It is estimated that there have been some million love songs recorded throughout various cultures and ages. Love as a subject of poetry and pondering never seems to lose its fascination. The desire for love, the search for love, finding love and losing it – there are, in all cultures, endless expressions of this unquenchable longing to go out from oneself to union with another. It has such power in the human heart that virtually every culture and belief has raised it to divine status, with various gods and goddesses of love ruling over human destiny. Frequently, love and fertility are linked, an obvious connection and one that is extended from human love and reproduction to affecting agriculture and husbandry. In another, very different, extension, there is also in some pantheons a connection between love, lust, war and death. We see this in the relationship between Aphrodite and Ares, the goddess of love and the god of war. The connection is even more explicit in the person of the Freyja, the Norse goddess of love, sex, war and death.
These varying depictions of different gods and goddesses ruling over love can be seen as reflecting “the realities of life as humans perceive them.”[1] Yet one point that all these deities have in common is that they are all gods or goddesses “of love.” They exercise power over love as experienced by other divine or semi-divine beings, as well as by humans. None of them however are ever described as “being love.” In fact, none of them can be love, for love is a relationship and no person can by themself be a relationship. As we saw in an earlier article, Christianity is the only world view that states that “God is love.” This it can do because it professes God to be a relationship, to be Trinity.
This identification in Christianity of God as love expresses a total unity of persons beyond the understanding of love in any culture. It could be said to be the projection of the human desire for union with the other, but that explanation falls short, for it avoids the question of why such a definition appeared so late in human history. The desire for the union in love has clearly been present in the human heart since words were found to express it, but no expression of a union similar to the one in the Trinity has been found in any other culture. If the Trinity is a projection of a purely human desire, why did it take so long to appear, only finding expression 2,000 years ago? Moreover, if it is a projection of a deeply felt human desire, why do not more people flock to it? These are good questions, and because of them, it is not easy to dismiss the doctrine of the Trinity as some purely human construct.
The belief in the Trinity has a foundation on the revelation of God in the Old Testament: “Shema yisrael Adonai eloheinu Adonai echad.” “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one.”[2] This proclamation of the One God against all pressure, all persecutions, is the glory of Judaism. Down through century after century, against nation after nation, the faithful adherents to the Covenant with Abraham stood firm in their belief that God is one and there are no other deities.
The unfolding of the inner life of this one God was revealed in Jesus and was made graspable by the Holy Spirit. God is one because God is Father giving Himself totally to the Son in the mutual gift that is the Spirit. Such a total giving is difficult for us to understand. Fatherhood, in our experience, is at its very best only a partial gift of self. An infinite, total self-gift is beyond our ability to imagine, but it is not beyond our ability to desire, for we are created in the image of such giving. To ponder it stretches our understanding of many realities: giving itself, fatherhood, life, person, love.
As we have seen, Christianity is the only worldview that states that God is love. It does so because it believes that God is a Trinity of mutual self-giving. But what do we mean by love? Does our understanding of love fit, even inadequately, such a relationship? This is an important question since this series discusses what it means for man and woman to be created in the image of God. If we are created in the image of God who is love, we will never understand ourselves until we come to a better understanding of what divine love is. The general Catholic definition of love is “to will the good of the other.” The Father certainly wills the good of the Son in begetting Him. He chooses to beget the Son for the good of the Son, not for the good of Himself. This choice, this act of the Father’s will, is the begetting of the Son. Nevertheless, I think we should stretch this definition a bit to include its mode of action. God is what God wills, and God wills to be Father. The essence of fatherhood is the giving of life, and it is this total life-giving self-gift of the Father that begets the Son. From this, I think we can define this Trinitarian love as
“the gift of oneself that makes the other more perfectly himself.”
In the Trinity, willing the good of the other is totally personal and it is totally gift. The Father gives Himself so totally to the Son that this giving is the Son. The distinction of Persons and the unity of action are not ruptured.
However there is still more to be considered. A gift is a donation to another, but it does not become a gift solely in the donation. To be a gift, it needs to be confirmed as a gift. There is the classical question: if a tree falls in the forest when there is no one to hear it, does it make a sound? The answer is, No; it creates sound-waves, but these sound-waves do not become sound until they are received by a receptor. Sound-waves are silent until they are perceived by something capable of hearing.
In the same way, a gift does not become a gift until it is accepted as a gift by the one to whom it is offered. It can be refused. In this case, the donation remains an offer on the part of the giver, but it is not fulfilled as a gift. If the giver insists on its being taken against the receiver’s will, then it becomes an imposition and ceases totally to be a gift. A gift accepted can make the one who accepts it more perfectly himself, as our definition has stated, but an imposition distorts both the giver and the receiver. To impose something is never an act of love.
The Father gives Himself totally to the Son. The Son accepts Himself totally from the Father, and in doing so, He confirms the Father as Father. This acceptance is the response of the Son that confirms the gift and makes of it an act of love. This response is in turn a gift, a self-giving of the Son that makes the Father perfectly Father. The giving and the acceptance constitute the full act of love, and this act is the Holy Spirit.
This single, infinite act of shared gift and response is the life of the Trinity. This is the inner life of the Three Persons, yet their action of love does not stop there. They chose to extend this mutual giving to other beings capable of receiving it. God is Being itself, and, in the act of creation, He gave being to creatures who could receive Him: to inanimate objects and living beings, who receive His act of creating, and to rational beings who both received it and responded to it. These are the angels and human beings, both of whom share in the gift of sonship by their response to God’s gift of love. That gift of love is God’s giving of Himself that makes angels and men perfectly themselves. By their response to God’s gift, they become sons of God by adoption. In our next article, “The Kingdom of the Sons of God,” we will look more closely at the creation God gifted into being.
Notes:
[1] https://owlcation.com/humanities/gods-goddesses-love
[2] Deut 6: 4
With thanks to Where Peter Is and Sister Gabriela of the Incarnation, O.C.D, where this article originally appeared.
