§ 166. The divine love, as the attribute in virtue of which the divine nature imparts itself, is seen in the work of redemption.
Conf. Basil. v.: Status huius scripturae canonicae totius is est, bene Deum hominum generi velle et eam benevolentiam per Christum Dominum declarasse … quae fide sola recipiatur.
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The two points indicated in the paragraph are not infrequently questioned even in the circles to which we belong. That the Supreme Being imparts Himself, and that this constitutes the very essence of divine love, is a position rejected by many as mystical; and the second point, that, namely, which restricts to the channel of redemption a divine self-impartation alleged to be going on everywhere, is rejected as unduly exclusive, and as confining the manifestations of the divine perfection to too narrow a range. Moreover, those who diverge from us in this way are chiefly people who, generally speaking, tend to conceal the distinctive features of Christianity rather than give them prominence. As regards the first point, such thinkers recognize the divine love in all those arrangements of Nature and all those dispositions of human affairs which protect life or further it. And yet, apart from redemption, and taken only in this sense, the divine love must always remain a matter of doubt. Supposing we regard the single life as its object, then, if we are not going to lapse into the grossest particularism, it is impossible from such aids to life to infer the divine love; they involve restraints upon the lives of others; so that the presence of love would always imply the presence of its opposite.1 Indeed, this is true not merely of helps and hindrances to sensible well-being; it applies also to the spiritual development of the single life; in very many respects favour to one involves the neglect of others. But if we put the single life aside and rather consider humanity—that is to say, our racial consciousness—then (since in this case helps and hindrances of individuals cancel each other, because each conditions the other) we shall be all the readier to return to the position that divine love does not reveal itself unequivocally except where it shows a generally protective and fostering care of what is highest and most specific in man, namely, his God-consciousness. And this, to Christian eyes, seems everywhere outside the sphere of redemption to be in a depressed condition. Thus we again find ourselves in the sphere of the divine self-impartation. So that, even when we are only seeking to exhibit the divine love as beneficent and protective, we cannot as Christians afford to insist on anything less or lower than that impartation of God in Christ and the Holy Spirit whereby the God-consciousness is renewed and made perfect. For even though every form of the God-consciousness, however imperfect (indeed, even its latent presence as something merely longed for), ranks for us as a divine impartation to human nature, it yet is not such that we can rest in it. On the contrary, such a divine impartation viewed from whatever side appears merely as a transitional stage, to which belong only human states that are provisional and imperfect.
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On the other hand, it is objected to our paragraph, for one thing, that it was not necessary to wait for redemption in order to perceive the divine love even in its character as a divine self-impartation, and for another that it is in the highest degree unsympathetic and ungrateful to find that love solely and exclusively in redemption. Now as regards the first point, people say that an impartation of God occurs in whatever in man can be taken as belonging to the image of God, therefore in reason with all its endowments—nay, in everything on which the original perfection of man is based, as well as in all those germs of spiritual development with which our nature is endowed. To this, it is granted, there certainly also belongs that God-consciousness which underlies piety; but if we were on that account to bind up the knowledge of divine love with redemption alone, we should be attaching the highest worth of all to what is really less important. For, it is argued, the difference in God’s dealings with creatures incapable of God-consciousness, and with such as develop this consciousness even in the feeblest and most imperfect way, is greater by far than that existing between His dealings with the latter and with those whom we call regenerate; for obviously the difference between the content of the God-consciousness in the last two classes is far less than that between the first two. To this we may reply that in virtue of their capacity for the God-consciousness all men certainly are also objects of the divine love; but the divine love does not realize itself in them simply as such; rather, starting from the fear of God (which was, of course, the prevailing religious temper under the law) they at most get through to the negative consciousness that the Supreme Being is devoid of jealousy—which is still very far from being a recognition of the divine love. That only comes with the efficacious working of redemption, and it comes from Christ. As for those who still (this we can say in a true sense of the whole non-Christian world) hover between idolatry and godlessness, just in so far as they do not love God, He cannot love them. And thus here, too, we come back to the position that He loves them only as He sees them in Christ, just as it is only when they themselves are in Christ that they come to a knowledge of the divine love.
As regards the second point, it is urged that even if wherever self-consciousness as such includes God-consciousness, the love of God first comes out in redemption, yet elsewhere it reveals itself in much that is exactly the same outside Christianity as within, and pre-eminently in all the triumphs of human knowledge and mastery of Nature. But to this we reply that all human life is to be pervaded by the powers of redemption, and that it is only as so pervaded that it reaches perfection. So that no human good of any kind is conformed to the relevant divine will, except as it is thus brought into connexion with that predominance of the God-consciousness in our soul which we owe to Christ. On the other hand, nothing which does not represent the divine will can reveal the divine love. Our paragraph, therefore, has only to be taken in the sense made inevitable by what went before2 to justify itself perfectly.
