Love and the Will of God

In Part I of the Encyclical Deus Caritas Est, section 17, Pope Benedict XVI wrote that God loved us first (I John 4:10), and that He has made Himself visible: "in Jesus we are able to see the Father" (John 14:9).  In the love story of the Gospels, "he comes towards us, he seeks to win our hearts, all the way to the Last Supper, to the piercing of his heart on the Cross, to his appearances after the Resurrection and to the great deeds by which, through the activity of the Apostles, he guided the nascent Church along its path.  Nor has the Lord been absent from subsequent Church history: he encounters us ever anew, in the men and women who reflect his presence . . ."  We experience God's love and then can respond with love. 

Continuing in that same section, the Holy Father speaks of love and the "communion of will" in which we, through love, increasingly will the same thing God wills (footnotes omitted):

"In the gradual unfolding of this encounter, it is clearly revealed that love is not merely a sentiment.  Sentiments come and go.  A sentiment can be a marvellous first spark, but it is not the fullness of love. . . .Contact with the visible manifestations of God's love can awaken within us a feeling of joy born of the experience of being loved.  But this encounter also engages our will and our intellect.  Acknowledgment of the living God is one path towards love, and the "yes" of our will to his will unites our intellect, will and sentiments in the all-embracing act of love.  But this process is always open-ended; love is never "finished" and complete; throughout life, it changes and matures, and thus remains faithful to itself.  Idem velle atque idem nolle -- to want the same thing, and to reject the same thing -- was recognized by antiquity as the authentic content of love: the one becomes similar to the other, and this leads to a community of will and thought.  The love-story between God and man consists in the very fact that this communion of will increases in a communion of thought and sentiment, and thus our will and God's will increasingly coincide: God's will is no longer for me an alien will, something imposed on me from without by the commandments, but it is now my own will, based on the realization that God is in fact more deeply present to me than I am to myself.  Then self-abandonment to God increases and God becomes our joy (cf. Ps 73 [72]:23-28).

This discussion of God's love for us leading us to will what God wills should put those minds to rest who grow concerned when some people speak of God's love as if it implied a tolerance of every diverse way of living without regard to morality.  Love and will are united so that "our will and God's will increasingly coincide."

Of course, this connection of love and will is well founded and often discussed among the saints and doctors of the Church.  St. Teresa of Avila mentioned such a unity of will in response to the love described in the Song of Songs in her Meditations on the Song of Songs, 3:1:

"O HOLY BRIDE, let us turn to what you ask for: that holy peace which makes the soul, while remaining itself completely secure and tranquil, venture out to war against all worldly kinds of peace.  Oh, how happy will be the lot of one who obtains this favor since it is a union with the will of God, such a union that there is no division between Him and the soul, but one same will.  It is a union not based on words or desires alone, but a union proved by deeds.  Thus, when the bride knows she is serving the Bridegroom in something, there is so much love and desire to please Him that she doesn't listen to the reasons the intellect will give her or to the fears it will propose.  But she lets faith so work that she doesn't look for her own profit or rest; rather, she succeeds now in understanding that in this service lies all her profit."

Thus, the "communion of will" mentioned in Deus Caritas Est is not unlike the "union of will" mentioned in St. Teresa of Avila's Meditations on the Song of Songs.  Both expect that the natural result of love is that we begin to want the same things God wants:  we begin to want to be holy, we increasingly want to do the will of God.  To speak of God's love, then, is not a different thing from speaking of God's holiness or of God's will for righteousness; rather, to know God's love and to love God in turn entails the will to know and do His will.

St. Edith Stein, in Chapter VII of Finite and Eternal Being ("The Image of the Trinity in the Created World"), analyzes the thinking of St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Augustine on love and will.  In Section 9 of that chapter, she summarizes St. Augustine's view in a way that corresponds to the concept in Deus Caritas Est of how love leads to active charity (such charity being the focus of Part II of the Encyclical):

"He [St. Augustine] places longing desire in the will and says that this desire is something in the nature of love, and that desire turns into love when the desired thing, i.e., knowledge, has been attained.  And there no doubt exists a close relationship between love and will.  The one who loves feels the urge to fulfill the commandments of God: he desires to conform his own will to the will of God.  The will grows out of love, and from willing springs action.  In fulfilling the divine commandments, however, we gain a deeper knowledge of God, and thereby in turn our love increases.  And while love for its part seeks to gain ever deepening knowledge, it is from the very outset not possible to have love without having knowledge.  Love comprises in itself knowledge and presupposes a certain kind of knowledge.  The spiritual life is an ascending life, and every basic form of spiritual life conditions by its own ascent the ascent of the other forms and is in turn stimulated and further advanced by these other forms.  It is precisely the inextricable junction and simultaneous difference of these basic forms of spiritual life that make them an image of the triune God."

After also considering the thinking of St. Thomas Aquinas, Edith says (section 9, pg. 457):

"As was previously pointed out, the one and only perfect actualization of love is the divine life itself, the mutual self-giving of the Divine Persons.  Here each person finds himself in the other, and since both their life and their nature are one, this mutual love is simultaneously self-love and a self-affirmation of the Persons' nature or essence.  In the realm of creatures, the closest approximation to this pure love, which is God, is the self-surrender of finite persons to God.

