On Nature and Grace in Deus Caritas Est

RECEIVED WITH WIDE ACCLAIM, Pope Benedict XVI’s first encyclical Deus Caritas Est [hereafter, DCE] lays out paradigms for the relations between eros and charity and between charity and justice.¹ Striking is the Pontiff ‘s sensitivity to the nuanced reciprocity that structures both relations. Disputing, for instance, the well-known thesis of the Lutheran bishop Anders Nygren (1890–1978), he argues that eros and charity are analogical, not equivocal.² God’s redeeming activity is the prime analogate of both loves. In the incarnate Word, eros and charity are perfectly conjoined. They flow forth from God as universal self-sacrifice, on the one hand, and as passionate yearning to save sinful humanity, on the other. For its part, the eros between husband and wife mirrors the divine charity when it comes to completion in conceiving children, nurturing a family, and spreading further to embrace neighbors and friends.

In relating charity and justice, Benedict delves deep into four themes: the nature of the human person, the meaning of prudence, the relation between social justice and ideology, and the relation between Church and state. In exploring these themes, this essay will first lay out Benedict’s argument in the second part of his encyclical. Then it will summarize a major critique of the paradigm that the encyclical develops. It will respond to this critique by drawing more widely on Benedict’s thought. Finally, it will discuss the relation of nature and grace that implicitly governs Benedict’s vision. This vision, we shall see, interprets the Second Vatican Council by creatively retrieving touchstone sources of Christianity: the Gospel of John, Augustine, and Thomas Aquinas.

Deus Caritas Est

Part II of the Pontiff ‘s apostolic letter is entitled Caritas. Its thesis contends that charity, for the Church, “is not a kind of welfare activity which could equally well be left to others. Charity is a part of her nature, an indispensable expression of her very being” (§25). The work of charity is, in fact, sacramental in a broad sense. It is both a sign and an instrument of the Church’s essence. The Church’s “service of charity” is the overflowing of the life of the Spirit, whose “energy transforms the heart of the ecclesial community, so that it becomes a witness before the world of the love of the Father” (§19). This emanation of love must necessarily extend “beyond the frontiers of the Church.” In so doing, it causes what it signifies. Acting to “purify” humanity, it clarifies rational judgment and aids the state better to order the norms of political life (§§25, 28).

In developing this thesis, Benedict explicitly addresses Marxism, perhaps Christianity’s leading recent nemesis. Marxism’s central critique, he argues, rests on the notion that those who stand on the social and political margins demand justice, not charity. Charity merely assuages the consciences of the privileged by treating the symptoms of the disease. Charity makes no attempt to diagnose and heal the underlying causes of injustice. These are structural; they cannot be eradicated by the purveyors of voluntary goodwill (§26). In agreement with Marxism, the Pope defines justice as giving all their rightful share of the community’s goods. Justice, he says, is the “aim and criterion of politics” (§28). It falls properly under the aegis of the state. In parting company with Marxism, however, he reasserts a fundamental imperative of Catholic social teaching. The state bears the moral burden of acting according to the principle of subsidiarity (§26). Far from imposing on the commonwealth a dictatorship of the proletariat, subsidiarity requires the higher orders of society to encourage the lower orders to assume their proper share of responsibility. The higher should not perform what the lower can do best for itself.³

Moreover, the principle of subsidiarity entails that, however deeply justice reaches into social structures, it never obviates love (§28). “One does not make the world more human,” the Pope asserts, “by refusing to act [lovingly] here and now” (§31). Suffering and loneliness always need compassion and care. These qualities often fall outside the aegis of the...