"Deus caritas est": Love's Vitality in Free Societies

Joseph Ratzinger's theology of love in dialogue with classical liberal perspectives on human action and relation

“God is love, and he who abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him” (1 John 4:16). So begins Pope Benedict XVI (Joseph Ratzinger)’s first encyclical, Deus caritas est, which marks its 20th anniversary this year. Deus caritas est meditates on God’s reality of love and experiences of human love which participate in it. Informed by Martha Nussbaum’s recent call for love in liberal societies, in this essay I place Ratzinger’s theology of love in dialogue with Adam Smith’s and Ludwig von Mises’s contrasting classical liberal approaches to love, asking what love can offer free societies. These thinkers attain insights relevant to the quest for a free and dynamic world order that contributes to a “civilization of love.” While recognizing with Mises the primacy of human action over love in generating free societies, I find that love is not extrinsic to liberalism but constitutive of our being, and I argue that free experiences of gift enrich the vitality of liberalism, driving the fullest actualization of human beings. Ultimately, these experiences have ontological depths, where love fulfills what it means to be an individual capable of subjectivity and action.

Ratzinger’s Theology of Love in “Deus caritas est”

According to Ratzinger, “No one has ever seen God as he is. And yet God is not totally invisible to us; he does not remain completely inaccessible.”¹ Through God’s revelation in Christ, “God has made himself visible: in Jesus we are able to see the Father.”² Ratzinger’s account of our experience of God leads into an analysis of the New Testament’s commandments of love. As he reads the Gospel of John, the love commandments are not heteronomous but our gracious response to God’s freely bestowed gift of love.³ Franz Rosenzweig expresses a similar insight: “Only the love received from God makes the act of love on the soul’s part more than a mere act, namely the fulfillment of a commandment of love… Love for God must be externalized in love for the neighbor.”⁴ In Ratzinger’s reading, there is an “unbreakable bond between love of God and love of neighbour,” where “love of neighbour is a path that leads to the encounter with God, and… closing our eyes to our neighbour also blinds us to God.”⁵

An ongoing theological debate questions the distinctiveness of the “law of love.” Ratzinger takes a mediating position, noting that the commandment of love of neighbor is both inscribed by God in human nature as well as the result of Christianity’s presence in the world. “Christianity constantly revives and acts out this imperative, so often profoundly obscured.”⁶ Ratzinger acknowledges certain universal features of the commandment, yet maintains that charity remains a distinct responsibility of each Christian and of the communities of faith. “Awareness of this responsibility has had a constitutive relevance in the Church from the beginning.”⁷ Though the Church’s charity shines forth, Ratzinger concedes features of the Marxist critique that “the poor… do not need charity but justice,” noting that Catholic social teaching recognizes that politics is not merely procedural but aims at justice.⁸ However, “love—caritas—will always prove necessary, even in the most just society.”⁹ Irrespective of political economy, societies are enriched by experiences of gift “grounded in the love of God in Christ.”¹⁰

Ratzinger cautions against an all-encompassing “State which would provide everything, absorbing everything into itself.”¹¹ Such a state would ultimately become “a mere bureaucracy incapable of guaranteeing the very thing which the suffering person—every person—needs: namely, loving personal concern.”¹² Though Ratzinger does not reject the state, a society in which the state’s material provision is supreme, where justice has seemingly rendered “works of charity superfluous,” fails to grasp the biblical insight that human beings do not live by bread alone but are constituted by openness to gift.¹³ Accordingly, Ratzinger elevates subsidiarity, centering the role of love in communities of faith beyond the state. In his view, these experiences must be guided not by immanentizing approaches, but by faith working through love, “a way of making present here and now the love which man always needs.”¹⁴

Actualizing Ratzinger’s Vision in Free Societies

Ratzinger presents an exalted vision of love, where even the most just societies need experiences of love. But can this vision be realized, especially in free societies not predicated on the logic of gift? Certain features of Ratzinger’s vision reflect classical liberal principles, particularly his critique of comprehensive states and emphasis on subsidiarity. Yet the centrality he accords to love exists in tension. Classical liberal political economy has long prized reason over love, though recent interpretations seek to uncover the humane character of Adam Smith’s foundational vision. In Vernon Smith and Bart Wilson’s reading of Smith, though “‘self-love’ is necessarily at the core of our being… in the responsible individual’s prudent maturation, conduct is shaped by learnt other-regarding rules of social order originating in our capacity for mutual sympathetic fellow-feeling.”¹⁵

Adam Smith’s notion of other-regarding sympathy has a kind of mutuality, though it differs from the theology of love’s transcendence present in Deus caritas est. However, this reading of Smith can chart a path to love’s vitality in liberal societies. But some may wonder why this matters. If we already have freedom and wealth, why the need for gift? Ludwig von Mises offers a challenge to visions of order which prize experiences of gift. In his view, “The praxeological theory of society is assailed by the fable of the mystic communion,” in which society “is not the product of man’s purposeful action [but] stems from unfathomable depths… in God’s power and love.”¹⁶

