Augustine's Doctrine of Love
Chapter 6: Love and Being
5. Impartial Judgment in Loving Concern for the Other
Love is often described in terms which contradict impartiality and exclude any kind of evaluation. This is the case not only in descriptions of romantic love as unhinging the reason, but even the highest love is sometimes so interpreted. For example, Martin Buber and Anders Nygren put the highest love in tension with and even in opposition to rational calculation and objective evaluation. I propose a counter thesis, that there can be no real love without the rational function which aims to transcend personal bias, and which assesses objectively the human situation, including that of the lover, the beloved, and their relationship.
Consider that if love is concern for the other as he really is, then objective knowledge must enter the experience of what it means to commit oneself to the other. It is the sheerest sentimentality to suppose that love can dispense with objective knowledge. To be is to be
involved in particular structures of existence, and to be a person is to respect the precise relationships of body, culture, and spirit in which we stand to others. For example, to love another person in the commitment of marriage is to deal with all that person’s relationships, ancestry, family, vocation and life history, ‘for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health’. To love is to accept responsibility for assessing the real situation in which we love, and that means self-discovery and discovery of the other. This does indeed require more than reason. Love
contributes to knowledge and loving is in a sense a way of knowing; yet love does not yield knowledge by itself, but only in relation to the
objective analysis of experience. The demand for impartiality in
judgment then is not a contradiction of love; but the high tribute which love pays to the other, the tribute of seeking the truth in the other and the other in the truth.
This same point may be put in relation to the discovery of the ‘needs’ of the other. Even the most radical assertions that the divine love is
‘uncalculating’ usually come with the concession that love is concern for the need of the neighbour. But how shall we discover needs except by realistic appraisal and understanding? It is the precise trick of emotional bias to make us believe we are exercising love because we are giving the other what we think he needs. We may be ignorant of the real need and actually be satisfying ourselves instead of the other. It is not loving concern alone which tells us what needs are; the structures of
human existence, and their discernment require impartial, loving judgment, united with critical reflection.
The settlement of claims in the light of an objective standard available to all is the meaning of equity, and equity is not the contradiction of love but one of the principles by which love respects the actualities of life. Without love we do fall below the standard of equity, and without forgiveness we miss that element in love which transcends purely rational justice. But love without equity becomes depersonalized.
Charles Hartshorne says: ‘Love is the effort to act upon adequate
awareness of others, awareness at least as adequate ideally as one has of oneself.’8
One of the real dilemmas of human love appears here since love always seems to require concentration of concern upon some and not upon others. This produces a tension in every judgment of human need.
Parents protect their children at the expense of other children. Sin enters here quite readily and easily amidst genuine moral dilemmas. But if the claim of justice is one of the structures of existence, then the being of the other is violated if this claim is not honoured, even in love. We see why in the strongest human loves concern for the other will be tempered with concern for the larger causes of justice which both must respect.
This is in part, at least, what St. Augustine means by loving the other ‘in God’. Only as we love the fullness of God’s purpose more than any other by himself can we really love at all.
(2) GOD’S LOVE AND HUMAN LOVE: THE PROBLEM OF ANALOGY
We come to the question of what use we can make of this analysis of human love when we speak of the love of God. Is not the heart of faith the recognition that God is utterly different from man? God is creator and not creature; Lord and sovereign, not dependent and limited by the conditions of our existence. Our knowledge of the love of God must come from his self-disclosure. It is not a projection from our human loves.
We have seen in our study of the biblical view of love that if we say human experience throws no light on the meaning of the divine love, we are departing from the biblical mode of speaking about God. The Bible uses many human images and analogies: master and servant, husband and bride, father and son. It is not only philosophers who have tried to
think of God through human analogies, it is the way of the biblical witness.
Let us put the point in another way. It may be that all human analogies fail in describing the love of God. But the question of what God’s love means requires us still to interpret the scriptural language. We have seen that the interpretation of love in the biblical faith has taken several
directions in history. We have also seen that the traditional Christian interpretations of love have been largely influenced by one kind of philosophical thought about being. It is surely conceivable that another analysis of love in human experience might open up possibilities of understanding the meaning of the love of God testified to in the Bible in a way which breaks through traditional concepts. The spirit of love is greater than any of its forms of expression or comprehension.
I am arguing then for a revolution in ontological thinking, if we are to speak more clearly about love. On the strictest biblical terms there must be something in common between the words we use to speak about God’s being and about our being, otherwise it is impossible to see how language about God the Father, and God the Son can be meaningful at all. What language could be more humanly relevant? The doctrine that there is a ‘community of attributes’ between God and the creatures is found in St. Augustine in his doctrine of the analogy of being.’9 The central point St. Thomas makes is that any rational justification for such statements about God as that he is one, good, intelligent, wise, and so on, is that the being of the creator is reflected in the being of the creatures.10 Even Karl Barth, who once called the doctrine of the analogia entis the invention of the anti-Christ, has more recently acknowledged that there can be speech about God’s being which is analogical but which is not bound up with all the classic metaphysical doctrines.11 Barth has developed his own doctrine of analogy which, to be sure, he claims is based solely on the biblical revelation.
