God is Love

When some people hear that God is love, it arouses the image of a benign old gentleman. An inoffensive chap who is insipidly polite and agreeably kind.

This superficial idea comes from the dogma of materialist thinking. We’re accustomed to think of love as an emotion, a feeling evoked by an object in the world.

But this is a facile and meagre conception of both love and God. Divine love isn’t an emotion at all. Love is our ultimate well-being and the foundation of our existence.

Love is truth, life and existence itself.

Love as ontology

Love as ontology is an idea that’s foreign to the modern mind. In the materialist worldview ethics is a dangler subject.

For the materialist, the world consists only of matter. Good and evil aren’t properties we find in materialism’s universe. Objects don’t have the properties of dimension, mass, charge and … goodness.

The materialist looks out at an insentient, uncaring and purposeless world.

It’s an artificial way of seeing the world because ethics is inseparable from our metaphysics. Ethics isn’t an optional extra, it’s the essential focus of our lives.

We can’t confine questions of right and wrong to abstract theories. Ethics is a practical discipline which can’t be avoided. Ethical truths are existential truths.

Materialism takes what’s foundational in our lives and makes it an afterthought. Good and bad become free-floating theories, uprooted from the substance of reality.

To understand the religious view that God is love, we need to put aside the peculiar ideas of materialism. We need to enter into a deeper and more holistic way of thinking.

Any philosophy worth having must fully integrate ethics with metaphysics. And once we do this, we end with love as ontology.

Love becomes the substance of reality.

The ultimate good

According to Plato, “What men love is simply and solely the good.” The supreme object of love is the ultimate good. We love things in varying degrees, according to how fully they participate in the good.

Eventually we reach the ultimate good, the thing “for whose sake all the other things” are loved. Later, Christianity will associate God with Plato’s ultimate good.

To understand God as the ultimate good, we first need to understand what the word God means. The superficiality of materialism has infected our ideas of God as well. Many people think of God as some kind of super-human sky daddy.

God isn’t more powerful than super-man, God is all-powerful. God isn’t “a being” who sits at the top of the pyramid of beings, God is “Being itself”.

God is the Absolute. The necessary foundation of all existence.

God is omnipotent, omniscient, eternal, self-sufficient, perfect, immutable, transcendent and immanent.

Divine simplicity

At the heart of this conception of God is divine simplicity. God isn’t composed of parts. There’s no distinction between what God is and that God is. In theological terms, God’s existence is identical to his essence.

Which should make it clear why God is also identified with the ultimate good. God is not only the ground on which all things stand, he’s also the end toward which all things move.

The simplicity of God means God doesn’t possess a will, God is his will. God is identical to his will, and his power, and his knowledge, and his goodness.

And so of course, God is also identical to his love.

Rather than an emotion evoked within God by an external cause, God’s love is an eternal act of will. Divine love isn’t a want or a need, something which God lacks.

God’s love is an outpouring of generosity. An overflow of benevolence and the desire for the good of the other.

Love as creation

This outpouring of God’s love is the act of creation. God’s love brings the world into existence and continually sustains it at every moment.

As the ultimate force of attraction, God draws us from the edge of non-existence and takes us to eternity, to the divine life.

This eternal existence is communion with God. An immersion in a universal, all-pervading, never ending love.

Mystics from many different creeds describe divine love as the fundamental cosmic fact. They speak in different languages and from different times and cultures. But they all describe the same state of being.

Our very existence – who and what we are — is a longing for God. We are by our very nature, ceaselessly drawn towards the ultimate good.

“You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.” (Saint Augustine, Confessions)

Love is grace

This is why many theists identify love with grace. Grace is the divine bestowal of our very existence. Our self is an act of charity, a gift from God.

There’s nothing in our nature that qualifies us for the gift of existence. The power of grace isn’t within our grasp. There’s no arrangement we can make, no actions we can perform which can create and secure our own existence.

Grace descends. We receive. Our only choice is to embrace the gift with an open heart, or fight against it.

The refusal of love

With this understanding of God’s love, the wrath of God or the existence of hell, can only be a metaphor. When we reject the unquenchable ardour of God’s love, suffering and evil are the consequence.

If we refuse to open ourselves to love, it can’t move us. It can’t inspire our actions. It can’t transform us. So it can’t lift and carry us to the divine realm.

It can only outwardly burn us as it collides with our resistance. This outward burning is suffering. This is what evil consists of, resisting and moving in opposition to God’s unconditional and all-pervading love.

Evil and suffering aren’t defects in our nature, but ignorance of where to find our highest welfare. We can vividly feel our inner longing for the good. But we try to satisfy that longing with the temporary things of this world.

We ignore God. We love things other than God, thinking we can find fulfilment without him.

All those material things are destined to disappoint us. The inevitability of that disappointment isn’t a matter of opinion or preference. It’s an ontological fact.

Our schemes for finding fulfilment in this world are destined to end in failure. Because they will inevitably end. The greater the love, the greater the pain which accompanies its inevitable loss.

The pinnacle of human thought

This understanding of divine love shows us the depth and breadth of theistic thought. Love of God represents the pinnacle of human thought, and the most exalted goal of a human life.

It also represents the ground on which we stand. Theism integrates the deepest longings of our heart and soul with our intellectual theories about the world.

God’s love is not the insipid kindness of an agreeable old man. Divine love is the elegant and graceful dance that moves the world.