An Ecstatic Rant on God's Love and Man's Deserving Salvation
A common, falsely Christian thought is that man is supposed to not judge and love even the worst of men simply because we are not in the right epistemic position.
St. Francis preaches to the birds [Giotto di Bondone (c.1266-1337)]
This is not a tight philosophical, analytic reflection. And yet I would die for the vision of God’s love I express here. I would embrace contradiction—a fate even worse than death!—rather than give up the convictions embodied in this rant.
AN ERROR ABOUT LOVE
A common, falsely Christian thought is that man is supposed to withhold judgement (i.e., condemnation) from, and freely give love to, even the worst of men simply because we are not in the right epistemic position. If we knew more, and could “look into the heart,” this prohibition would be lifted; we would know who is worthy of love, and who is worthy of judgement and condemnation, and would be reliable judges ourselves. But as it stands, only God has such knowledge, and so we cannot condemn, though we may suspect that certain people are worth condemning.
Again, if we think like this, we suppose that some are worthy of being condemned, and not worthy of total love and beneficence. Our ignorance is simply a barrier to confirming our suspicions. We would then be commanded to love all merely as a prudential principle, to avoid failing to love anyone who deserves it. For the error of condemning those who are worthy of love is worse than loving those who are unworthy. Love is harmless, we suppose, but condemnation harms. And so we calculate up the proportion of risk to potential reward, and settle on “do not judge, lest ye be judged” and “love thy neighbor as thyself.”
But that can’t be right. The only consistent Christian view is that everyone is worthy and deserving of love. For God is love and is in all and loves all. Can we presume that God loves the wicked unjustly, or does not love them at all? This is why many Christians—particularly those who have no good theological training—often insist that "on the cross, two contrary aspects of God—justice and mercy—meet." If taken straightforwardly—which many in the churches I grew up in did—this simply means that God is, at face value, UNJUST for saving us, and that His mercy must overcome His inner drive for justice. This presupposes, of course, that we are not worthy of love, nor even an offer of salvation.
HUMANITY "DESERVES" GOD'S LOVE AND SALVATION
But must we think that? Surely, we should affirm that, both as a species and as individuals, human beings have not earned, through their actions, (a) salvation from our current predicament nor (b) good gifts that transcend and go far beyond the goodness of mere salvation. If anything, we have, through no fault of God's, put ourselves in our predicament! Our merely human actions do not merit a helping hand out of our self- imposed predicament. But, that does not mean that it would not be the best, most fitting, good, lovely and beautiful thing for God to help us! But if it would be best for God to save and love us, then it has to be the case that it is RIGHT for God to save and love us. And if it is right for God to save us, then it is reasonable for God to save and love us. And if it is reasonable for God to save us, then we are fitting objects of salvation and love, in spite of our actions! For loving some thing can only be reasonable if it is itself worthy of love.
How do we make sense of this, without falling into the error of insisting that we have somehow merited God's love and salvation? It is simple. This only appears to be a problem because morons like us focus so heavily on the instrumental value of things, even people and animals. To our (again moronic) ears, "I deserve love and salvation" sounds like "I deserve love and salvation in virtue of my instrumental value" (i.e., my actions and the worth I provide to the world through them). Mankind wrongs itself, insults God, and harms the rest of creation. Through human action, mankind has done nothing to earn salvation, has chosen nothing to earn salvation, but has, in fact, brought about its own destruction, and made itself unworthy of receiving goods beyond mere immortality. Yet, still, mankind is worthy of love. For we should rather hear, "I deserve love and salvation in virtue of my nature, my inherent value, despite my seriously deficient instrumentality."
Even if we dare to say this, my intrinsic value is a function not of my own will and actions, but because of God—He has created all things with the inherent value they have. With all that said, I think the pseudo-problem is solved. That was easy, wasn't it? We've warded off "works-based" salvation and insisted that our salvation and worthiness of love is purely up to the grace of God.
I truly think we cannot easily speak of God's love for us because we are so focused on assigning instrumentalist merits to God's creatures.
A PROOF OF OUR DESERVING GOD'S LOVE AND SALVATION
Let's reflect on this further. I think the primary proof of it will have more radical implications.
I ask you Christians: is God not all in all? Is God not in every creature? Is not our goodness really God's Goodness? How could we dare to suppose, then, that anyone could fail to be worthy, deserving of love? For surely God is worthy and deserving of love.
