the love that moves the sun and all the stars

The title comes from Dante's Paradiso...Seinfels critiques the encyclical " God is Love"...and for once, the MSM i.e. the NYTimes has gotten it RIGHT about the Pope's encyclical...

Steinfels writes:
"God is the absolute and ultimate source of all being," the pope wrote, "but this universal principle of creation—the Logos, primordial reason—is at the same time a lover with all the passion of a true love."

Or as he said in his earlier remarks on Dante: "God's 'eros' is not only a primordial cosmic force, it is love that has created man and that bends before him, as the Good Samaritan bent before the wounded man, victim of thieves, who was lying on the side of the road."

When Benedict speaks of love as the "primordial cosmic force," he knows of course that science traces the movement of the sun and stars to the Big Bang, gravity and other forces of nature. He is, nonetheless, claiming that the truest, most fundamental insight into the nature of the cosmos and humanity is found in our experience of love, beginning with the paradigm of erotic love and crowning it in religious faith.

Is this claim really uncontroversial? Humans, after all, have offered any number of ultimate characterizations of reality, from a swirl of atoms to a struggle for survival, from a war between matter and spirit to the search for pleasure and release, from the slow march of rationality to a cloud of illusion.

There is plenty of evidence for each of these views. One can easily argue that the case for love, personal, self-giving love, as the bottom-line character of reality is the wildest, most astonishing of claims in the face of that evidence.

At the deepest of levels, is the parent caring for the ill or troubled child or the couple pledging mutual affection and support till death do them part going with the grain of the universe or acting in defiance of it? Is such love a flame that somehow begins and ends in a larger fire? Or is it a brief, bold flare that will ultimately be snuffed out in the darkness?

For a century and more, much of Western art and thought has insisted on the latter—to the point, it should be added, that those fierce claims about the ultimate absurdity of existence, no less than the counterclaim of believers like Benedict, are now also passed over as uncontroversial.

Yes, people love when it is not logical to our moneyworshipping efficient society, as the LATimes article points out...in this touching article on infant hospices that give parents expecting children with fatal congenital defects to have an alternative to late term abortion...

And such love is a mirror of God's love for us...

Andrew Greeley call your office: Ratz is stealing your line about God being a passionate lover...