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Theology - Trinity: Trinity of love

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Augustine’s trinitarian account of love is often understood as a purely formal correspondence: Love requires three – the lover, the beloved, and the love itself – and, whaddya know?, there are three Persons in the God who is love.

Augustine sometimes sounds like that: “Love means loving and something loved with love. There you are with three, the lover, what is being loved, and love. And what is love but a kind of life coupling or trying to couple together two things, namely lover and what is being loved? This is true even of the most external and fleshly kinds of love.”

But that’s not mainly what Augustine is saying about love. You can’t stand outside love, and match three and three and call it a day. To find the Trinity who is love in love, Augustine says, you have to love.

Augustine finds the trinity of love in the rollingly perichoretic reality of the charity by which we love. We can hardly love another without loving the love by which we love him or her. (This is Augustine’s premise, but is it true? can’t we hate the love that binds us to an abuser? Augustine would say this is not true love.) And when we love love, we can hardly stop there; in loving love, we have to love as love in action, love that is loving another. We cannot love charity without loving her love something, because it’s the very nature of charity to love something. Charity cannot love herself without lover herself loving something, since, again, that’s just what charity does. It’s nonsensical (or perverse) to say: “I love love,” and then add “but I hate the fact that love binds me to other people.”

More explicitly, Augustine refers to a number of passages in 1 John to argue that we cannot love a brother without loving God. Love of God and love of neighbor are inseparable. Quoting 1 John 4:20, Augustine claims that the one who hates his brother doesn’t see God because he doesn’t love the brother. If we do not love a brother, we are not in love. Since God is love, our lack of love for our brother means that we are not in God.

And, since God is light, the one who fails to love his brother is not in the light but in the darkness. A man outside of love may see his brother with “ordinary human vision”: but cannot see brother by inner vision. But it’s not just his brother that he fails to see. He cannot see the God who is love because of the darkness of lovelessness. One who lacks love for his brother cannot love God, and cannot love God because He cannot see God, since God is the “love which he lacks by not loving his brother.” Only when one turns in love to the brother does he become capable of seeing God: “if he were to love with spiritual charity the one he sees with human vision, he would see God who is charity with the inner vision with which he can be seen by.”

It is impossible, then, to see the Trinity of love from the outside. To see God, one must love Him; and one cannot love Him without loving a brother. Only from within the whirl of brotherly love can one see that God is love, as Lover, Beloved, and Love.

posted by Peter J. Leithart on Monday, November 9, 2009 at 1:32 pm

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Theology - Trinity: Trinity of love

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