An analogy for my reader: a mother, in virtue of giving being to her child who is worthy of profound love, can never be totally unworthy of love, and therefore must be worthy of love. For the child is the mother, in some hard to articulate and yet genuine sense. The child is materially, teleologically, historically and causally the mother. The mother is the source of the particular being of the child, and the flesh of the mother is, quite literally, the flesh of the child. All flesh of the child is an emergence out of and in and through the flesh of the mother. The mind and intent and will of the mother is not only one of the many efficient causes, but reflected in the child. The mother constitutes the child, and the child is in and through the mother. So that, if the child is lovable, then so too must the mother be. And in the mother, all those processes and materials, all those units and structures of the child dwell potentially. The goodness of the babe is only possible given the goodness of and in the mother, so that the babe proves the mother's goodness because the mother (partly) grounds and gives rise to the babe's goodness. The goodness of the babe is the goodness of the mother.
What a nice little metaethical principle that I have supposed: good can only come from good; anything good that comes, substantially comes from good. Further, the resulting good draws its goodness from that preceding good's substance, no matter how imperfect and limited that good is. (So far as I can tell, the only way to deny this is to think of persons as completely separate from their bodies, to regard their bodies as mere accidents, separable from their cartesian soul. For then the person would not really pass into and become the other person, the mother becoming the babe...)
And another principle: the goodness of anything that comes from a prior source or origin will reflect the goodness of that source or origin. The babe is an "image" (icon) of the mother.
So, too, and in an even more profound sense, can our inherent worthiness of God's love be proven. For God—the Being of beings, the Artificer of artificers, and the Form of forms—is our mother: the Mother of mothers and Father of fathers. He is our very being, our beginning and our historical and teleological end. So that, if we come from Him, we are good, and our goodness is His. Our goodness is an icon of His.
So, since God necessarily, definitionally deserves infinite love, then do we not, also? I cannot help but conclude that mankind deserves love and salvation, not in that we have earned it through good works, but through being what we are.
ANNIHILATIONISM, INFERNALISM, UNIVERSALISM
And so now I ask you: can God ever deserve to be destroyed? To be eternally miserable? Is not God always worthy of love? Life? If God could be divided, then even a tiny fragment of His being would be infinitely good and lovable. And yet God is in us, and in all. So how can any be deserving of annihilation or eternal torment? How can any fail to be worthy of love? How can any be worthy of eternal misery and torment?
SOME WORRIES
I have failed to grasp, however, clear principles for how to distinguish the identity of creatures from that of God, once God is admitted as Being of beings. (If someone has resources on this, please let me know!) For instance, Thomas Aquinas wanted to deny saying that God is our material cause, seemingly for this very reason (Summa Theol., I.Q4.A1; Commentary on the Sentences, I.18.5). Surely our parts are not God, as if each of our parts were all each fully God Himself, for that would be absurd—there would then be many Gods in us. But, in another sense, our material parts are God, for Being is itself God. God is the reservoir of Being, the infinite Ocean of Being. Matter, even prime matter, arises in and through and as a manifestation of Him. So, God is, in a sense, material cause, as well as formal, final, and ultimate efficient cause. How can Thomas avoid saying this? It seems absurd to admit God as subsistence subsisting, and yet deny that He is the ultimate principle of the material realm.
I worry that I have failed to understand something here that pertains to clearly delineating God's identity from ours. But perhaps, in the realm of the transcendent, all such distinctions break down. Perhaps I am thinking of the Being of beings through the image of a unified, homogenous physical substratum or manifold that divides itself into distinct “pieces” or “ridges” and builds up complex systems out of itself. In which case, the manifold would be the material cause. But this is clearly not the correct way to think about the Being of beings, as even the manifold would be a being within a frame for beings to inhabit. The image of the inner experience of a mind is probably a better analogy—a mind imagines objects within it, sustains them. The mental objects clearly are not identical to the mind, yet are in the mind and sustained by it, and in another sense are the mind. I don’t know. I am a recent convert to classical theistic metaphysics, after a long period of true skepticism.
On the other hand, it makes perfect sense to me to stop worrying about tight articulations of identity. I feel as though I could get by metaphysically with simply pointing to the features of the panentheistic system: I am God, but not God, in that God is in me and is me, but is far more than me, and I can never exhaust Him, as a cup of ocean water is the ocean, but is also not the ocean.
Ultimately, I think it is funny that I cannot, for the life of me, think of how I could know the truth of anything I asserted here. But I feel it in my heart, in such a way that I cannot imagine it being false.