God's Love or, Why I am not Reformed

Near the beginning of his Confessions-esque autobiography The Seven Story Mountain, Thomas Merton recounts a childhood story. He tells of playing with his friends and his refusal to allow his younger brother to play with them - “if they did try to come and get into our hut, or even to look at it, we would chase them away with stones.” For Merton, this came to give him a picture of all sin. He describes the scene,

When I think now of that part of my childhood, the picture I get of my brother John Paul is this: … standing quite still, with his arms hanging down at his sides, and gazing in our direction, afraid to come any nearer on account of the stones, as insulted as he is saddened, and his eyes full of indignation and sorrow. And yet he does not go away. We shout at him to get out of there, to beat it, and go home, and wing a couple of more rocks in that direction, and he does not go away. We tell him to play in some other place. He does not move. 

And there he stands, not sobbing, not crying, but angry and unhappy and offended and tremendously sad. And yet he is fascinated by what we are doing, nailing shingles all over our new hut. And his tremendous desire to be with us and to do what we are doing will not permit him to go away. The law written in his nature says that he must be with his elder brother, and do what he is doing: and he cannot understand why this law of love is being so wildly and unjustly violated in his case.

Written into human nature is the desire to be loved and to love in return. Understanding this, Merton addresses the true nature of sin as he continues.

Many times it was like that. And in a sense, this terrible situation is the pattern and prototype of all sin: the deliberate and formal will to reject disinterested love for us for the purely arbitrary reason that we simply do not want it. We will to separate ourselves from that love. We reject it entirely and absolutely, and will not acknowledge it, simply because it does not please us to be loved. Perhaps the inner motive is the fact of being loved disinterestedly reminds us that we all need love from others, and depend upon the charity of others to carry on our own lives. And we refuse love, and reject society, in so far as it seems, in our own perverse imagination, to imply some obscure kind of humiliation.

This description of sin fascinated me for three reasons: 1) it parallels St. Augustine's writings on love and the importance of ordered loves; 2) it is so often true of me; 3) it seems symptomatic of so much of modern Christianity.

Just last Sunday, I attended a protestant worship service after going to early mass at my Anglican church. The sermon, which interestingly enough seems to take the place of the Sacrament as the focal point of the service, centered on the first chapter of Jonah and emphasized the will and sovereignty of God. According to the sermon, the chief end of man was to “glorify God and enjoy Him forever.” God's will was to bring glory to himself; this will motivated his actions toward mankind, and his sovereignty prevented the thwarting of his will. I sat mute in horror (perhaps also out of politeness/cowardice). The God who creates and sustains the worlds through love, the God who became man, who turned his back on himself and died to redeem me, was described as supremely self-obsessed.

I ought to clarify my objection. St. Thomas Aquinas writes in On the Perfection of Religious Life, “Love is orderly and just, when the greater good is preferred to the lesser good.” God then, in order to be just – to give to himself his due, must love himself first and foremost. According to St. Anselm, God is “that than which nothing greater can be thought.” On this level, I accept a sort of divine self-obession. To give greater love to a lesser entity would be a failure of love. But I think the type of protestant approach that centers on God's willing himself glory goes much farther and either leads to or consists of (or both) deeper misunderstandings.

The first of these is a misunderstanding of the nature of the Holy Trinity. The Athanasian creed states that, “the Catholic Faith is this, that we worship one God in Trinity and Trinity in Unity. Neither confounding the Persons, nor dividing the Substance. For there is one Person of the Father, another of the Son, and another of the Holy Ghost. But the Godhead of the Father, of the Son and of the Holy Ghost is all One, the Glory Equal, the Majesty Co-Eternal.” There is then, community within the Godhead; this community leads to self-sufficiency. Because of the multiplicity of persons, God is able to be love, to be loving, without any created things. Because of that multiplicity, his glory is already perfect. God glorifies himself, in himself, perfectly. This protestant misunderstanding¹ fails to understand God as he is and actually decreases his glory.

This view also fails to understand love. Thomas Merton describes God's love as disinterested – that is as regards himself. Love is eternally giving, particularly in the form described as agape. St. Thomas Aquinas writes in his Summa of Christian Teaching, “True love requires one to will another's good as one's own.” Julian of Norwich writes of the central importance of love in God's relation to the world, 

Love is our Lord's meaning....Before God made us he loved us, which love was never abated and never will be. And in this love he has done all his works, and in this love he has made all things profitable to us, and in this love our life is everlasting. In our creation we had beginning, but the love in which he created us was in him from without beginning. In this love we have our beginning, and all this shall we see in God without end (Showings).