Mises notes that theological critiques of “those motives that direct the individual’s action in the market economy” cannot hold, because they “fail to recognize the role which those springs of action they condemn as vicious play in the operation of the market economy” and the creation of wealth we all enjoy.¹⁷ Experiences of intersubjective love alone cannot generate the wealth of free societies. For Mises, “Neither love nor charity nor any other sympathetic sentiments but rightly understood selfishness is what originally impelled man to adjust himself to the requirements of society, to respect the rights and freedoms of his fellow men and to substitute peaceful collaboration for enmity and conflict.”¹⁸ Unlike Smith’s dialectical approach, Mises’s realism centers the individual over relationality, yet “seen from the point of view of the individual, society is the great means for the attainment of all his ends.”¹⁹

Mises’s recognition of the importance of human action and individual existence in society, in dialogue with Norris Clarke’s conception of human being as “substance-in-relation,” points to a possibility of reconciling love with principles of free societies. For Clarke, relationality through action flows from and fulfills our substantial being, so intersubjectivity is part of our nature.²⁰ The individual remains primordial as the originating subject of human agency, but is fulfilled by relational action. Though this is more relational than Mises’s vision, it affirms his centrality of human action. Clarke’s ontological basis for relational action arising from our nature further resonates with Ratzinger’s reading that the love commandment is inscribed in our nature, aligning with Smith’s dynamic of self-love and fellow-feeling and lending support to love’s role in liberalism.

Martha Nussbaum notes that the liberal tradition has undertheorized love and the moral “psychology of the decent society” due to concerns that “prescribing any particular type of emotional cultivation” could suppress “liberal ideas of freedom and autonomy.”²¹ She offers a way forward that integrates a philosophy of emotions, especially love, within liberal societies. “Love is what gives respect for humanity its life.”²² For Nussbaum, “respect is not the public emotion good societies require, or at least not the only one.”²³ In her view, “It is plausible to think… that the moral sentiments on which Rawls relies cannot be transparently rationalistic.”²⁴ Mere formal “respect grounded in the idea of human dignity will prove impotent... unless it is nourished by imaginative engagement with the lives of others and by an inner grasp of their full and equal humanity.”²⁵

An affective conception of love cannot accomplish all things, whether the achievement of justice or the creation of wealth, to which Mises’s critique of love attests. However, Nussbaum’s call points the way to love’s greater vitality in liberal societies, complemented by Ratzinger’s theology of love, Smith’s theory of moral sentiments, and Mises’s and Clarke’s accounts of human action. Love drives the fullest actualization of human beings in society, going beyond mere recognition of others’ humanity toward experiences that are mutually enriching: existential relation with the Other and ultimately with God. Love cannot be compelled, or it would be incompatible with human freedom. As a gracious response to our experience of God’s love, our being pours over into relationality through action, reflective of classical liberal principles of human action. These experiences of gift have ultimate depths; “we enter into the very dynamic of [God’s] self-giving.”²⁶

1. Benedict XVI (Joseph Ratzinger), Deus caritas est [God is love], sec. 17 (Rome: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2005).

2. Ratzinger, Deus caritas est, sec. 17.

3. Ratzinger, Deus caritas est, sec. 17-18.

4. Franz Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption, trans. Barbara E. Galli (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005), 230.

5. Ratzinger, Deus caritas est, sec. 16.

6. Ratzinger, Deus caritas est, sec. 31.

7. Ratzinger, Deus caritas est, sec. 20.

8. Ratzinger, Deus caritas est, sec. 26, 28.

9. Ratzinger, Deus caritas est, sec. 28.

10. Richard John Neuhaus, “Pope Benedict on Love and Justice,” First Things 163 (May 2006): 62.

11. Ratzinger, Deus caritas est, sec. 28.

12. Ratzinger, Deus caritas est, sec. 28.

13. Ratzinger, Deus caritas est, sec. 28.

14. Ratzinger, Deus caritas est, sec. 33, 31.

15. Vernon L. Smith and Bart J. Wilson, Humanomics (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 8.

16. Ludwig von Mises, Human Action (Auburn, AL: Mises Institute, 1998), 166.

17. Mises, Human Action, 720.

18. Mises, Human Action, 168.

19. Mises, Human Action, 164.

20. Norris Clarke S.J., Person and Being (Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 1993), 8.

21. Martha Nussbaum, Political Emotions: Why Love Matters for Justice (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2015), 4.

22. Nussbaum, Political Emotions, 15.

23. Nussbaum, Political Emotions, 379.

24. Nussbaum, Political Emotions, 10.

25. Nussbaum, Political Emotions, 380.

26. Ratzinger, Deus caritas est, sec. 13.