I learn to look on this other person not simply with my eyes and my feelings, but from the perspective of Jesus Christ.
(Benedict XVI, Deus Caritas Est, §18.)
God is caritas, that is, the deepest and originating kind of love: God’s own love,3 the love (as Dante put it) that “moves the sun and all the stars.” This is the poet’s way of suggesting that all of creation, the whole known and unknown universe, was called into being at a point in time by a love so potent as to draw all things out of nothingness into existence, at their appointed times.
The Creator might have done otherwise. But in fact he chose to call into being a contingent, changing, evolving universe, whose inner laws operate mostly by emerging probabilities. Aristotle saw that most natural beings act by laws only “for the most part.”4 As modern science has discerned, most laws of nature work not by necessity but by probabilities. As some possibilities are made real, they change the probabilities of later evolution.
Schemes of probabilities—not fixed, rigid principles—seem a better model for the inner workings of our cosmos and most things in it. In that sense, the universe is imperfect, never flawless. It is this characteristic of the universe that favors the emergence at some point in time of fallible human agents, able to reflect and choose, armed with liberty to accept or to reject the path laid out by God for their own flourishing. As Thomas Jefferson once put it, “The god who gave us life gave us liberty at the same time.”5 It is this feature of the universe that allows humans to live free to act or not, to accept or to reject the friendship into which their Creator invited them. He did not have to do that. But he did.
The God who created us, according to the human story that both Judaism and Christianity have presented to us, plunged deep into our nature its most dynamic thrust: toward the free choice either to love God and our fellow humans or to reject such love. The first impulse (and law of our being) that the Creator placed into our hearts is to love God, who in his generosity gave us life, along with liberty and the responsibility for our own destiny. As Jacques Maritain wrote, “By its liberty, the human person transcends the stars and all the world of nature.”6 The second law God gave us is a call to love our neighbors as we love ourselves. These are very high targets for the human race. They are the ground of our unique dignity, and immortal beauty, among all other creatures.
It is true that very early in the Jewish/Christian drama of Creation, the first brother, Cain, slew his brother Abel. In the evolving world, then, the love of brothers is radically threatened by enmity and strife, and all manner of human fratricide and mass destruction. The human story—human history—is not a simple morality play in which good always triumphs, and love, justice, and peace prevail. Often the human project has for long, long periods spiraled downward in moral decline, not upward in moral improvement. The commandment of love is plainly not an empirical description of the way things are.
Christianity maintains that, nonetheless, each of us must love our enemies—we don’t have to like them or enjoy their presence, but we must at least recognize that the Creator called them into his friendship, just as he called us. We must strive to see what the Creator loved in them. But that can seem too much to swallow and, frankly, utterly beyond our emotional inclination.
There are, of course, other narratives and story lines presented as models of how human history actually proceeds. There is the nihilist view: “Life is a tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing.” There is also the narrative presented by those who call themselves secular humanists. Some of these present themselves as scientific humanists, others as humanists who love imagination and sympathy more deeply than science. (Compare the young A. J. Ayer’s Language, Truth, and Logic with Albert Camus’s The Rebel, or even more so, The Plague.)
Each human must question, reflect, and choose which narrative of human living comports better with his or her own experience of life and evidence, and which better serves the future of the human race. To do so is to exercise the radical freedom built into our nature.
It is in the nature of caritas to implant this liberty into our souls. In this implanting, many are led to see the potential images of caritas in themselves. That is the image of the civilization they try to build, the “City on the hill,” the City of God. It is a world that requires radical spiritual liberty if it is to be fulfilled. Caritas is uncoerced or not at all.
Caritas is the propelling drive in which Catholic social doctrine begins, toward which it aims, and under whose searing judgment it falls short or, at times, does well. In the words of Saint Thomas Aquinas, “Charity is the form, mover, mother and root of all the virtues”; it is the inner fire of all the other habits infused in us by God.7 It is the obscure magnetism that guides us through the dark night of the soul.
From this personal love that constitutes the inner being of God we can derive an acronym that ties all sixteen principles of Catholic social teaching together: CaRitaS—the five Cs, the five Rs, and the six Ss. It is fitting that the term caritas should tie together all sixteen principles, since the reality of caritas is their inner form.
2. The Common Good
Every day human interdependence grows more tightly drawn and spreads by degrees over the whole world. As a result the common good, that is, the sum of those conditions of social life which allow social groups and their individual members relatively thorough and ready access to their own fulfillment, today takes on an increasingly universal complexion and consequently involves rights and duties with respect to the whole human race. Every social group must take account of the needs and legitimate aspirations of other groups, and even of the general welfare of the entire human family.
(Gaudium et Spes, §26.)
The Good News brought by Christ is that the Creator of the universe is neither icily indifferent to us nor hostile. It is true that he chose to create a world of contingencies in which both heinous and holy acts could be chosen by men, and in which nature itself is full of hazards to all living creatures on earth. But the Creator asks us to trust him as a friend who walks with us. The Lord God Creator asks us to address him as “Our Father.”
In the same spirit, he gives us to know that all the goods of this earth are intended by him for every single person on this earth. Intimate union with our Father is the highest common good of all who have ever lived or will yet live.
But even on an earthly level and within history itself, our Father willed a share of the earth to every single human being. Not an equal share. To some he gave more talents than others. Some he placed in more favorable climes and locations richer with natural resources than others. (He gave all the nations of the Middle East huge deposits of oil, but not Israel. He promised Israel a land of milk and honey, but he said nothing about oil.) The people of Israel he blessed in other ways. He taught them the secrets of the human spirit, the human law, and the habits of creativity and inquiry. He implanted in them the seed of the idea of progress, and the intimation that God’s Kingdom to come was a place of truth, beauty, goodness, and compassion.
Human advance is not always upward, but often in a long period of decline and decadence. Human history, for Jews and Christians, gives reason to trust in human betterment and a common learning of wisdom, and a steady openness to the wisdom hidden even in humble, sometimes low-born, people. One must approach wisdom humbly.
All these teachings are more valuable than gold. Indeed, from them derive the methods that led to the discovery that black tar, oil, and shale have buried in them unsuspected riches, hidden for many ages. And even in the most humble, mean, and seemingly fruitless dry sand, there is silicon.
The Lord God Creator intended all the goods of the earth for all his human family. He has called all into friendship with him. We are reflective, choosing, creative persons, responsible for our own destiny. In other words, he made us free.
In this world, it is not so easy to pursue the common good. Except in the most abstract way, who knows what the common good actually is, in all its devilish detail? And how to make it work? And how to tame the sinfulness and self-destructiveness to which humans are demonstrably prone? Where is there a woman or a man so wise as