By August Adam | Introduction by Ulrich L. Lehner

“Christianity gave Eros poison to drink; he did not die of it, but degenerated into a vice.” Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil indicts Christianity for the corr­uption of desire. In his first encyclical, Deus caritas est, Pope Benedict XVI refutes Nietzsche, demonstrating that the Gospel actually restores love’s “true grandeur.” Too often, however, Christian preaching has failed to comprehend that truth. In The Primacy of Love, first published in English in 1957, August Adam combats those errant tendencies in theology and catechesis that disparaged sexuality and diminished marriage. Building on the theology of Thomas Aquinas in particular (and anticipating the teachings of Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI), Adam writes, “Christ expressly specified love as the most important of all Christian virtues. In a classification in which love is the chief commandment, chastity loses nothing—indeed it increases in importance, while overemphasis on sex does far more to endanger sexual morality than to further it.”

The truth of the primacy of love is registered on hundreds of pages of the Holy Scriptures and is stressed so emphatically that it cannot be overlooked. (August Adam)

August Adam (1888–1965) was a German Catholic priest and theologian. Denied a university professorship on account of his approach to moral theology and his con­demnation of Nazi ideology, he taught religion at a secondary school until his retirement. Over the course of his career, Adam wrote numerous scholarly and popular books, most of which remain untranslated from the German.

Ulrich L. Lehner is the William K. Warren Foundation Professor of Theology at the University of Notre Dame. A renowned scholar, he is author and editor of more than twenty books.

Paperback: 190pp.

ISBN: 978-1950970049