Moreland on Nygren

My guess regarding the compatibility of Bishop Nygren's view (that God's agape love creates human value, rather than recognizes human value) with Catholic teaching (a guess based on human dignity deriving from the Imago Dei, which itself can be seen as an act of God's value-creating love) may be off-base, judging by Fr. Araujo's helpful post.  Villanova law prof Mike Moreland shares the skepticism, offering this response:

I think you've put your finger on a very important question or series of questions. . . but I'd resist at the outset the assertion that Nygren's Lutheran account of agape is easily reconciled to the Catholic tradition on charity as love of friendship of God . . . Three quick points:

(1) For Aquinas, we love in charity "for God's sake" (II-II, 25.5 ad 1), which means loving the neighbor as "belonging" to God, but that is different than saying, as does Nygren, that agape creates value in the neighbor (it's the difference between Aquinas' metaphysics of participation and the good, on the one hand, and the Lutheran doctrine of sin and grace, on the other).

(2) In contrast to the Lutheran view of agape as a replacement of the natural order of love, Aquinas builds his discussion of charity on Aristotle's account of friendship. For Aquinas, we love another in charity on account of God's goodness, which, in turn, creates other forms of friendship that are retained in the order of charity (II-II, 26.2). Natural emotional ties are not eliminated by charity but are instead perfected by charity (II-II, 26.6). Not surprisingly, then, Luther speaks of our relation to God in terms of fides but not of caritas, amor, or philia. In fact, Luther thought the smuggling of Aristotelian friendship (and its attendant egoism) into the account of charity was nothing short of blasphemous. Nygren's contrast of eros and agape, with some qualification, replicates that tension.

 

(3) The final and harder question (and where your post was driving in the end) is how Thomistic charity and its outward acts or effects of beneficence and benevolence toward others stand in relation to modern conceptions of dignity and respect, which are indebted to Kant's argument in the Groundwork and in the Metaphysics of Morals that we owe by pure practical reason respect to an autonomous will of absolute moral worth and fitting to the rational nature of persons. That's an extremely difficult question, but, crudely, I think one can fall into either the continuity camp (see Schneewind, The Invention of Autonomy--Kant was a Prussian Lutheran, but he inherited some attenuated elements of the scholastic tradition from Christian Wolff, who was, in turn, influenced by Suarez and Spanish Jesuit scholasticism) or decline and fall camp (see MacIntyre, After Virtue).