BidenPresident
Verified User
In “Deus Caritas Est” (2005), Pope Benedict gets to the heart of love by first citing Nietzsche’s aphorism in Beyond Good and Evil concerning sexual love: “Christianity gave Eros poison to drink; he did not die of it but degenerated—into a vice.” Nietzsche here expresses what the pope calls “a widely-held perception” that somehow Christianity destroys the very highest aspect of human existence in its insistence on the purity of love.
Yet Benedict says that even the Greeks were well aware of the temptation inherent in sexual love, a temptation already identified in the Old Testament, and this is a temptation to dominate and use another human being for passing pleasure. Christianity, we could say, did not poison but rather healed love so that it could become what it is meant to be: the highest affirmation of being, the expression of our profound freedom and a vehicle of divine blessing.
https://www.americamagazine.org/fai...Id7L7eizewytxpmNlJl3J63mgP4Ai3gfpMnJ4.VgXOoCA
Nietzsche is correct. The Pope is wrong.
Yet Benedict says that even the Greeks were well aware of the temptation inherent in sexual love, a temptation already identified in the Old Testament, and this is a temptation to dominate and use another human being for passing pleasure. Christianity, we could say, did not poison but rather healed love so that it could become what it is meant to be: the highest affirmation of being, the expression of our profound freedom and a vehicle of divine blessing.
https://www.americamagazine.org/fai...Id7L7eizewytxpmNlJl3J63mgP4Ai3gfpMnJ4.VgXOoCA
Nietzsche is correct. The Pope is wrong.