God is love.
We've read it on greeting cards and heard it at weddings.
God is love.
What could that possibly mean?
After all, we've already seen that God is good.
What does it add to say that He is love?
Here we discover a reality as beautiful as it is mysterious.
In this video, we continue our discussion of the divine names or properties.
In the last video we described how God has an intellect or perhaps better, is His intellect.
Here, let's consider the will of God and the love He has for Himself and His creation.
Since God has an intellect, it follows that He has a will.
Will, in our experience, just is intellectual appetite.
When we discover something good for us, we are inclined towards it.
Basically, since we are this type of thing, namely a rational animal, we are drawn by
those goods which perfect us.
The faculty which reaches out to intelligible goods, we call will.
Now, God doesn't need perfecting, so there's no appetite in God in the way that there is
in man, but there is still a spontaneous unfolding of intellect into will.
In a strange way, we can say that God's nature fits Him for Himself, and so He gravitates
accordingly.
Thus, His will is expressed principally in His love for Himself.
Like we saw with His intellect, God's will just is His being.
God is His existence, is His will, is His act of willing, and is the object of His willing.
But God doesn't just will Himself as if He had nothing to do with creation.
Neither does He will creation as something separate from Himself.
Rather, He wills all things in willing Himself.
God, we said, knows all the different ways in which His being can be participated, and
He joins His will to those ways that He wills to exist.
Now, since God wills all that is, does that make everything that happens necessary and
predetermined?
No, says St. Thomas.
Undoubtedly God wills each thing that is, but His causal power is so rich that He also
wills that each thing transpires according to its proper principles.
So God wills that necessary things happen necessarily and that contingent things happen
contingently.
In our case, this means that God wills freedom to unfold freely through the agency of the
persons themselves.
St. Thomas also teaches that God's will cannot fail.
God is not just one cause among a tangle of other causes.
Rather, He is a transcendent, universal cause.
He makes things to be and to cause and all things are transparent to His gaze.
His causality accounts perfectly for the network of created causes.
So even if a particular cause fails, it doesn't escape the universal cause.
What may seem to depart from the divine will in one order returns to it in another, as
when a sinner departs by transgression and returns by punishment.
When talking about God's will, it's common to talk about antecedent and consequent will
in God.
St. Thomas describes antecedent will as God's will irrespective of concrete particular circumstances.
Consequent will takes account of those concrete particular circumstances.
The first is not efficacious.
The second is.
Here's an illustration that he uses.
Picture a judge.
He wills the common good of the citizenry and the flourishing of each citizen.
Now, let's say that a particular citizen commits a capital crime and that the judge sentences
him to death.
In this instance, the judge wills antecedently that the man live and live well, but in light
of the fact that this man has wounded the common good and justly merited condemnation,
the judge wills consequently that he be put to death.
So, do we say that the judge wills the man's death?
No.
And yes.
He hasn't been waiting longingly for the opportunity to kill the man, nor does he relish the opportunity
once it presents himself.
Rather, he loves the common good above all and each as pertaining to that common good.
When punishment is the right way to express this love, then it is the will of God.
So God loves Himself above all and creatures as pertaining to the divine good, and punishment
is a manifestation of His love.
In fact, since God is His will and since love is the first movement of the will, it follows
that God is His love or simply God is love.
Now, since God loves all things by the same act of the will which is His essence, it follows
that God loves all equally.
But God also wills to give some persons greater gifts than others, and so we say that God
loves some people more than others, in that sense.
This is the mystery of predilection.
In His wisdom, God has seen fit to distribute His gifts unequally for the manifestation
of His glory.
To some, He gives more.
Think here of the Lord's human nature, the Blessed Mother, or St. Joseph.
To some He gives less.
For our purposes, we believe that each is responsible for what God gives.
For some, five talents and for some, one.
Ultimately God will make each as holy as He wills.
He gives what He commands and He commands what He gives.
At the same time, we affirm that God is just, since God gives all what is proper to each
according to their nature.
God's justice, though, is underwritten by His mercy.
By mercy here, we don't mean that God's heart is made miserable at the suffering of others,
but rather that He works to remove the source of our misery.
In fact, God's works of justice are founded on mercy since nothing is due to creatures
except by God's gift.
Our only claims on God are claims founded on what He has first given us.
And so in this sense, we say that His mercy is the very pattern of His justice.
In the end, we gaze steadily into the mystery of His will knowing that He is good, that
He is loving, that He is just, and that He is merciful.
For God is love, and that's a reality excelling our hearts.
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