What If I Told You Love is Existence

In the presence of the God in whom he believed,

who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist.

-Romans 4:17

If you wish to read this with the footnotes in place, please click: Is God's Being Love?

       Love is understood to be many things: an emotion, a feeling, an action. There are many kinds of love: philio, caritas, and Minne. Yet, in the Bible, love is action. “Rebekah loved Jacob,” and so helped Jacob obtain the birthright from the elderly Isaac. Mary Magdalene loved Jesus, and so she washed his feet and perfumed his head. Jesus Christ loves all mankind, and so He died on the cross to release mankind from its slavery to sin and death. St. John the Evangelist, however, states simply, “God is love.” Since God is simply subsistent being, St. John is stating that being is love, since the source of all being is love.

To begin, being and subsistent being need defining. Being is that which is or “ an essence exercising the act of existence in its own particular way.” Subsistent being is “being which exists in itself, as opposed to accident, i. e., being which necessarily inheres in some other.” If there is being that is the source of all being, that being would have to exist in itself. It could not be accidental being, since that is contrary to the nature of accidents. Also, since subsistent being is greater than accidental being and accidental being cannot give what it does not have, accidental being cannot be the source of subsistent being. It is a subsistent being that would be the source of all being.

Without falling into an endless chain of causation, there has to be a source of being that is itself without a source. As stated above, this source of being must be subsistent being, but without any accidents, as the presence of accidents in the source would limit the source’s ability to be the source of all being. Subsistent being without accidents would be nothing but subsistent being or, stated another way, the source would be all subsistent being in the sense of complete inclusivity. This all subsistent being, therefore, is the source of all being.

An objection to the above could be, that all subsistent being cannot be the source of all being. All subsistent being means that each and every subsistent being is the source of all being. Multiple subsistent beings cannot be the one source of themselves and everything else. That’s ridiculous.

A person, for example, wants to open a fishing pond. The pond, though, is empty and must be stocked with enough fish to satisfy the people, who come to fish there. A few days before opening, the owner of the fishing pond adds all of the fish to the pond at one time. The owner restocking the pond is, then, the source of all of the fish in that pond. There is no way that all of the fish could spontaneously appear in the fishing pond of their own accord.

Understood in that way, the objection is true. As explained above, however, the term is to be understood as all subsistent being in the sense of simple being or being without accidents.

According to St. Thomas, “we must consider not only the emanation of a particular being from a particular agent, but also the emanation of all being from the universal cause,” and “since God is very being by His own essence, created being must be His proper effect,” so God is “something which is to all beings the cause of their being, goodness, and every other perfection” seeing as how “the Godhead is called the being of all things.” God, then, is all subsistent being.

Since, therefore, all subsistent being is the source of all being and all God is all subsistent being, all God is the source of all being.

As demonstrated above, all God is the source of all Being. From St. John, it is clear, that God is love. Said another way, all love is all God.

An objection to this term could be, that by restating God is love as all love is all God, it is being stated that God must conform to any or all subjective understandings of love, thereby making the sovereign, omnipotent God of the universe into a weak, omnipotent, dependent god, whose existence or character is beholden to any or all subjective understandings of love. God, therefore, is being replaced by an idol of subjective opinion and worshipped. All love is not God. God is God.

This restatement of it, though, does not imply that any subjective notion of love is God. Rather, this formulation is declaring, that everything that is contained within the idea of love, that is legitimate and fitting to love as known in nature and revealed by God, is God. For example, the three types of love from classical Greek philosophy, philio, agape, and eros, are included.

Furthermore, “I answer that, the name Love in God can be taken essentially and personally. If taken personally, it is the proper name of the Holy Ghost; as Word is the proper name of the Son.” It is important to note here that Thomas says that love in God can be taken “essentially.” As Thomas explains in more detail, “The Holy Ghost is said to be the bond of the Father and Son, inasmuch as He is Love; since the Father loves Himself and the Son with one Love, and conversely, there is expressed in the Holy Ghost, as Love, the relation of the Father to the Son, and conversely, as that of the lover to the beloved. But from the fact that the Father and the Son mutually love one another, it necessarily follows that this mutual Love, the Holy Ghost, precedes from both. As regards origin, therefore, the Holy Ghost is not the medium, but the third person in the Trinity; whereas as regards the aforesaid relation He is the bond between the two persons, as proceeding from both.” It is apparent, then, as love is the essence of God, that it can be said, that God is love and love is God are both acceptable.

This, then, leads to the conclusion, that all love is the source of all being.

Bibliography

Aquinas, Thomas. Summa Theologiæ.

Clark, S. J., W. Norris. The One and the Many: A Contemporary Thomistic Metaphysics. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2014.

Ford, Adam. adam4d.com. http://adam4d.com/love/.

Johnstone, Laurence. A Short Introduction to the Study of Logic. London: Longmens, Green, and Co., 1887.

Pieper, Josef. Faith. Hope. Love. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2012.