The two faces of love

This is a portion of the first Lenten homily delivered in the Vatican by Father Raniero Cantalamessa (see the full length sermon). Fr Cantalamessa is the preacher to the Papal Household, that means, he preaches to the Pope himself - and that probably means he's got advice worth heeding. The homily is titled The Two Faces of Love: Eros and Agape, and it was delivered last Friday. Hope it adds to your Lenten growth!

There is a realm in which secularization acts in a particularly pervasive and negative way, and it is the realm of love. The secularization of love consists in detaching human love in all its forms from God, reducing it to something purely "profane," in which God is out of place and even an annoyance.

However, the subject of love is not important just for evangelization, that is, in relation with the world; it is also important first of all for the internal life of the Church, for the sanctification of her members.

Love suffers from ill-fated separation not only in the mentality of the secularized world, but also in that of the opposite side, among believers and in particular among consecrated souls. Simplifying the situation to the greatest extent, we can articulate it thus: In the world we find eros without agape; among believers we often find agape without eros.

Eros without agape is a romantic love, very often passionate to the point of violence. A love of conquest which fatally reduces the other to an object of one's pleasure and ignores every dimension of sacrifice, of fidelity and of gift of self. There is no need to insist on the description of this love because it is a reality that we see daily with our own eyes, propagated as it is in a hammering way by novels, films, television fiction, the Internet, the gossip magazines. It is what common language understands, moreover, by the word "love."

It is more useful for us to understand what is meant by agape without eros... Agape without eros seems to us a "cold love," a loving "with the tip of the hairs" without the participation of the whole being, more by imposition of the will than by an intimate outburst of the heart, a descent into a pre-constituted mold, rather than to create for oneself something unrepeatable, as unrepeatable is every human being before God. The acts of love addressed to God are like those of certain poor lovers who write to the beloved letters copied from a handbook.

If worldly love is a body without a soul, religious love practiced that way is a soul without a body. The human being is not an angel, that is, a pure spirit; he is soul and body substantially united: everything he does, including loving, must reflect this structure. If the component linked to affectivity and the heart is systematically denied or repressed, the result will be double: either one goes on in a tired way, out of a sense of duty, to defend one's image, or more or less licit compensations are sought, to the point of the very painful cases that are afflicting the Church. It cannot be ignored that at the root of many moral deviations of consecrated souls there is a distorted and contorted conception of love.

We have therefore a double motive and a double urgency to rediscover love in its original unity. True and integral love is a pearl enclosed within two valves, which are eros and agape. These two dimensions of love cannot be separated without destroying it, as hydrogen and oxygen cannot be separated without depriving oneself of water.