God is Love

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nativity

Confession: I’m behind on my to-do list, my creative juices are running dry, and I do not have an original, funny, up-to-the-minute post for you tonight. (I know you were waiting for one with bated breath; sorry to disappoint.) But I decided to post something I wrote a few years ago over Christmas break — so here follows a modest reflection on the Incarnation.

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Among the greatest reflections that St. John’s famous declaration “God is love” (1 Jn 4: 8, 16) have inspired are The Four Loves, by C.S. Lewis, and Pope Benedict’s first encyclical Deus Caritas Est.

Pope Benedict explores the nature of love as expressed in the traditional definitions of eros and agape in order to understand Divine Love.  Agape, or “descending love,” is “concern and care for the other…it is ready, even willing, for sacrifice.”  Eros, or “ascending love,” is sometimes portrayed as the antithesis of agape: eros is “possessive or covetous love…a fascination for the great promise of happiness.”

Benedict, however, sees the relationship between eros and agape differently.  “[I]n drawing near to the other, [eros] is less and less concerned with itself, increasingly seeks the happiness of the other…bestows itself and wants to ‘be there for’ the other. The element of agape thus enters into this love, for otherwise eros is impoverished and even loses its own nature.”  Divine Love, in the Bible, is not only the obvious agape of Christ’s sacrifice: it is also the eros of Hosea, Ezekiel, and the Song of Songs.  “God loves, and his love may certainly be called eros” (desirous) “yet it is also totally agape” (sacrificial, merciful, and gratuitous).

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Though Lewis (obviously) speaks of four types of love in his famous book, he too begins his work by contrasting only two types: Gift-love and Need-love.  Gift-love is that which “moves a man to work…for the future well-being of his family which he will die without sharing,” while Need-love is that which “sends a lonely or frightened child to its mother’s arms.”  Divine Love, he writes in his introduction, is pure Gift-love: “The Father gives all He is and has to the Son. The Son gives Himself back to the Father, and gives Himself to the world, and for the world to the Father, and thus gives the world (in Himself) back to the Father too.”  In the rest of the book, Lewis arrives at a more nuanced view of human loves, but Divine Love remains, to him, pure Gift-love.  “Need-loves, so far as I have been able to see, have no resemblance to the Love which God is,” for God is sovereign and self-sufficient and thus incapable of Need-love, which is by definition “a cry for help.”

The Christian reads the Bible as salvation history: the account of God’s love for mankind since Creation.  More concretely than His covenants with Israel in the Old Testament, the new covenant of Christ’s sacrifice reveals God’s love—eros and agape—for His people.  “In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him” (1 John 4:9).  “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16).  Because God loved His people as a bridegroom loves his bride (eros), He gave his Son for them in the sacrificial love of agape.

Pope Benedict points out that Aristotle knew the self-sufficient divine power “is indeed for every being an object of desire and of love,” but thought the divine to be “solely the object of love,” not a being who loves.  In contrast, “[t]he one God in whom Israel believes…loves with a personal love.”  And yet He remains omnipotent.  Lewis wrote in astonishment, “God, who needs nothing, loves into existence wholly superfluous creatures in order that He may love and perfect them.”

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Considering Divine Love in this light, and in light of Christ’s sacrifice, Lewis’s definition of Divine Love as pure Gift-love seems entirely correct.  But in coming to the world as a baby, God Himself voluntarily experiences human Need-love.  As Pope Benedict said in his Christmas Eve 2008 homily, “He becomes a child and puts himself in the state of complete dependence typical of a newborn child. The Creator who holds all things in his hands, on whom we all depend, makes himself small and in need of human love” [emphasis mine].  In this way God reveals His astounding humility: the God of power and might becomes a baby, full of human Need-love and at the mercy of human Gift-love.  Divine Love, separated from Jesus’ childhood, could seem too great to comprehend or bear.  But Jesus, true God and true man, loved and depended on his parents like an ordinary child.

And at the same time that God loved with Need-love, He made Himself more lovable to us, says Pope Benedict.  From the same homily:

The medieval theologian William of Saint Thierry once said that God — from the time of Adam — saw that his grandeur provoked resistance in man, that we felt limited in our own being and threatened in our freedom. Therefore God chose a new way. He became a child. He made himself dependent and weak, in need of our love. Now, this God who has become a child says to us: you can no longer fear me, you can only love me.

He hides His glory that we may better see His love, and love Him better in return.  The old injunction to “love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might” (Deuteronomy 6:5) suddenly becomes much easier to obey, for God has a human face in Jesus Christ.

Lewis saw that, even before the Incarnation, God’s grace could enable men to give Him not only Need-love but also Gift-love and, greatest of all, Appreciative love: “Need-love cries to God from our poverty; Gift-love longs to serve, or even to suffer for, God; Appreciative love says: ‘We give thanks to thee for thy great glory.’”  The Incarnation gives new dimension to all three.  When we experience fellowship with Christ, ignoring our Need-love for Him becomes impossible.  When we remember Christ’s sacrifice for us, we gain courage to serve Him with Gift-love in return.  Finally, when we contemplate the God who loves His unworthy people enough to become human and die for their sake, Appreciative love is only natural.  In meditating on the Incarnation, “we know and believe the love God has for us” (1 John 4: 16).

Anna Williams

Anna Williams

Anna Williams is a junior fellow at First Things magazine, a former Collegiate Network fellow at USA TODAY, and a recent graduate of Hillsdale College.

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