Augustine's Doctrine of Love
Chapter 7: God and Man
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The Spirit and the Forms of Love by Daniel Day Williams
Daniel Day Williams was associate professor of Christian theology in the Federated theological Faculty of the University of Chicago and the Chicago Theological Seminary, then Professor of Theology at the Union Theological Seminary in New York City. Published in 1968 by Harper & Row. This book was prepared for Religion-Online by Harry W. and Grace C. Adams.
the mask of pride. Man falls into unlove, and experiences the boredom and horror of life without meaning. Man is captured by some loves to the exclusion of others. He is the sensualist for whom the flesh becomes God, or the moral idealist for whom ‘love of mankind’ is drained of all emotion and there is neither concern nor pity for real human beings. Yet man must find love in and with others for it is the only fulfilment life offers. He is the being whom no earthly love satisfies, until it becomes a way to the love of God. When man’s love fails or becomes distorted, the final resource in the love of God is a creative act of healing. Love is disclosed as grace. In this and the two succeeding chapters we examine these major assertions of Christian faith in the light of our interpretation of love as spirit at work in history.
(1) LOVE AND THE IMAGE OF GOD IN MAN
In the biblical faith man’s greatness is understood in the light of the image of God which he bears. If God is love the image of God in man defines the forms of love in human existence. Yet the image is defaced, distorted, ‘ruined’, so the Reformers said, by man’s wilful self-
separation from God. Can we get light on the nature of the divine love from man’s distorted experience of love? This question of what happens to the image of God through sin underlies some of the most critical issues in the Christian interpretation of love and it will be worthwhile to give some attention to the history of this theme and its development in contemporary theology.
The traditional Roman Catholic doctrine is derived from Irenaeus, who noted that two words, tselem and demuth are used in Genesis I to assert that God has created man in his image. Irenaeus therefore made a distinction between the image of God which is man’s distinctive endowment of reason, his dominion over nature, and his creaturely dignity; and the similitude to God which is faith, hope and love, that is, the full and righteous relation which man is supposed to enjoy as God’s creature. For Irenaeus it is this similitude which is lost in the fall but the image remains relatively intact. This has formed the ground plan of all subsequent Catholic theology with its formula of ‘grace completing nature’ as the pattern of redemption. The similitude must be restored to the imago. There are, of course, many qualifications to be made of this brief characterization, but it is essentially the traditional Catholic position.2
The Protestant Reformers attacked this structure. They said that not only
is the similitude lost in the fall, but the whole image of God is left in
‘ruins’. Nothing in human nature is left intact after sin. The reformers wanted to show that the corruption of the fall extends to the whole man.
They believed that the Catholic pattern leads to an unjustified confidence in human reason which is subject to pride and demonry.
They saw the image of God as constituted by the ‘original righteousness’ with which God endowed Adam. They said this
righteousness, which is man’s right relation to God, has been lost almost completely. We say ‘almost’ because Luther and Calvin had to make some qualification concerning the effects of the fall. Neither they nor their followers in Protestant orthodoxy believed that man has lost all sense of God or of moral obligation. Something constructive must be left in human reason and conscience if man is to have a basis for a collective life with a measure of justice and sanity. Thus Calvin asserts that the capacity for ‘civic righteousness’ remains in fallen man.3
Whichever of these traditional positions we take, we see that our view of the place of love in human existence is at stake. The Catholic doctrine makes the love of God one of the three supernatural virtues, and says that in the fall faith, hope and love are lost. But can the love of God be lost without profound effect upon the whole of man’s life? When St.
Augustine says that without faith and love the reason cannot be rightly ordered in the world or rightly directed toward God he seems closer to the Reformers than to St. Thomas. On the other hand, the Catholic tradition contends for a truth which must not be surrendered, that there are in fallen man capacities for reason, conscience, and creativity which are not wholly destroyed by sin.
Theology in the twentieth century has been interpreting the imago dei in a way which expresses the personal and historical nature of the relation between God and man. Thus the foundation is laid for a theology which understands love as the centre of human existence. Since it is the
Christian faith that God is love, it is curious that theology has been so late in taking love as the key to the Christian doctrine of man. Let us see what this new direction involves for an understanding of human love and the divine love.
In a well-known controversy Karl Barth and Emil Brunner debated Brunner’s thesis that the imago dei remains in fallen man formally, but that it is lost materially. To this Karl Barth replied, ‘Nein’.4
Subsequently both Barth and Brunner explicated their positions in ways which not only brought their views closer together, but which may avoid
the compromise of the reformers with the ‘relic’ of the imago, and the dubious simplicity of the Catholic view that sin leaves the humanum relatively intact.
