A Commentary of Deus Caritas Est -- #2

by John W. Wright

It seems to me that it is very important to read Deus Caritas Est in light of the structure given to the reader. While the depth of the truth, goodness, and beauty of the language shines through the text in its parts, the depth and precision of its thought emerges when one sees the deeper structure of the text. The text shines actualizes the program of Henri de Lubac, who himself developed his thought, not as his own, but as explicating the very structure of the relationship between the natural and the supernatural in the Christian tradition. The first part of the encyclical clearly shows that Benedict, famed for his Augustinian background, upholds a Augustinian Thomism. If I was correct in my explication of the introduction as reading the encyclical as nonfoundationalist, then Benedict emerges here as what Tracey Rowland calls a “postmodern Augustinian Thomists.” Almost imperceptibly, Benedict renounces both an explicit theological liberalism and a Whig Thomism, the Catholic “neo-conservatives” who argue for a congruence between a theological confessional orthodoxy and the democratic liberal nation-state and late capitalist political theory and practice by a Thomism heavily influenced by Jacque Maritain.

While both Kung and Neuhaus have praised the encyclical, it seems to me that they miss the basic theological issue that structures the letter. To use the language of Henri de Lubac, the encyclical is really about the relationship between the supernatural and the natural in relationship to the human experience and divine revelation of love. Unlike Kung, for Benedict, the natural does not set the categories into which one must translate the supernatural; unlike Neuhaus, the competitive, Darwinian conflict of the modern liberal state and capitalism do not provide one realm upon which the supernatural then rests to ameliorate. As for Thomas, Benedict argues for a Christian conception of love where grace perfects nature. Human love does not exist completely distinct from divine love. But one cannot collapse human and divine love into each other in the terms of human love, with divine love merely a higher degree of intensity that human love.

As one reads the encyclical carefully, we discover that Benedict carefully teaches that we cannot know what love really is without knowing divine love. Human love evidences a desire for love, a desire itself given as a gift from God in creation, but a desire that is fulfilled in a completely unpredictable way in the revelation of divine love in Jesus Christ. The natural is taken up into the divine and made supernatural in a way that the natural, in and of itself, could never predict. Benedict wisely does not engage in polemics about different theological structures to understand love. Yet the text clearly differentiates his teaching in ways that arise from a Ressourcement understanding of Vatican II. Benedict therefore distinguishes Christian love from two prominent misunderstandings. Liberal thought understands the continuity between human love and divine love. But it makes the mistake of making the supernatural natural by translating divine love into categories of what has been given, rather than as a gift. Liberal thought places the divine into categories given by a transcendental, philosophical concept of the human. For instance, such a perspective would argue that we know what love is by psychological theories and then we can project these concepts upon the divine to understand God directly through human nature as defined by modern philosophical and political liberalism.
Catholic Whigs, on the other hand, make divine love a distinct realm from the competitive conflict that characterizes the natural. In Whig Catholicism, one engages in the violence of the nation-state or the market-drives of capitalism, and then responds to its negative vicissitudes with a charity outside and beyond the competition. It therefore embraces a “compassionate conservativism,” a doctrinaire Catholicism that morally demands full participation in a society determined by the categories of human nature as defined by modern philosophical and political liberalism. Benedict shows a third option, largely unexplored in contemporary society and thought, but one that lies at the center of the Christian tradition. It is “the Unity of Love in Creation and Salvation History” in which the love given in creation is overwhelmed and fulfilled by the divine love found in salvation history, that is, in God’s revelation in Jesus Christ.

Section 1 thus possesses a clear structure: Love in Creation (paragraphs 2-8); Love in Salvation History (paragraphs 9-15) that culminates in “Jesus Christ – the Incarnate Love of God;” and “Love of God and Neighbor” (paragraphs 16-18). This conclusion thus shows that these two loves, love in creation and love in salvation history, are unified as one: “Love of God and love of neighbour are thus inseparable, they form a single commandment. But both live from the love of God who has loved us first. No longer is it a question, then, of a ‘commandment’ imposed from without and calling for the impossible, but rather of a freely-bestowed experience of love from within, a love which by its very nature must then be shared with others. Love grows through love. Love is ‘divine’ because it comes from God and unites us to God; through this unifying process it makes us a ‘we’ which transcends our divisions and makes us one, until in the end God is ‘all in all’ (1 Cor 15:28).”

Human love is not annulled by divine love, but completed, purified, made whole and perfect by the gift of divine love. Human love comes to its true end, its telos, its completion, in divine love. The natural becomes supernatural, exceeding its wildest explications by the complete surprises and gratuity of the revelation of the Love that is God in Christ. The speculative, section 1 of the encyclical thus takes us back to the very beginning of the text: “God is love, and he who abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him.” Benedict sets the stage to work out the practical implications of this dogmatic teaching in the second section of the letter.