Implications of the "Other"

In 1st John 4:8, the reader will discover that, “God is love.” If the reader is attentive, the question arises: what does it mean to say God is love? 

Answering that in a satisfactory way requires a grasp of the word “love” itself, which, as many have observed, is used in a dizzying variety of ways. The Catholic tradition, as explained by St. Thomas Aquinas and restated in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, says that “to love is to will the good of the other” (CCC 1766). To make sense of that, it is important to distinguish willing from wishing; willing involves actively choosing something. That aside, if this is the definition of love, and God is love, that implies some sort of an “other” within God.

This provides an entry point to thinking about the Trinity. There is a passage in C.S. Lewis’s Screwtape Letters that makes this idea come alive. The demon Screwtape speaks thus of God, 

This impossibility He calls love...can be detected under all He does and even all He is - or claims to be. Thus He is not content, even Himself, to be a sheer arithmetical unity; He claims to be three as well as one, in order that this foolish nonsense about Love may find a foothold in His own nature.

To say it a different way, it is the reality of more than one divine person within one God that makes it coherent to say “God is love.”

That being said, it would seem that two divine persons would be sufficient for the statement “God is love” to be coherent. Perhaps three persons are not logically necessary, but it does make more evident the expansiveness and richness of love when it is shared among more than two persons. If there were only two divine persons, it would not be so clear that love is not just something that is passed back and forth in a closed loop. On the contrary, it is overflowing, abundant, and outwardly-directed.

In his work On the Trinity, St. Augustine suggests that the Holy Spirit is himself the overflowing abundance of the love between the Father and the Son. This manner of explanation has been controversial in Eastern Christianity for reasons beyond the scope of what I wish to show here, but nevertheless, it seems quite persuasive, perhaps because it parallels human experience, when the love between parents overflows into the conception of a child. It is important to note, however, that in this understanding, the overflowing of the Holy Spirit happens in eternity, rather than in time, like the birth of a child would.

When the meaning of “God is love,” is established, it is a logical progression to think that love must be essential in human life too, if, as Sacred Scripture says, we are made “in the image of God.” Indeed, love is essential for us – we are commanded, in both the Old and New Testaments: “love your neighbor as yourself.”

A question about the definition of love arises in relation to this command too. If love is “to will the good of the other,” is it possible to love oneself? One way in which it could be said that love of self is possible is that oneself in the future is an other, and that working for the good of one’s future self is an act of love. I seem to remember once hearing someone call these mental constructions of a self at varying degrees of distance into the future “the community of yous.” In this line of thought, one loves oneself by caring for this “community of yous.” 

Why, then could this answer not have worked for the question above — the question of how we can say God is love? One might ask, “Could not God be love simply by loving his future self?” The problem is that God does not have a future self. He is outside of time, and thus he needs a co-eternal other to love, which then leads us back to the Trinity.

Although some may have dismissed the idea of the Trinity as a superfluous complication, when understood in the context of the statement “God is love,” it becomes apparent that the Trinity is far from an irrelevant confusion. On the contrary, it serves to confirm the common human instinct that love is in some way central to the world and to human existence. 

Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, as it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.