A full defence of the analogical mode of thinking about God would require an elaborate discussion. What I shall do here is to consider the consequences of applying to the doctrine of God the results of the analysis of the categorical conditions of human love. I shall try to show that this mode of thinking illuminates our experience of all love, and leads to a relevant interpretation of the biblical assertions about God and his revelation in Jesus Christ. In the end, the only justification for
metaphysical thinking is that it throws light on human experience in its widest and deepest ranges.12 Proof is out of place in speech about God,
but we can seek insight where the tradition has left us in confusions and obscurity.
(3) GOD AND THE CATEGORIES
If individuality, freedom, action and suffering, causality, and
impartiality are categorical conditions of human love, then there is an initial presumption for Christian thought that the being of God, who is love, is in some way reflected in these structures of our existence. There is no good reason for taking away from love all that constitutes its
distinctively human aspects and using the remainder to construct a doctrine of love in God.
It is often argued, to be sure, that many of the structures we have designated, such as suffering, the limitation of power by another’s freedom, the involvement in risk, constitute deprivations of being, and hence are not appropriate tokens of the divine nature. But this is
precisely the issue to be discussed. Are they merely deprivations, or are they positive and constituent elements of love? Suppose love is the capacity to will the freedom of the other, whatever that freedom may mean for the one who loves? Is this any less a positive element in the being and value of love than its other attributes, such as power or goodness? Charles Hartshorne says that the notion that God is more perfect the more completely he is removed from change, time, and risk, is a prejudice which simply contradicts our experience of human love.13 What we have to look for is some explanation of why the tradition that perfect love is beyond suffering has such a powerful hold.
If the categorial analysis of love explodes the notion that the conception of God must require absolute simplicity, unchangingness, and
impassibility then the analogy of being may be understood so as to affirm a creative, temporal, and relational aspect in God’s being. In this metaphysical outlook we can really carry through the analogy between human love and the love which is in God. It will still be analogy. We acknowledge our situation and our limitations when we use human categories in our speech about God. if we seek a doctrine of being, it is clear that God as the reality which is necessary to all being cannot sustain exactly the same relationship to time, space and change, which the creatures exhibit. God’s being is that on which all being depends.
All times are embraced in his everlastingness but the future is really future for him also. The power of being in the creature is not the power of being itself, but a derived and limited power. God does not come to
be or pass away, but he can be involved in the changes in a world where there is coming into being and passing away.
The problem of a metaphysical theology is to carry through the analogy of being with full justice both to the structures of experience and to the transmutation of structures as they apply to the being of God.14
Whitehead, for example, who declares that in rational metaphysics God must exemplify the first principles of being, still has to allow for
categorial differences between God’s way of being and that of the finite actual occasions. God is necessary to every finite being, but no
particular finite being is necessary to God, Love in God must involve what is required for love among the creatures and between God and the creatures, yet God remains God, involved in the history of the creatures as the being upon whom they all depend.
Let us put what this means for the relation of love and being in the metaphysical aspect of theology in a summary statement.
If God is love and the ground of the structure of love, then he remains in the absolute integrity of his being what he is throughout all time and all circumstance. His love is what ours never is, steadfast, adequate to his purpose, complete in concern for all others. Yet God constitutes with his creatures the metaphysical situation in which their love can be real, and in which love between himself and the creatures can be actualized. This means that our categories of individuality and communion with the other, freedom, action and suffering, causality which leaves the other free to be moved by the other, and impartiality of judgment have their analogues in the being of God. This means that God is not non-temporal in all respects, beyond causality, beyond any of the structural
requirements which make love between beings possible. Rather he exemplifies these categories as positive structures of his love.
This constitutes such a considerable revision of the traditional doctrine of God that its very radicalness may argue there must be something wrong with it. I think this reaction is mitigated if we remember that in spite of much of the formal ontological language about God in
traditional theology, the language of devotion has been modelled very largely on the acceptance of God’s hearing, responding, sharing, and suffering with his creatures:
I waited patiently for the Lord;
He inclined to me and heard my cry.
He drew me up from the desolate pit, out of the miry bog,
and set my feet upon a rock,
making my steps secure (Psalms 40:1-2).
And after you have suffered a little while, the God of all grace who has called you to his eternal glory in Christ, will himself restore, establish, and strengthen you. (I Peter 5:10)
In this is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the expiation for our sins. (I John 4:10)
To review all the categories with a full discussion of their analogical application and transmutation is a very large task. Let us indicate the main lines which this inquiry will follow.