 The stunning characteristic of this love of God is its activity on behalf of his beloved. St. Ignatius of Loyola writes in Spiritual Exercises, “The effect of true love is the reciprocal communication of all good things between the persons who love each other; whence it follows that charity cannot exist without sacrifice.” Dante notes that love, while kindled by goodness, increases virtue only when expressed outwardly - "Amore,/acceso di virtù, sempre altro accese,/pur che la fiamma sua paresse fore.”² This activity on our behalf is consistent with the nature of love, the nature of God himself. To suggest that God created us primarily to increase his glory attacks the very nature of God.

This attack involves both God's self-sufficiency and the nature of love itself. If God's glory can be increased by his creation, then he is not sufficiently glorified in himself. If his love is ultimately focused on himself, then love itself it not what we have been taught to believe. Nobody would consider human actions motivated by a desire for glory to be loving – how then can we say this of God? The Bible itself presents a different message: “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends (John 15:13).” True love is always directed outward toward the beloved; the more perfect the love, the less self-directed the love becomes. God's love is perfect.

Far from supreme self-obsession, God's love is only interested in the good of his beloved. Were his love self-directed, he need not have created the worlds, with all the self-sacrifice that would entail. “God is love.

In this was manifested the love of God toward us, because that God sent his only begotten Son into the world, that we might live through him (I John 4:8-9).” This love animates the universe, holds the elements together, and makes life worth living. This love is at the center of Christianity and is expressed in its chief symbol – the Cross – and the central mysteries of the Incarnation and Eucharist. In the Incarnation, God becomes man, shares our weaknesses and trials, and demonstrates what true humanity is. In the crucifixion, the ultimate portrayal of love (John 15:13), Christ made possible the reconciliation of man and God. This reconciliation opens the possibility of union with God – that is, perfected love. This union in perfected love, far from subverting our humanity, allows for its fullest expression. Pope Benedict XVI writes, “But this union is no mere fusion, a sinking in the nameless ocean of the Divine; it is a unity which creates love, a unity in which both God and man remain themselves and yet become fully one. As Saint Paul says: “He who is united to the Lord becomes one spirit with him” (1 Cor 6:17).” Finally, Christ gives us the most precious gift of his body and blood for the assistance our faith and the maintenance of our union with him. Just as God's love maintains the bonds of the universe, so “The Eucharist is the efficacious sign and sublime cause of that communion in the divine life and that unity of the People of God by which the Church is kept in being. It is the culmination both of God's action sanctifying the world in Christ and of the worship men offer to Christ and through him to the Father in the Holy Spirit (Congregation of Rites, instruction, Eucharisticum mysterium, 6).”

Despite these gifts (and the innumerable benefits procured by them), there is no shortage of those who would deny the love of God. Similarly, there are those who claim the name of Christ, like the church mentioned earlier, whose conception of God ultimately precludes the possibility of love itself. Both these errors are truly sin in that they are willful separations from the love of God (which is to say God, himself). The former is much more easily answered. Reason teaches that free-will is a necessary condition for reciprocal love. C. S. Lewis makes this clear; as he argues, it is useless to point to the existence of evil as evidence of an unloving or impotent God; the fact that free will exists, the fact that evil exists, demonstrates that our love is more important to God that a “perfect” creation.
Man was created to experience the love of God and to love him in return. God's love persists despite mankind's failing to love him in return, as Saint Catherine of Genoa notes: “But God loves us so much that although he sees us so blind and deaf to our own advantage, yet he does not for that reason cease to knock continually at our hearts by his holy inspirations, that he may so enter and make therein tabernacles for himself into which creatures can never enter more.” Echoing I John 4:19, St. Bernard of Clarivaux writes, “God loves, he desires nothing else than to be loved; for he loves only that he may be loved.”

The very existence of love, then, demonstrates God's love to man. The appropriate question is not, “Why does evil exist?” but “Why do goodness, love, and beauty exist?” and “Why does man desire them?” Why, when happiness is so fleeting, when goodness is so rare and hard to achieve, when love so often fails, when pursuit of them so often leads to disappointment and sadness, do we desire these things? We desire them because we were created out of love and for love by a loving God. St. Basil the Great argues that “In the very nature of every human being has been sown the seed of the ability to love. You and I ought to welcome this seed, cultivate it carefully, nourish it attentively and foster its growth by going to the school of God's commandments with the help of his grace.” This ability is also the end of man - man will not be satisfied until he loves God with all his heart, soul, mind and strength. It is love that makes beauty, goodness, and the happiness of their experience possible. St. Faustina writes, “Love is a mystery that transforms everything it touches into things beautiful and pleasing to God. The love of God makes a soul free.”

