Radical Optimism, the new record by superstar Dua Lipa, is a great summer album. It’s filled with high-energy club bangers and dynamite melodies. Lipa’s voice is pure and true. 

The record is about love. Not just any love, but a love that has been purified by judgment, grace, and experience. It’s obvious that Lipa loves sex, but it’s also clear that not just any fool is going to sink into those lovely lips.

In this way, Radical Optimism might have found an insightful interpreter in Pope Benedict. The pontiff went to be with the Lord in 2022, but he left us with Deus Caritas Est, or God is Love, his finest encyclical. Re-reading the pope while enjoying Radical Optimism offers a revelation: Pope Benedict gets what motivates Dua Lipa. Her critics do not.

Pitchfork gave Radical Optimism a dismal 6.6 rating, while offering this commentary:

Lipa debates making her move on a guy she likes but worries about ceding her power. ‘If control is my religion,’ she sings, somewhat mixing her metaphors, ‘then I’m heading for collision.’ She decides against the approach, able to imagine them together in the future but not right now. It’s telling: The overthought Radical Optimism puts Lipa so many steps ahead she’s hard to make out. Her tight grip reveals an empty hand.

The Guardian agreed: “Lipa’s refusal to engage with the more soul-bearing aspects of 21^st-century celebrity has made her the kind of pop star one suspects Andy Warhol might have had a lot of time for: a slightly remote, visually arresting space into which fans can project whatever they want.” The Los Angeles Times lamented that Radical Optimism lacks “the kind of detailed celebrity meta-narrative that’s come to define—and to propel—the superstar pop LP in music’s parasocial age.”

Instead of focusing on fame, Lipa had taken on something much grander—the search for authentic love in the modern world. The album opens with “End of an Era,” a song that marks the transition girls make from clubbing to becoming wives. 

The sweetest pleasure
I feel like we’re gonna be together
This could be the end of an era
Who knows, baby? This could be forever and ever

In the clouds, there she goes, butterflies let them flow (end of an era)
Another girl falls in love, another girl leaves the club
Send a big kiss goodbye to all of the pretty eyes (end of an era)
Another girl falls in love, another girl leaves the club.

This is lovely poetry, rich with meaning. Critics complain because Lipa does not spend her time bitching about fame and her public image, but perhaps she is better off leaving that kind of thing to Taylor Swift. Love is still the greatest human challenge and the greatest adventure. In Deus Caritas Est, Pope Benedict explores “that love between man and woman which is neither planned nor willed, but somehow imposes itself upon human beings, [which] was called eros by the ancient Greeks.”

The Bible avoids the term eros, preferring the terms philia (the love of friendship) and agape, the love of God. According to Nietzsche, Christianity had poisoned eros, with the church and “all her commandments and prohibitions.” As Pope Benedict explains, the charge against Christianity was that it “turned to bitterness the most precious thing in life.” Doesn’t the church “blow the whistle just when the joy which is the Creator’s gift offers us a happiness which is itself a certain foretaste of the Divine?”

The answer is no. The Greeks considered eros to be a form of intoxication, a “divine madness” which “tears man away from his finite existence and enables him, in the very process of being overwhelmed by divine power, to experience supreme happiness.” Yet Christianity, the pope noted, “in no way rejected eros as such; rather, it declared war on a warped and destructive form of it, because this counterfeit divinization of eros actually strips it of its dignity and dehumanizes it … An intoxicated and undisciplined eros, then, is not an ascent in ‘ecstasy’ towards the Divine, but a fall, a degradation of man.”

Evidently, eros needs to be disciplined and purified if it is “to provide not just fleeting pleasure, but a certain foretaste of the pinnacle of our existence, of that beatitude for which our whole being yearns.”

The attempt to give eros dignity and strip it of its toxins is at the heart of Radical Optimism. In the sensual and sexy “Illusion.” Lipa sings the following lines: 

Was a time when that shit might have worked
Was a time when I just threw a match and let it burn
Now I’m grown, I know what I deserve
I still like dancin’ with the lessons I already learned

I already know your type, tellin’ me the things I like
Tryin’ make me yours for life, takin’ me for a ride
I already know your type, think you can play your cards right
Don’t you know I could do this dance all night?

Yes, Lipa is protecting herself, but it’s in the service of something much greater. She’s no prude—she’s wise. The payoff comes in “Falling Forever,” which is the best song in Radical Optimism. “Can we keep falling forever?” Lipa asks, deliriously in true love. Her discipline has allowed eros, philia and agape to glow in her soul. We can, indeed, keep falling forever.