The love of God. His and ours.
Ours is the difficult thing to grasp. God’s love for us we can at least appreciate as a distinct possibility, but for us to actually love the transcendent, infinite divinity? The ground of being beyond all created nature?
That… “Transfinite” and utterly non-traversable distance have led many to deny that we could in any meaningful sense love God.
Yet since love in its most basic sense means willing the good of another, and for that other’s sake, it’s inevitable that we can actually love God insofar as we can rationally affirm His existence.
From the Christian’s perspective, loving God is our active and willed cooperation with Grace, the conforming of our will to that of God and His commandments. And the first of these, “…the beginning and end of all the others consists in the love of God: ‘You shall love Yahweh your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength’ (Deut. 6:5).” (Garrigou-Lagrange, R. Knowing the Love of God.)
Such love, the willing of the Good of the highest Good from which all other being flows (i.e. God), is inevitably the perfection of all the virtues.
It’s by definition the path toward our ultimate end and fulfillment, so true love is in a sense sufficent for everything since it inevitably encompasses all the other virtues. “Love, and do what you wish”, writes St. Augustine, since if you really love in this sense, all your actions will be good.
So this holds for the mere natural love of God, for the affirmation and admiration of the summum bonum of the great pagan philosophers, the idea of the Good of Plato, or the tian 天 of classical Chinese philosophy.
Yet this natural love of God is an infinite distance removed from the infused supernatural Charity that only Christianity affirms and reveals. “A love of friendship for God which ordinary reason cannot grasp.” (Ibid).
This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.
No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.
You are my friends if you do what I command you. I do not call you servants any longer, because the servant does not know what the master is doing; but I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father.
You did not choose me but I chose you. And I appointed you to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last, so that the Father will give you whatever you ask him in my name. I am giving you these commands so that you may love one another.
(John 15:12-17)
These words are impossible to grasp. Friendship. The mutual affirmation of that unique reflection of the divine, the unapproachble sense in which both you and I are images of God, an imitable likeness which we must humbly love one another to actually partake in, to indirectly access in sympathetic adoration.
Yet this form of relationship, Christ proclaims, is somehow what God wishes to share with those who love Him. Reason cannot fathom how something like this would be possible, yet revelation affirms it, and faith knows it.
God’s Love for us is indeed said to be “foolishness”. Madness in the eyes of the world. It infinitely exceeds what we could grasp by natural reason, or could ever actually desire. It portends a meaning of our lives absolutely beyond anything we could ever naturally conceive of, or experience, as meaningful.
And it is foolishness, as Paul has it, since it upends the creature’s default relationship to the Creator.
In Christ He died in place of the creature who had become His enemy. Such a thing is inconceivable foolishness for natural reason. Aptly then it is defined as the ‘foolishness of the Cross’ and such ‘foolishness’ is reparation for that other foolishness which is sin.
The rationalists are not wrong in saying that reason, left to itself, cannot comprehend. In fact, one is dealing with a foolishness that nature cannot conceive, which to the rationalists seems unworthy of God. One is dealing with an abyss of supernatural love in which reason is lost; only faith can admit it, only the gaze of the saints can penetrate it.
Yet, only in heaven by the light of the Beatific Vision will the infinitely superior harmony of this mystery ever be completely unveiled.(Garrigou-Lagrange, R. Knowing the Love of God.)
The response of the saints is equally radical.
To love God to the fullest, with the utmost effort of the will, even in the midst of adversity, pain and aridity. A love which somehow, at the end of everything, fully empties itself, and truly says to Him that “better You than I.”
A love which is happy in the mere fact that God is, even if the price is everything.
Even if it were to lose itself forever.
There’s a deep connection here to the darkness of Faith attested to by the saints. This profound and invincible weakness that in a sense is strong enough to support the fullness of being itself.
True Charity is just like Faith not an object, nor a proposition. It’s not something that can even in principle be doubted or considered an illusion, since it’s not a natural entity accessible to our cognitive apparatus. It’s necessarily imputed from the outside, and nothing we can actually possess as our own. It’s only present to us in the mysterious act of reception.
And that’s precisely also why it’s invincible in this profound and ostensible weakness. You can’t reduce to something else what you can’t actually own as an object or natural experience. You can’t eliminate through metaphysical substitution what you do not actually possess. You can say it’s an “illusion”, but that doesn’t matter. Then it’s present in its fullness nonetheless - and “illusions” are metaphysical tangibles. Too thick.
The presence of the mystery is actually, in a sense, too weak to be reduced to something tangible in the world. Then you must add something over and above the faith.
Indeed, in a truly Chestertonian paradox, we only ever “own” the faith through humbly not-owning it. It’s always and necessarily imputed from without, and never possessed by ourselves as such. it’s something we only own by humbly not-owning, and that’s exactly why it’s invincible.
If you love me, you will keep my commandments. And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate, to be with you for ever. This is the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him. You know him, because he abides with you, and he will be in you. (John 14:15-17).
The world doesn’t know it. The world doesn’t know you. Whatever remains of the world in yourselves can’t know it either, and much less negate it. O happy secret. O Quiet House.
“For the foolishness of God is wiser than man's wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than man's strength.” (1. Cor. 1:25).