Augustine's Doctrine of Love
Chapter 6: Love and Being
1. The Individual
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.
expression for God. ‘Being which is the source of the community of beings’ is better.15
2. Freedom
If love means willing the freedom of the other, then the possibility of combining love with predestination or absolute determinism is swept away. If God wills to love, and, above all, if he wills to be loved he cannot determine the love of the other, even though it be the
determination of the creature by the creator. This doctrine of radical freedom does not mean that every possible meaning of the doctrine of predestination is negated. If destiny is the shape of a possible future which must be actualized in freedom, then God is the supreme predestinator. Every destiny is shaped by him. But destiny without freedom is meaningless. That is, even God cannot absolutely predetermine a future which has a loving community within it.
Again, we have seen that coercion is one instrument of love, but it must be coercion for the sake of winning freedom for the other, and freedom is personal decision, not automatic response. Therefore this approach to the doctrine of God means a revision of the traditional view of the exercise of the divine sovereignty, it rejects the doctrine that since God is love he must in the end win every creature’s response. If he loves, he risks the refusal of love.
It should be added that the assertion of limited freedom for the creatures also involves the assertion of all the freedom in God compatible with the freedom of the creatures. God is the supreme instance of freedom to love. He never refuses to love, but the specific action of his love lies within the mystery of his being which no ontologieal analysis can fully penetrate or exhaust.
3. Action and Suffering
A third consequence of our analysis is the rejection of impassibility in God. To love is to be in a relationship where the action of the other alters one’s own experience. Impassibility makes love meaningless. In asserting this thesis, familiar in process philosophy, I wish to stress the analogical situation when we speak of God’s suffering.
Suffering in human experience always suggests and may well include
some destruction of our being. It always threatens our poise if not our integrity. It can deaden sensitivity. We may say that these things result when our love is not strong enough, but that is not the whole story. Our finitude has its price. There may be more than we can stand. Life takes us beyond the limits of our strength. To love is to recognize that there will be destruction in time of what is humanly precious.
Suffering in God cannot be regarded in just the same way. It is not a pain or deprivation which threatens his integrity. It must be the
acceptance in the divine of the tragic element in the creation, a patience and bearing with the loss and failure, and ever renewed acceptance of the need for redemptive action. Suffering always threatens our being. It never threatens the being of God, but is an element in the history of his accomplishment of his will. It may involve a threat to the completion of his purpose in a given occasion, but not a deflection of his purpose.
Again, suffering is what it is for us in part because we do not see its full consequences. In our doctrine of God, even God’s knowledge does not encompass all the specific aspects of future free decisions. But God’s being includes his knowledge of all possible outcomes. He knows the boundaries of all tragedy, just as he knows the infinite resources for dealing with every evil. Suffering is thus transmuted in God without being eliminated. God participates in the world’s suffering, but without all the limitations which beset finite sufferers.
We remain close, but not too close, to the tradition when we say that there is that in God which does not suffer at all. The invulnerability in God is the integrity of his being, his creative vision and function which is his sovereign majesty. This is not acted upon, it is not moved or
altered. But God in his creativity works in and through creatures who do suffer and who become occasions of his suffering. The traditional
doctrine that the Son suffers but not the Father seems a hopeless compromise. It makes the relation between the Father and the Son
utterly different from love, and the non-suffering Father an unbelievable being remote from anything which makes being good.
4. Causality
What the analogy of causality excludes from the doctrine of God is his exercise of sheer power to create without becoming involved with the creature, and without being subject to the suffering which follows upon the creature’s freedom. Causality without involvement is incompatible
with love. The traditional assertion that the will of God is the ultimate cause of every event cannot be preserved without qualification, because a will which allows no effective power to any other cannot be a loving will.
Here the ontological approach to love in relation to causality leads a little way toward the solution of a persistent theological problem. How does God act upon the world? How does his love move the sun and the other stars, and human hearts ?16
We have seen that the act of love toward the other may elicit the
response and transformation of the other. Nygren thinks of all eros love in the pattern of the soul’s being drawn towards the object of desire. But the analysis of the human eros reveals that something more is involved.
