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When Benedict XVI issued his first papal encyclical on Christmas day last year, it was greeted by a fair amount of surprise. The new pope, an outspoken theologian of a pronounced conservative bent, had not chosen to write on an obviously headline-grabbing issue like the priestly ordination of women or homosexuals. Instead, he focused on an age-old question—the nature of love—which he treated in a measured, philosophical manner. But if that was one surprise, for some readers another surprise lay in what he had to say.

Like other Christian thinkers before him, Benedict took care to distinguish between love for one’s own, such as the love of a man for his wife, and the unmotivated and unearned love for that which is not one’s own, for the outsider. According to the Swedish Protestant theologian Anders Nygren, whose influential book on the subject was titled Eros and Agapé (Swedish edition 1930-36), these two forms of love are diametrically opposed: one preferential and selfish, the other generous and open. Indeed, the two types also encapsulate a stark difference between Judaism and Christianity. In the Hebrew Scriptures, Nygren wrote, “love is exclusive and particularistic”; Christian love, by contrast, “overleaps all such limits; it is universal and all-embracing.”

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