not simply offer people material help, but refreshment and care for their souls, something which often is even more necessary than material support.
There is hope, then, even in the modern/postmodern world of weapons, atheism, hate, materialism, apathy, loneliness, and a too-heavy reliance upon technology. The hope is that which has always been present from the Creation, that God’s Creatures can sense and know if they drop the walls that keep them in ignorance. The hope is love. As long as Christianity and the Catholic Church continue to exist and thrive, feeding the world with the bread of life and the message of love, then we can know, we can be certain, that God’s Providence is with us to the end of time.
Editor’s Note: This article is the final part of a CE original series on the History of Love, pursuing the meaning of love and our understanding of it throughout time.