Freedom is central to love, not freedom from restraint, but freedom from compulsion. St. John Chrysostom notes this, “Love cannot be compelled. You do not love because you are forced to love: you love spontaneously, of your own free will.”St. Bernard of Clairvaux also notes the free nature of love, arguing that it cannot be compelled by either the one loving or the one being loved. “Love is an affection of the soul, not a contract: it cannot rise from a mere agreement, nor is it so to be gained. It is spontaneous in its origin and impulse; and true love is its own satisfaction.” God's love and desire to be loved in return is demonstrated in mankind's gift of free will which enables man to love God. 

Glorifying God is certainly a chief part of the human telos and an aspect of our love for God. But even that is designed for our good. While God is glorified in and through those who love him, his is sufficiently glorified in himself. His desire for mankind to glorify him is directed towards the good of mankind. As mentioned earlier St. Thomas Aquinas teaches that the greatest glory and love ought to be given to the greatest being; that being is God. God's being who he is creates a duty (honor/privilege) of loving him first and foremost. This is not primarily due to his command, rather it is written into the nature of man as a created sentient creature. St. Bernard of Clairvaux writes,

You want me to tell you why God is to be loved and how much. I answer, the reason for loving God is God himself; and the measure of love due to him is immeasurable love...Therefore even the infidel who knows not Christ but does at least know himself, is bound to love God for God's own sake. He is unpardonable if he does not love the Lord his God with all his heart, and with all his soul, and with all his mind; for his own innate justice and common sense cry out from within that he is bound wholly to love God, from whom he has received all things. (On Loving God).

God's love for mankind is so great that he has left signs throughout creation to direct mankind's worship and love back to him. Psalm 19 declares, “The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork. Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night sheweth knowledge. There is no speech nor language, where their voice is not heard. Their line is gone out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world.” This, coupled with Christ's continually offered body, demonstrates a perfect love desperate for the good of the beloved.

The danger of considering God to be self-obsessed, demanding love and the increase of his glory, comes from the liberty with which God has endowed man. Because love cannot be compelled, it cannot be commanded. To command love is to be unloving. Those who reject this version of the God of the Bible do so because their very natures revolt against the absence of the love they were created to seek.
But the absence of the command does not reduce the utter necessity of loving God. And again, here we turn to Christ. 

God is the most lovable of all things, and meditation on his nature is the strongest incentive there is to love and devotion; but because our minds are not strong in themselves, we need to be led to knowledge, and so to love of God by way of the world we sense, and above all by thinking of Christ the man, so that by seeing God with our eyes we can be lifted up to love what we cannot see (St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica).

Christ offers himself continually to unite us to God. Christ says in John 6,

Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that believeth on me hath everlasting life. I am that bread of life. Your fathers did eat manna in the wilderness, and are dead. This is the bread which cometh down from heaven, that a man may eat thereof, and not die. I am the living bread which came down from heaven: if any man eat of this bread, he shall live for ever: and the bread that I will give is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world.

St. Francis de Sales writes, “Love is the chief among the passions of the soul. It is the king of all the heart's impulses; it draws all things to itself, and makes us like to what we love (The Devout Life).” By participating in the love and gifts that flow from the sacred heart of Christ, we become more like him. St. Catherine of Sienna writes, “Love is so powerful that it makes one heart and one will of lover and beloved. Whatever the one loves, so does the other, if it were otherwise, it would not be perfect love.” It is only through this love that we can be so transformed. St. Bonaventure writes in The Soul's Journey Into God, “There is no other path but through the burning love of the Crucified, a love which so transformed Paul into Christ when he was carried up to the third heaven (II Corinthians 12:2) that he could say: With Christ I am nailed to the cross. I live, now not I, but Christ lives in me (Galatians 2:20).

1I mean here the particular protestant misunderstanding I mentioned earlier, not that all protestants share this misunderstanding.

2 Love kindled by virtue always kindles another, provided that its flame appear outwardly. (Canto XXII, lines 10-12)