Karl Barth now speaks of the imago dei as the distinctive form of human existence, that is, life in community. Following a suggestion made by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Barth says that the connection in Genesis between the imago dei and the creation ‘male and female’ is not
incidental, but that this primary form of human community indicates the meaning of the image of God in man. Barth analyses man’s life in
community in four ‘categories of the distinctively human’. These are:
(1) Being in encounter is a being in which one man looks another in the eye.
(2) There is mutual speaking and hearing.
(3) We render mutual assistance in the act of being.
(4) All the occurrence so far described as the basic form of humanity stands under the sign that it is done on both sides with gladness.5 In this structure of community Barth sees a reflection of the divine community, the Trinity. Barth reminds us that God says, ‘Let us make man in our image’. Barth thus gives his own version of St. Augustine’s bold suggestion that in the being of man there is a reflection of the holy Trinity, God’s being as Creator, the Father; the knowledge of his being, the Logos; and the rejoicing in that knowledge, the Spirit. Barth here continues the tradition of ‘metaphysical’ theology except for one very important difference. Barth says this ‘image of God’ does not give man any knowledge of God whatever. Man does not know God. His human existence does not point him toward God. All man’s religion is false and idolatrous. Thus Barth seems in the end to maintain the position he asserted against Brunner: there is nothing in man as he actually is which in any way discloses his origin in God.
It is hard to see how Barth’s ambivalent position here can be defended.
If the form of man’s life in community is derived from the being of God, then there is something in man which does point toward the true God, however obscurely it may be known. Process theologians make this criticism of Barth. They believe man has an awareness of his God- relationship, however confused it becomes.
Apart from the special issue concerning Barth’s doctrine of sexuality as the key to the imago dei, there is something like a consensus in
contemporary theology concerning the theme of the imago dei. What we are coming to see is that it is a mistake to define the imago dei as any set of attributes or qualities which man may possess. The imago dei needs to be conceived in dynamic terms as the relatedness which God has established between himself and man and to which man can respond.
Karl Barth sees the imago in the forms of human interaction, the life of personal communication in sharing and rejoicing. Emil Brunner stresses the theme of responsibility.6 Man is the being who can respond to the claim of the other, and give himself to the other. James Muilenburg interprets the Genesis in similar terms:
This is characteristic of Old Testament thought, everywhere; divine revelation is revelation which places man before a choice, a decision which must be made. The highest purpose of man — his supreme task and function — is to do the will of God. It is not coincidence that Christian faith sees the Son of God wrestling in the torment of decision before he goes to the cross.. . . It is the image of God in man which makes him a decision-making person. His ability to choose, the freedom implied in his choice, his sense of difference and value, these surely are aspects of what is divine in him.7
All these converge on the view that the imago dei should not be
conceived as a special quality, but as the relationship for which man is created with his neighbour before God. The image of God is reflected in every aspect of man’s being, not as a special entity but as the meaning of the life of man in its essential integrity. But surely this can be most clearly grasped if we say that love is the meaning of the imago dei. In this way we can recognize in man that which underlies his special capacities such as reason, moral judgment, artistic creativity, and
religious awareness. All these find their meaning in life which is created for communion, that is personal existence in community with others.
This is the universal fact of facts, deeper than reason and the integrating reality in life.
This thesis that the imago dei is the form of creation for life fulfilled in love gives us our basis for the interpretation of sin. The root of sin is failure to realize life in love. The cleft in man which results from sin is more than the loss of a supernatural endowment. It is disorder in the roots of his being. It is the disaster resulting from twisted, impotent or
perverted love. Sin infects the whole man. It does not at once destroy the reasoning powers, though in extremity it may do even that. It does not completely take away conscience, though the loss of love may finally result in the disappearance of conscience. It does not eliminate creativity from man’s life, though it may turn that creativity into demonic self-destructiveness. It does not leave man without any sense of God or knowledge of the holy, though it may distort this sense, turning man’s worship into idolatry and leaving him without hope and seemingly without God.
If this analysis be correct all human loves have something in them
which pulls them on a tangent toward the love of God. They reflect their origin in God. A doctrine of man following this clue will search in the human loves, even in their incredible distortions, for that which reveals man’s relationship to the loving God who is his Creator. The love of God can be present whether it is overtly recognized or not.
In this way contemporary theology has moved to a dynamic
interpretation of the image of God, its loss and restoration. The process theology which informs our interpretation of Christian faith agrees wholeheartedly with this view of the image of God in man; but it
proposes a distinctive addition to the doctrine, for process theology sees love disclosed in a history in which the spirit of God creates new forms.
