The Love of God

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God inspires, authorizes, demands our love; love of what sort?

The Layman and His Conscience, by Ronald Knox (Cluny Media, 206 pages)

Shall we venture to make a meditation on the love of God? Such a vital subject, for where should we be, if God didn’t love us? And what use are we, if we don’t love God? And yet a difficult subject, terribly difficult. The love of God, St. John tells us, resides “not in our showing any love for God, but in his showing his love for us first,” and again, “Yes, we must love God, he gave us his love first.”

It all sounds so simple, but think for a moment what it involves. If God saw you and me, his sinful creatures, eating our hearts out with unrequited affection for him who is so high above us, so remote, so all-sufficient to himself—then we could understand that he might pity us, and pity is a possible foundation of love. We should have no claim upon him, but we could understand it if goodness like his should condescend to weakness like ours. But it’s not like that, you see, it’s the other way round. It’s God who sets the whole thing in motion, by loving us and asking for our love in return.

Difficult to understand, and not simply because we are sinners. That is a point St. Paul calls attention to, but it is a different point; “as if God meant to prove how well he loves us, it was while we were still sinners that Christ died for us.” True enough, but then, God is not limited by time; his regard does not have to travel forwards and backwards, like ours. He can see the saint in the sinner; St. Mary Magdalen, St. Paul, St. Augustine—what he loved in them was not, surely, what they were, but what they were going to be; not what they had made of themselves, but what he was going to make of them. The sinfulness of our nature does not make it unrecognizable; it is still what it was when God made it and saw that it was good. He can still recognize it and love it under all the defilement it has incurred, as surely as the father in our Lord’s parable could recognize and love the prodigal son, emaciated and in rags. No, the difficulty is not that God should love us although we are sinners. The difficulty is to see how the phrase “God loves us” has any meaning at all.

You see, whenever we use that word “love” in connection with our ordinary human experience, we mean by it an affection—something which affects us, moves us, takes command of our feelings even when we try to resist its influence. The simplest way to assure yourself of that is to reflect that when we are fond of somebody we are apt to say, “I have a weakness for So-and-so”—a weakness, you can’t help yourself; perhaps you imply that So-and-so is not everybody’s money, that there are faults which might be found in So-and-so, but you have a weakness for him in spite of it. And when this weakness becomes strong in us, then we are weaker than ever. The love of a man and a woman for one another, the love of a mother for her child, how such a love as that can carry us up to the heights, drag us down to the depths, and we seem powerless to prevent it!

Love isn’t something we do, it is something which happens to us; something which gets us down, alters us.

Now, if that is, in our experience, the nature of love, what is the use of saying that God loves us, or loves anything? He cannot be affected, he cannot be altered, by anything outside himself; he is all act, all will; must it not be absurd to mention his attitude towards us in the same breath with this human quality which we call love? One is very conscious, I think, of that difficulty, in reading the Old Testament prophets. In trying to do justice to God’s changeless fidelity, they are for ever comparing his love for Israel with the love of a man for the bride of his youth.

“What is the law of common life?” says Jeremias. “Let wife that has been put away by her first husband marry a second, can she afterwards return to the first? That were shame and defilement. And thou with many lovers hast played the wanton; yet come back to me, the Lord says, and thou shalt find welcome.” When they use the language of human love like that, the prophets are using a metaphor; they are comparing Almighty God to a man whose passion is too strong for him, and we see at once that if you tried to press the comparison literally, it would be a contradiction in terms. It is a metaphor, as we all know, when they talk about Almighty God as being angry; it is equally a metaphor when they talk of him as if he were overmastered by the strength of his own love.

And yet, God loves us; that is not a metaphor. Or do we simply mean that he behaves as if he loved us, sometimes, when he pardons our sins or aids us in our difficulties; just as he behaves as if he were angry with us sometimes, when he visits us with punishment? I suppose if God had left us to get on as best we could by the light of our human reason, with no more knowledge of his nature than what philosophy could give us, we might have to say that. But he has revealed himself, and as part of his revelation he has told us that he loves us—told us that he loves us? Rather, the whole of his revelation is, first and foremost, a revelation of himself as a loving God. That love, humanly expressed, which shines forth in the human character of Jesus Christ, is only the translation for us in human terms of what God is really like.

All we can say is that human love, love as we know it, must be only an imperfect expression of the real truth which lies beyond our ken, which does not enter into our imagination at all. We know that there must be a divine love which is unlike our human love as the sun is unlike the paltry lights of earth, and yet is at once the continuation and the source and the explanation of it. We dare not deny the truth because the mirror of it in our own minds is imperfect.

