“Christianity gave Eros poison to drink; he did not die of it, but degenerated—into a vice.” Thus Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil indicts Christianity for the corruption of desire. In his first encyclical, 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 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.” With intense clarity and joyous urgency, The Primacy of Love beautifully presents the fullness of Christian teaching on the virtue of love.