Powerful article that Amy Welborn links to at Crisis magazine:
http://www.crisismagazine.com/feature2.htm
This is an exciting time to be Catholic. With Deus Caritas Est Benedict is able to engage modernity, diagonose its ailment and prescribe a cure. Not bad for a first encyclical.
Excerpt
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]Perhaps, then, Benedict begins with Nietzsche as a prophecy. “I am a disciple of the philosopher Dionysus,” declared Nietzsche in Ecce Homo, “I should prefer to be even a satyr to being a saint.” That is, he would prefer to be less than human than to submit to the reality of a spiritual realm, for that would entail the submission of his will to God. [/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]“Ecce Homo,” declares Benedict, bringing Nietzsche onto the encyclical’s stage. “Behold the Man. Behold what you are becoming. Behold the West lapsing into erotic Dionysian madness.” And—pity the pope; feel his cross—he must deliver this message in the midst of the West’s bedlam culture, preaching sainthood to a society of satyrs.[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]Satyr or saint? The complete extremity of opposition, and hence the starkness of the choice, might give us some sympathy with Nietzsche. With eros, there is no happy and comfy medium, no fence-sitting. It is either-or, not both-and. Benedict makes this painfully clear in his antidote to poisoned eros. “By contemplating the pierced side of Christ,” the pope maintains, “we can understand the starting-point of this encyclical letter: ‘God is love.’”[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]Not exactly good news for the eros intoxicated. But what does it mean?[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]It means, oddly enough, that Nietzsche was, in a sense, right to fear God, to fear agape. Against many of his contemporaries, who had embraced a rather tepid Christianity where “God Is Love” meant “God Is Nice,” Nietzsche smelled death in the gospel. More properly, he recognized that Christianity demanded the crucifixion of eros, but it only promised its resurrection. That is the reason why Benedict repeatedly intones that the dehumanizing of eros can only be cured by discipline, purification, renunciation, and, finally, sacrifice. [/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]Sacrifice. Crucifixion. Whoever seeks to gain eros will lose it, but whoever loses eros will preserve it. “Whoever seeks to gain his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life will preserve it” (Lk 17:33).[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]In these words, Jesus portrays his own path, which leads through the Cross to the Resurrection, the path of the grain of wheat that falls to the ground and dies, and in this way bears much fruit. Starting from the depths of his own sacrifice and of the love that reaches fulfillment therein, he also portrays in these words the essence of love and indeed of human life itself.[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]We can have some human sympathy with Nietzsche’s attempt to make a garden out of Gethsemane, to build a castle in the dark night of the soul. Anything, rather than the cross. To trust eros, life itself, to a God one cannot see or feel; to fall into death, hoping for a miracle of life—a more than human trial for an all-too-human soul. Here, remarks Benedict, with the greatest possible understatement, we are on “the threshold of biblical faith.”[/FONT][FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]
[/FONT]
http://www.crisismagazine.com/feature2.htm
This is an exciting time to be Catholic. With Deus Caritas Est Benedict is able to engage modernity, diagonose its ailment and prescribe a cure. Not bad for a first encyclical.
Excerpt
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]Perhaps, then, Benedict begins with Nietzsche as a prophecy. “I am a disciple of the philosopher Dionysus,” declared Nietzsche in Ecce Homo, “I should prefer to be even a satyr to being a saint.” That is, he would prefer to be less than human than to submit to the reality of a spiritual realm, for that would entail the submission of his will to God. [/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]“Ecce Homo,” declares Benedict, bringing Nietzsche onto the encyclical’s stage. “Behold the Man. Behold what you are becoming. Behold the West lapsing into erotic Dionysian madness.” And—pity the pope; feel his cross—he must deliver this message in the midst of the West’s bedlam culture, preaching sainthood to a society of satyrs.[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]Satyr or saint? The complete extremity of opposition, and hence the starkness of the choice, might give us some sympathy with Nietzsche. With eros, there is no happy and comfy medium, no fence-sitting. It is either-or, not both-and. Benedict makes this painfully clear in his antidote to poisoned eros. “By contemplating the pierced side of Christ,” the pope maintains, “we can understand the starting-point of this encyclical letter: ‘God is love.’”[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]Not exactly good news for the eros intoxicated. But what does it mean?[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]It means, oddly enough, that Nietzsche was, in a sense, right to fear God, to fear agape. Against many of his contemporaries, who had embraced a rather tepid Christianity where “God Is Love” meant “God Is Nice,” Nietzsche smelled death in the gospel. More properly, he recognized that Christianity demanded the crucifixion of eros, but it only promised its resurrection. That is the reason why Benedict repeatedly intones that the dehumanizing of eros can only be cured by discipline, purification, renunciation, and, finally, sacrifice. [/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]Sacrifice. Crucifixion. Whoever seeks to gain eros will lose it, but whoever loses eros will preserve it. “Whoever seeks to gain his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life will preserve it” (Lk 17:33).[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]In these words, Jesus portrays his own path, which leads through the Cross to the Resurrection, the path of the grain of wheat that falls to the ground and dies, and in this way bears much fruit. Starting from the depths of his own sacrifice and of the love that reaches fulfillment therein, he also portrays in these words the essence of love and indeed of human life itself.[/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]We can have some human sympathy with Nietzsche’s attempt to make a garden out of Gethsemane, to build a castle in the dark night of the soul. Anything, rather than the cross. To trust eros, life itself, to a God one cannot see or feel; to fall into death, hoping for a miracle of life—a more than human trial for an all-too-human soul. Here, remarks Benedict, with the greatest possible understatement, we are on “the threshold of biblical faith.”[/FONT][FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]
[/FONT]