The power of love is evoked not only by the presentation of the desirable, but by experiencing the attitude and disposition of love toward the self from another. This is a human analogue of what the biblical faith testifies, that God’s self-communication through historical experience has power evoke and reconstruct a human response. The divine action need not be thought of as a matter of super-casuality behind the scenes through which everything happens; but as the continual divine self~communication, presenting to the creatures not only the good to which they may aspire, but also the support and recreative power of the sustaining and loving reality which is in the depths of all things.
All metaphysical analysis is abstract. It seeks only those aspects of being which constitute its structural necessities and forms. No
metaphysics can give us the fullness of being, that of a blade of grass or the smallest unit of matter. Contemporary metaphysical thought
recognizes these limitations. The analysis of structures, however, can enable us to see the concrete more clearly and this constitutes the sole justification of metaphysical thought. We are seeking an interpretation of the love of God and the loves of man in the light of the biblical faith and in relation to human experience. We have gained some ground in this alternative the classical way of speaking about God’s being, and we see that this suggests some fundamental clues concerning how God’s love communicated to us. We look now at three major themes of Christian theology using the instrument of this vision of God’s being.
The three themes are: God and man, the history of freedom and sin;
Jesus Christ, God’s action in the incarnation; and redemption, the meaning of atonement.
NOTES:
1. Quoted from Phyllis Greenacre in Karl Menninger, The Theory of Psychoanalytic Technique (New York: Basic Books, 1962, p. 78;
London: Hogarth Press, 1958).
2. Cf. A. N. Whitehead, Process and Reality, Pt. I, chap. 1. I am speaking of Heidegger’s method in Sein und Zeit which I find more convincing as an approach to metaphysics than his later phase where poetic mysticism seems to replace dialectical analysis.
3. For a penetrating survey of the philosophical discussion of love see Richard McKeon, ‘Love and Philosophical Analysis’ in his Thought, Action, and Passion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1954).
4. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, pp. 408, 297, 615. Critical analysis of Sartre’s doctrine in Paul Ramsey, Nine Modern Moralists (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1962).
5. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, Eng. Tr. by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson of Sein und Zeit (London: S.C.M. Press, 1962).
6. See Andcrs Nygren, Agape and Eros, Pt. I, and Martin Buber, I and Thou (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1958, 2nd ed., pp. 51ff.;
Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark).
7. ‘Prehension’ is Whitehead’s word for ‘organic taking account of’.
8. Charles Hartshorne, Man’s Vision of God, p. 165.
9. Augustine, Confessions, VII, xi, 17.
10. St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Pt. 1, Qu. 13, Art. 1-5.
11. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics. I/1, Preface, p. x; III/1; III/2, §29.
12. A. N. Whitehead, ‘The ultimate test is always widespread, recurrent experience’. Process and Reality, p. 25.
13. Charles Hartshorne, Man’s Vision of God (pp. 114-120).
14. St. Thomas’s doctrine of analogy has been criticized because in the analogy of proportionality we are left with the assertion of some
relationship between God’s being and finite being, but we do not know what this means for God’s being. See Dorothy Emmet, The Nature of Metaphysical Thinking (London: Macmillan, 1946). The agnostic note certainly creeps into St. Thomas’s doctrine and one reason is that he saw the paradoxes involved in combining the view of God as simple, immutable, and impassible with the biblical language about God as Father, Son, and Spirit, begetting the Son, and Creating and Redeeming the World. Process metaphysics proposes analogies in which the Creator- Redeemer God of the Bible is really conceived as creative being.
15. Daniel D. William;, ‘Tillich’s Doctrine of God’, The Philosophical Forum, Vol. XVIII, 1960-1.
16. I have elaborated this point in ‘How Does God Act’ in Reese and Freeman, eds., Process and Divinity (La Salle: Open Court, 1964).
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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.