Prima Pars Q. 20 A. 1: Does Love exist in God?

“God is love” but is that said just metaphorically of God? We understand the attribution of grief or anger to God as being metaphors, why wouldn’t love be a metaphor too?

Another difficulty is the fact that love is a passion that requires the ability to be moved by another, but this makes no sense for God, who is unchanging.

The answer, however, is that love must exist in God.1

Here’s the argument:

Whatever has a will must love.God has a willTherefore, God must love

Love is a movement of the will towards the good and its existence appears to be simply a corollary of the existence of will (because every power is for the sake of operation + the fact that there is not potency in God). In question 19, Aquinas proves that God has a will.

Love is the first movement of the appetite, before any other movement like hope, fear, anger and so forth. Such movement presuppose love since love is ordered to the good in general (rather than the good under a particular aspect, or away from evil).

In humans, the rational appetite (the will) acts through sensitive appetites, therefore any act of the will is accompanied by corresponding bodily changes (e.g. the heart beats faster; adrenalin prepares the body for physical action). Because of these bodily changes we call movements of the sense appetites “passions”, but we do not apply this term to the movements of the will itself. Since God loves only through movement of the will, God loves without passion because there are no attendant bodily movements in God.

We can speak of God’s love being passionate in a metaphorical way if we wish to, but used in the sense of the movement of the will we should speak of God’s love literally.

Similarly, we think of love between humans as associated with each wanting the good for the other; in the case of God’s love for us we can still think in these terms if we remember that the good that God wills is nothing other than Himself.

We are present to God in His knowledge; our being is because of His willing the good for us, in Him.

Finally, we must note that God loves inasmuch as His will is creative, therefore God’s love extends to all of creation, not just to rational creatures.