§ 167. God is Love.
1 John 4¹⁶.
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Already it has been stated repeatedly that in God there can be no distinction between essence and attributes, and that just for that reason the conception ‘attribute’ is not particularly well fitted to set forth the Divine Essence. Still, this also implies that, in so far as anything true is predicated of God by means of what we posit as a divine attribute, what is thus truly predicated must also express the Divine Essence itself. On this account it must necessarily be possible to form similar propositions, affirming of Him all other attributes, if these as such have any claim to be posited at all. However, no such propositions occur in Scripture, nor has it ever been laid down in Church doctrine that God is eternity, or omnipotence, or the like. And while certainly we might venture to say that God is loving omnipotence or omnipotent love, yet we must admit that in the first of these forms as much as in the second love alone is made the equivalent of the being or essence of God. Hence it is in this exclusive form that our paragraph has to be established and justified, namely, that love alone and no other attribute can be equated thus with God. Only, it is understood that here also we wish to have nothing to do with any conception of God reached by way of speculation, but that what we have to show is merely why this attribute is thus distinguished from the others which we have come to affirm in the course of our argument.
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To begin with, as regards the attributes which we arrived at in the first part of this work, they made then no claim to rank as such designations of the Divine Essence that they could be substituted for the name ‘God.’3 Even although we explain omnipotence as the attribute in virtue of which all finite things are through God as they are, while we certainly in that case posit the divine act in its entirety, it is without a motive, and therefore as an action wholly indeterminate in character; and it can only be incorrectly, and under the influence of quantitative standards of measurement, that we name God omnipotence. The finite as such is not merely a manifold; it is also something mutable, and is invariably given to us solely in impermanent states or stages of transition. So that the statement in question really conveys nothing but what the finite is through God, as willed and posited by Him; and unless we pass out beyond the finite sphere we all the time remain uncertain as to the nature of the will of God which as such is implied in omnipotence. The same thing of course holds true of the other divine attributes treated of in the same context. We arrived at each of them by abstraction from the definite feeling-content of our God-consciousness; hence, if we are not to project them in thought into the attributes yielded by reflection on this feeling-content (as happens in the formula that God is omnipotent or eternal love), but rather to take them strictly by themselves, we are bound to say that belief in God as almighty and eternal is nothing more than that shadow of faith which even devils may have.4
Nor are the two attributes (holiness and justice) discussed in our Second Part, under its second aspect, such as originally could stand as expressions of the Divine Essence. For we cannot say that God in Himself is justice or holiness; for neither of these attributes can be conceived apart from a relation to evil as well as to the antithesis between evil and good. And neither the antithesis nor its solution has any existence for God, considered solely in Himself. Hence the action of these attributes separately from the others is exclusively limited to a certain sphere, and it is only when we cancel this separation and resolve them into those attributes which we are now discussing as the result of the second half of our exposition, that they are recognizable as divine attributes at all. So that what was formerly considered as the work of divine holiness and justice is now properly (even though it be more by way of preparation than of fulfilment) reckoned in as part of the work of redemption. Thus both of these attributes, like the others, merge for us in the divine love, this last viewed solely in its preparatory manifestations; and the divine love is holy and just love inasmuch as essentially it begins with these preparatory stages; in the same way it is almighty and eternal love. Love and wisdom alone, then, can claim to be not mere attributes but also expressions of the very essence of God, while yet we do not say God is wisdom precisely as we do God is love; and the point is one which we can elucidate as follows, even before we deal with the conception of wisdom. If we look at the way in which we become aware of the two attributes respectively, it turns out that we have the sense of divine love directly in the consciousness of redemption, and as this is the basis on which all the rest of our God-consciousness is built up, it of course represents to us the essence of God. But the divine wisdom does not enter consciousness thus directly, but only as we extend our self-consciousness (as personal, but even more as racial consciousness) to cover the relation of all the elements of reality to each other. Indeed, since the two attributes cannot be conceived in separation from each other, and since love is not the perfection of wisdom but wisdom the perfection of love, it follows that love would not be implied in so absolute a degree if we thought God as wisdom, as wisdom would be if we thought Him as love. For where almighty love is, there must also absolute wisdom be.
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