Well, there’s no need for further speculation on when B16’s first encyclical–Deus Caritas Est–will be coming out, because B16 himself has told us: next Wednesday.
He addressed the matter in his Wednesday audience this week.
On . . . January 25, moreover, my first encyclical will finally be published, the title of which is already known, "Deus Caritas Est," "God Is Love." The topic is not directly ecumenical, but the framework and background are ecumenical, as God and our love are the condition for the unity of Christians. They are the condition for peace in the world.
With this encyclical I would like to show the concept of love in its different dimensions. Today, in the terminology that it is known, "love" often seems something very remote from what a Christian thinks when he speaks of charity. I would like to show that it is one movement with different dimensions.
The "eros," the gift of love between man and woman, comes from the same source of the Creator’s goodness, as well as the possibility of a love that denies itself in favor of the other. The "eros" is transformed in "agape" in the measure in which the two really love one another and one no longer seeks oneself, one’s enjoyment, one’s happiness, but seeks above all the good of the other. In this way, the "eros" is transformed in charity, in a path of purification, of deepening. From one’s family one opens wide to the larger family of society, to the family of the Church, to the family of the world.
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On the topic of the different meanings of “love” in Scripture and tradition: I asked this on another blogger’s site:
I always wondered why so few Catholics ever comment on the famous, “Peter, do you love me?” reading, in which Jesus asks three times if Peter loves him, and Peter answers three times that he does.
It was pointed out to me in divinity school that the Greek has Jesus using the highest form of love, agape, the first two times, while Peter answers with philia – as if Jesus were asking if Peter loved him with the all-encompassing love of God, while a puzzled Peter answered, “Lord, you know I am your best friend.” The third time Jesus asks, He switches to “philia,” as if to accommodate Peter’s lower understanding, asking, esentially, “OK, Peter, are you my best friend?” at which time Peter’s answer would be more of a relief at being asked something he could understand.
However, my concentration was philosophical theology as well as literature, not languages. If some learned reader could say something about this – correct? not correct? – I would be very grateful. I would have to dig through many boxes to find my Greek New Testament, so if someone has one at hand…..
One answer I got was -several times – was that in this passage, the words “agape” and “philia” are meant to be synonyms!! I replied that try as I might, I can’t find it in myself to believe that such a revolutionary new idea, from the heart of God, could be brushed off as just another synonym for what the Greeks saw as “friendship,” and wrote about often.
After all, the concept “agape” exists nowhere in Greek philosophy. The concept of unconditional love, fleshed out as it is in Christianity, did not exist before. It was something truly new that had come into the world with Christ.
Note – while I know Jesus spoke Aramaic, what we have to deal with is the Greek….
Does anyone else have any thoughts?
I think that whenever wordplay and rhetorical devices appear in the Bible, we’re supposed to pay attention. Jewish people are very sensitive to wordplay in the OT as important to interpretation; and we know the Greeks were hyper about literature. So the gospel writers, whether Jew or Greek, are not putting stuff in there at random.
That said, asking the same question in different synonymous ways is also a rhetorical device. But I suspect that the shades of difference are important here.
Drawing from the discussion elsewhere, I gather the literal meaning is something like this:
“Peter, do you love me in an agape way?”
“Lord, I love you as a friend.”
“Slop my sheep some feed.”
“Peter, do you love me in an agape way?”
“Lord, I love you as a friend.”
“Take my lambs to pasture.”
“Peter, do you love me as a friend?”
“Lord, you know everything! You know I love you as a friend!” (“I’ve been saying nothing else for an hour!”)*
“Take my sheep to pasture.”
Now what does it all mean? Pretty much the same as the English translation. But not exactly the same, no.
* That’s in the Dragaeran translation of the Bible, the one by Paarfi of Roundwood. Paarfi deplored the excessive brevity of the Bible, and decided it really needed six or seven hundred pages of narration and gentle translational discourse to really round it out. He also added special notes on the significance of verse and chapter numbers in light of the Dragaeran Cycle and its animals. It is said that Paarfi was only converted to Christianity because it insisted that in the beginning was the Word, and this was a lot more promising for a writer than all that stuff about the Paths of the Dead.
What’s all the consternation over the translation from German to Latin?
Fr. Philip