In this history God is involved with the world both as its eternal ground and as the supreme participant in the suffering which his creativity involves. In process theology therefore the ‘analogy of being’ which holds between God and the creatures must be related to a fully historical conception of what being is. Man bears the image of God in his
temporality as well as his participation in eternity, in suffering as well as in peace. His loves are in process. There are three implications of this way of understanding the image of God in man, which have important consequences for our understanding of man’s estrangement from God and the consequent disorder in his existence.
(2) GOD’S CREATIVITY AND MAN’S
God’s love is creative power bringing the worlds into being, and working with them for the fulfilment of an ever new creative order of life. The Kingdom of God is the goal of his creation, but we need not conceive the Kingdom as a fixed ‘state of being’ toward which things tend. The Kingdom of God is the fulfilment of God’s being in relation to every creature, and if being is love, then the Kingdom must be an
infinite realm of creative life.
Man’s creation in the image of God is his call to participate in creativity, in its splendour and its suffering. Creativity is at work in all things, and certainly in what we call the secular orders. To love is to become
responsible for doing what needs to be done to make the world a more tolerable place which reflects more fully the glory of its origin. When we love God we love the infinite creative source of being. God’s work is everywhere and needs no state of completion for its meaning is endless creative life. To love God is to love the one who sets the ultimate boundaries to life, boundaries which are not defined by a final state of affairs, but by ever new possibilities of growth.
The second implication of this doctrine has to do with the metaphysical truth that to be is to respond. We have seen that passivity to the other, setting the other free, and the will to have one’s own existence shaped by the other as well as to give oneself creatively constitutes one of the categorial conditions of love. If then life in communion is the essential nature of man, this includes transformation by participation with the other, and the acceptance of suffering with and for the other. It is not the essence of man to try to make himself invulnerable. That is sin. It is the essence of man to find the meaning of his life in a community of mutual responsiveness and sharing.
This doctrine exactly reverses Jean-Paul Sartre’s view that what marks human existence is the impossibility of breaking through to the other or being reached by the other. The tragedy is indeed where Sartre sees it, in the way we do become ‘walled off’ from one another. But this is tragic because it contradicts man’s essential being, which is his will to
communion.
We also find here a resolution of the problem which D’Arcy has posed in the tension between the two loves of self-affirmation and self-giving.
Something has to link these two loves, and in D’Arcy’s structure as we saw it there would have to be still a third love. But in the process view there is no need for that complication. Both self-affirmation and self- giving are aspects of the essential love which is the will to communion.
Self-affirmation without response is deadly. That is why egoism so often becomes desperate. Self-giving without self-affirmation is
meaningless. That is why much of what appears to be self-giving love is really self-destruction. What we need to see is that self-affirmation and self-giving are united in the essence of love which is communion.
Tensions are present indeed, and the failure to reconcile them constitutes the dark side of the human condition, but there is no contradiction in the essential pattern of love.
We are speaking of the imago dei, and this means that the love which God gives to man and which man may return to God bears some analogy to the human will to participation. God makes himself
vulnerable to receive into his being what the world does in its freedom, and to respond to the world’s action. We acknowledge always a drastic limitation in speaking of the being of God and his love. What it means for God to love the world, to suffer, to give freedom to the creatures and to will communion with them is the very mystery of existence. We must not equate our being with God’s and say that love, suffering, freedom, and creativity mean for him precisely what they mean for us. What we can do, however, within the perspective of Christian faith, is to give an account of the love of God which does not make nonsense out of the profoundest aspects of love in human experience. If we say that the imago dei in man is his creation for communion with God and the creatures, we mean that God wills communion on terms of man’s real freedom and responsiveness. It is to know that the love God offers is responsive love, in which he takes into himself the consequences of human actions, bears with the world, and urges all things toward a society of real freedom in communion.
This doctrine in no way negates the great assurance of the New Testament of the steadfastness and the inexorableness of the love of God. Paul’s hymn at the close of Romans 8 expresses the ground of Christian faith:
I am persuaded. . . that nothing can separate us from the love of God.
So also does his assertion that love never passes away (I Corinthians 13). What God gives is his absolute faithfulness, his everlastingness in unceasing love. The meaning of existence lies in the possibility of communion in freedom; this is what is assured to faith.
The power of God, however, is not that of absolute omnipotence to do anything. It is the power to do everything that the loving ground of all being can do to express and to communicate and fulfil the society of loving beings. God’s power expresses his love, it does not violate it.
Therefore it is the kind of power which holds the world together in one society, setting limits to the freedom of the creatures without destroying