Sexual love needs to be ‘purified’
Referring to the different dimensions of love, the pope said human love and desire could never by reduced to just sex if it was to be authentic.
If the two dimensions, agape and eros - the selfless and the sexual - were cut off from each other “the result is a caricature” of love, he said.
“Eros, reduced to pure ‘sex’, has become a commodity, a mere thing to be bought and sold, or rather, man himself has become a commodity,” he said.
Benedict said Christianity had not “poisoned eros” as Nietzsche had argued, and had not “blown the whistle” on the joy of God’s gift to mankind.
Eros was a gift to be cherished, but an “intoxicated and undisciplined eros” was “a fall, a degradation of man,” he warned.
Erotic love needs to be “disciplined and purified, if it is to provide not just fleeting pleasure,” but a “foretaste of the pinnacle of our existence,” the Pope said.