"No finite spirit [Geist], to be sure, is capable of wholly embracing the Divine Spirit, but God -- and he alone -- embraces and encompasses wholly every created spirit.  Those who surrender their selves to him attain in loving union with him to the highest perfection of their being and to that love which is at once knowledge, surrender of the heart, and free act.  That love is wholly turned upon God, but in union with divine love the created spirit also embraces its own self -- in knowledge, in joyful bliss, and in free self-affirmation.  The surrender of oneself to God is simultaneously a surrender of one's own self -- a self which God loves -- to the entire created world, and in particular to all spiritual beings united with God."

Viewed in the context of these quotations from Pope Benedict XVI, St. Teresa of Avila and St. Edith Stein, there is no real division between a view of God's love as leading to Catholic social action, on the one hand, and a call for obedience to God's moral law, on the other.  Indeed, the love that draws us into a "union with divine love" draws us into a communion of will with God so that we will what He wills, and in that communion of will lies the motivation for charity to the poor and "to the entire created world, and in particular to all spiritual beings united with God." 

Comments

[Francisco]

I wonder though, how come Evolution is based, not on good deeds, but on effort.
How can we, humans, after seing five million years of cannibalism, say that the will of God is to give food to others?
Surely, effort counts on each one of us, surely society advances through science much more than by good deeds.
I am a proffesional of Law, and all I can see is that Law defines itself as the adaptative tool for the forming of society: no Law, certainly, not a good Law, would ever pretend, as the biblical/coranic rules of morality and law do, that it is there forever, that it is unchangable: this makes it automatically anti-scientific.
Therefore, the best would be for you to devote yourself to Politics, and the study of Economy, ... if you really want to improve the economical condition of human being.

With respect to God, yes, but He is the Spirit, and He is love, let us ask Him to give us His presence, and let us talk serious with respect to our survival.

I think God would be much happier, and certainly more seeked by humans, if we only accepted that He has never given any rule of law, and, or, morality, for by so doing, all we have inherited from religion is a guilt conscience, fear, and anxiety.

God, and Christ, wants us to liberate ourselves from this problems of conscience which stems from religion and its morality definitions, and concentrate in Him, his warmth, his presence. All the rest is civil society, which should be directed by ourselves, improved by our social efforts, by science, and the change of law by democracies.

God bless,

[Teresa Polk]

Francisco, thank you for commenting! I love to get comments from Europe. I too am a legal professional, which also made your comments interesting.

I think greater change comes about when people's hearts are moved by love. When people begin to seek to know and do God's will, and see that much of God's will is based in love, they begin to act in accordance with the values supported by love much more readily than when the same values are imposed only by laws.

As for politics and law being greater sources of positive social change than the Church, I would disagree. People are more powerfully motivated from within, when an ethic becomes their own, than they are from externally imposed values, when the laws impose something on them from the outside. Changing the laws does not change people’s hearts.

However, I also want to assure you that the Catholic faith, as a whole, includes concerns of justice and of active involvement in social change.

Moreover, the Church would agree with you to the extent that there is development of Catholic doctrine over the centuries. Cardinal Newman wrote a good bit about that, to name one. Of course, there are many things that do not change over centuries. You might be interested in an essay titled "Development and Negation" by Michael Liccione on the Pontifications blog, which touches on this issue:

http://catholica.pontifications.net/?page_id=1415

There are many things that remain consistent in the law too, and things that you will find governed by laws in different parts of the world, different centuries, and different cultures. Among those would be that there are laws against murder, laws against rape, laws against theft, and so forth -- although the details of those laws certainly change from culture to culture and era to era.

I encourage you to follow the link in the post to Deus Caritas Est and read all of it. This post addresses mostly the mystical and theoretical part. Much of it deals with the issues of politics and justice that may be of interest to you.

Catholicism always includes both contemplation and action, both faith and practice. This post considers primarily the contemplative side of that component, and not all of Deus Caritas Est.

By way of setting this post in context, it is one of a series of posts related to Benedict XVI’s enclyclical Deus Caritas Est and to St. Teresa of Avila’s Meditations on the Song of Songs. This one (“Love and the Will of God”) is about the contemplative side of Pope Benedict XVI, considered together with the writings of two Carmelite saints. The first one was “The Controversy of Love”, about how both the Pope and St. Teresa of Avila encountered some controversy when they wrote about romantic and spiritual love. The last was “A Good and a Better Wine”, on the active side of St. Teresa of Avila, shown in her Meditations on the Song of Songs.

So if your concerns are more political and active, I would suggest that you look at the entire encyclical and perhaps at the other two posts. Here are links for those posts:

http://blog-by-the-sea.typepad.com/blog_bythesea/2006/02/the_controversy.html

http://blog-by-the-sea.typepad.com/blog_bythesea/2006/02/a_good_or_bette.html