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His own death is an occasion to revisit his cultural wisdom.
Among the peculiarities marking the pontificate of Pope Benedict XVI is the fact that he neither condemned nor ignored one of the most influential German philosophers of our era, Friedrich Nietzsche, the one who famously proclaimed the death of God in our times.
In the first and most moving encyclical of his pontificate, Deus Caritas Est (God Is Love), released on Christmas Day in 2005, Benedict unpacked the significance of divine love in relation to human desire, or what the Greeks call eros. To do so, he quoted an aphorism from Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil: “Christianity gave Eros poison to drink; he did not die of it but degenerated — into a vice.”
According to Nietzsche, Christianity ruins what is highest in us, the jubilant celebration of life that is erotic desire, by infecting it with guilt and sin. Because Christianity is in its essence opposed to life, it is no wonder that its God is now dead to us.
Pope Benedict, like St. John Paul II before him in the Theology of the Body, took seriously the thought that sexual desire is the apex of human nature, but he pointed out how naive Nietzsche was.
Sexual love is a blessing if and only if it is purified, if and only if it becomes transfigured by a love that seeks to bless rather than a love that simply seeks to consume. Lust is no liberation but a domination and enslavement for all parties that are involved in its desperate clutches.
Continued below.
Among the peculiarities marking the pontificate of Pope Benedict XVI is the fact that he neither condemned nor ignored one of the most influential German philosophers of our era, Friedrich Nietzsche, the one who famously proclaimed the death of God in our times.
In the first and most moving encyclical of his pontificate, Deus Caritas Est (God Is Love), released on Christmas Day in 2005, Benedict unpacked the significance of divine love in relation to human desire, or what the Greeks call eros. To do so, he quoted an aphorism from Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil: “Christianity gave Eros poison to drink; he did not die of it but degenerated — into a vice.”
According to Nietzsche, Christianity ruins what is highest in us, the jubilant celebration of life that is erotic desire, by infecting it with guilt and sin. Because Christianity is in its essence opposed to life, it is no wonder that its God is now dead to us.
Pope Benedict, like St. John Paul II before him in the Theology of the Body, took seriously the thought that sexual desire is the apex of human nature, but he pointed out how naive Nietzsche was.
Sexual love is a blessing if and only if it is purified, if and only if it becomes transfigured by a love that seeks to bless rather than a love that simply seeks to consume. Lust is no liberation but a domination and enslavement for all parties that are involved in its desperate clutches.
Continued below.
Pope Benedict’s crucial answer to Nietzsche about guilt and sin
Among the peculiarities marking the pontificate of Pope Benedict XVI is the fact that he neither condemned nor ignored one of the most influential German...
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