God loves us, and asks that we should love him in return. That seems natural, doesn’t it, to you and me; we are accustomed to the language, and the logic can take care of itself. But I think it is good for us sometimes to pause in our tracks, and re-examine these over-familiar phrases.…

That Divine Love which chose us out before the world began, which did not create us and then love us, but loved us first and then created us, claims our love by some higher title than that of mere pity, of mere reciprocity. It draws us, like a magnet, of its own force; our hearts turn to it as the flowers turn towards the sun, not persuaded by reasons, but driven upwards by a native impulse. They were made for God; if we will let him have his way with them, the current of love will flow between us, this way and that, until there is no saying which love it is that attracts the other; we can only compare it to the love of man and woman when two hearts beat as one. We did wrong, perhaps, to say that God asks for our love; he does more, he commands it; “Thou shall love the Lord thy God with all thy heart.” It is the law of our being, it is necessary to the fulfilment of our nature. He loved us first; that is not proposed to us as a motive for loving him; it is offered to us as an explanation of why it is that we are able to love him; why it is that we dare to love him; why it is that (unless some fault of ours comes between) we do love him.

God inspires, authorizes, demands our love; love of what sort?

Not one that has its seat in the feelings, or even that has any repercussion in the feelings; we shall never begin to understand the love of God until we realize that.

It’s quite true, as we were saying just now, that what we ordinarily call love between two human beings is a matter of affection; it is accompanied by an immediate emotional response. A lover walks on air; the room lights up for him when the woman he loves enters it; how long the days seem when, for a while, they are separated! Now, our love of God can be, is sometimes, a felt love. Some of us have experienced before now this overflow of the divine love into our feelings; for a few weeks, for a few months, perhaps, prayer came strangely easy to us; we were almost impatient, sometimes, to be alone with God; we found ourselves eager to do him service by some little sacrifice of time or convenience; the thought of him recurred to our minds, with a strange sense of sweetness, at intervals during the day. For a few weeks, for a few months perhaps; but now, all that seems to have disappeared. We go on saying our prayers, and nothing happens; we get nothing out of them except what we put into them; and that isn’t much. We fidget in church, as if we were impatient for Mass to be over; even the most elementary sacrifice we make for him, even going without meat on Fridays, seems like a drudgery. And we say to ourselves, “Yes, I used to love God, but somehow I seem to have stopped.”

Watch that tendency; it comes straight from the devil. The tendency, I mean, to talk as if we could measure the intensity of our love for God by the intensity of our feelings about it. I spoke just now of an overflow into our feelings, and I used the word advisedly. It is an overflow, nothing more; our love of God is something in the supernatural order, and it consists of nothing more or less than the adherence of our wills to him. If, by consenting to sinful habits, or by encouraging the occasions of sin, you are setting up your will against his, then that is different; then you are making a fault in love. But if you are trying to serve him, even though it is not always a great success; if you are aspiring towards him, keeping your head upstream and taking the strain of being a Christian, then you are loving God, and every whisper of doubt that you feel about it comes straight from the devil. If the devil can make you think that you aren’t loving God, it’s his best hope of persuading you to stop loving God; he has no weapon like despair. It doesn’t matter how little enjoyment you get out of your religion, it doesn’t matter how little progress you seem to be making in the affairs of your soul; it may all be like dragging a log uphill, every Hail Mary wrenched from you with an effort, but you are loving God.

I don’t say it oughtn’t to humiliate us. It is humiliating, that God should have created us, filled the world with beauty for us, and given us such contentment in his creatures; that God should have redeemed us, opening up to us a new world of grace with its supernatural and eternal opportunities, and that we should take it so calmly; that all the evidences of his love should have been staled for us by familiarity. After all, even the saints have felt that. St. Philip Neri, the man of all those ecstasies, all those tears, yet made it his favourite prayer, “My God, I don’t love you one bit.” Let us humble ourselves, by all means, for being the insensitive creatures we are; let us thank God for all the lives in which his love makes a more sensible repercussion than it does in ours. But never let us doubt that somewhere in our natures, too deep to wake any external echoes, the steady, purposeful flow of his love is finding a response.

Above all, let us beware of trying to test the value of our love for God by comparing it with the love of some human creature who is dear to us. There is a scruple which tempts us to ask, “When I tell God that I love him above all things, do I really mean that I love him more than So-and-so?” The question is a foolish one, because you are confounding two different kinds of love. Your love for So-and-so is a thing of the affections; you are attracted, by beauty, by charm, by common loyalties, by common memories; it is a sentiment you cannot help, a weakness if you like to call it so. Your love of God is a blind stirring at the roots of the soul; there is no comparison. Well (you say), what if the two loves should conflict; what would happen? Do not ask what would happen—we are poor creatures. Ask what you would wish to happen; if your will is to love God above all things, you do love him above all things; you are still responding, however unfeelingly, to the unfelt influence of his love.

Republished with gracious permission from Cluny Media.

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The featured image is “The Good Shepherd” (1902-1903), by Henry Ossawa Tanner, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.