The Primacy of Love, by Ilia Delio

Author: Ilia Delio. Review by Frank Regan

This is part of a series launched by DLT Books called ‘My Theology’. It will consist of brief statements by leading theologians. Among them is one of my favourites, Ilia Delio. She is a Franciscan sister whose interest is in the integration of science, religion and culture. Currently she is exploring the relationship between evolution, quantum physics and artificial intelligence.

Delio is a follower of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, so love is at the centre of her theological concerns. She focuses on agapic love as love spent freely and carelessly for the other. Related to it is erotic love, a deep aching desire, an ardent reaching out, but for one’s own sake.

She also explores creation as the law of God’s being-in-love. She writes of our search for love, the erotic in us which urges us to seek; and the agapic where we find completion (but not yet).

Suffering is at the heart of being human. Delio engages with it and also points to a God who suffers. She says the ‘universe is cruciform by nature’, a challenging and enlightening thought. In life there is a struggle against death. The earth is the tomb of most of the species of life which ever existed. And it is the womb for the gestation of new life. Nature’s antidote to death is reproduction. Life lives on in stubborn resistance. Yet, death is not a random process, at odds with creation’s struggle to live and survive. It is, ‘integral to the evolving fullness of life’.

To live life to the full is to take on the cross as defining of our existence. We live in a crossroads of death and life. For Christ, the cross was the throne of glory, the instrument of torture which became an instrument of liberation. Christ suffered along with us, sweated blood, yet surrendered to death as the victorious culmination of his journey. Suffering, undertaken for love, is creative of new life. We all struggle with pain in the world. Someday we may understand it as key to embracing all of humanity, all of creation, in a love which never ceases to give.

Our post-Enlightenment culture has formed us in the school of the head, and has ignored the school of the heart. The triumph of intellect and the seeking of power has separated us from the wider world of relationships and from the ecology of terrestrial life. Teilhard reminds us that science without religion is blind; religion without science can lead to superstition. We must bring head and heart, science and religion into alignment where each can challenge, enrich and guide the other.

This is theology for the life of the world, not of the church. Like every good theology it is also good spirituality. As theology we can talk of God in a contemporary manner, one which touches the heart. As spirituality we walk the Way, urged by the Spirit, toward the Truth of our life and existence. This is a profound, wide-ranging and contemporary theological reflection, and in the short span of eighty-three pages. It is a great read and will reward reading again.

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