for goodness. Love grants a dynamic unity and intensification to the coextensiveness of being, oneness, truth, and beauty. In his being absolute love, God is one, true, good, beautiful, and living. This transcendental absoluteness can be seen in the self-revelation of himself to himself as the eternal communication of the totality of oneness, unity, good, truth, beauty, and life to the other.43
The second aspect that love unfolds is the personality of the Godhead. God is not only the fullness of being and goodness in the objective sense. He is superabundant being, goodness, wisdom, and life because he is also a personal being—that is, a being who exists as an infinite relation of love in which one has always already given himself over to the other completely. Due to the inseparability of love and logos in God, divine revelation does not lead to an understanding of the concept of “person” as marked by a random, arbitrary will, but rather as a mystery of dialogue and constitutive relation with another. Personhood, in light of revelation, is recognized as the perfection of being, first in God and analogically in the human being. God’s self-communicating goodness always exists as a communion of persons. The eternal communication of his own goodness (Deus Trinitas) is, analogically speaking, a loving, ever-greater, eternal encounter of the divine persons.
Third, the relation between love and person also means that God’s communication of his own being is accompanied by fruition. God not only communicates his being; he takes delight in doing so and, moreover, desires that the other participate in both the giving and the delight of loving and being loved by the other. There is no love without the delight of being loved and sharing this delight with the other. The love that is at the origin of creation ex nihilo is not an ornamental cloak over an exercise of power. When we say that God loves the world into existence we mean that he communicates his own goodness and being to what he is not.
While love unveils these three dimensions of the nature of the Good and so gives rise to a reading of the summum bonum as summa caritas, love is also a gift given (in God and from God). There is a circularity between love and gift that prevents us from reading love simply as a faculty of the will, and gift as an object of that love. Love is gift, and gift, in its highest expression, is love. Love is not just one gift given among others. Love is what makes gifts be gifts and not mere exchanges of property. It is love that ensures the purity of the giver’s and the receiver’s intentions. Alexander of Hales, describing the properties of the Holy Spirit, writes that love is what is given in whatever is given.44 Love, says Aquinas, “has the nature of the first gift, and through it all gratuitous gifts are given.”45 What love gives is itself, that is, it gives being with all the incomprehensible ever-greater unity of its transcendentals. It gives it so that the other can be. Creation ex nihilo is God’s absolute affirmation that generates another, one that is identical to the origin (the Son), and another that is what he is not.46 This communication is an expression of his love for the world, and it is given so that the concrete singular may experience from within, taste, and take delight in his love.47
Human love has its roots in the creative affirmation of the singular, according to which God says to the creature: it is good for you to be (Gen 1:31). Willing man’s ultimate good, God wishes the creature to participate in his life, to dwell in him. Because of this divine love, every true lover wills the good of the beloved.48 In light of the circularity between gift and love we can suggest now that gift is the mystery of the communication of love whose unity is also one of ever-greater differentiation.
To express the mystery of unity and difference in a third specific to love, and so to better understand the gratuity proper to the giving and the receiving of the gift, we need to look briefly at the two indissociable terms that come together in the name love, that is, eros and agape. Love has an oblative, agapic dimension and a desirous, erotic dimension. Eros, a god for the Greeks, has an ambiguous nature. The offspring of poros (wealth) and penia (poverty), eros, so Plato recounts, indicates need and precariousness and, at the same time, impetuousness, the desire for wisdom.49 Eros is not a self-motivated impulse. It is awakened by beauty. This beauty is first the corporeal beauty, which attracts and entices the lover out of himself because it is the overflowing of the eternal beauty in a concrete form. We thus find the first connotation of eros: the beginning of desire lies in a certain given participation in beauty. Eros is moved by something else, in which it seeks the fullness of what it has foretasted. Receiving the form of beauty, eros engages the whole of the person, including his body, and drives the person to transcend himself. Desire tears him away from his own limitations. This, then, is the second connotation: eros not only indicates the need to receive; it also draws the person to seek unity with what he still does not possess. Seeking unity with love itself, eros moves the lover upwards to the root of beings. Love “thirsts,” so to speak, for the beauty that comes to it first. This is why eros has been described as the ascending dimension of love.
We can say further, and apart from the neoplatonic tradition, that, anthropologically speaking, eros, as the desire of unity with the other, includes physical, conjugal union. Yet the union that desire seeks is better perceived in its highest degree: spiritual indwelling. Eros, again, is the desiring dimension of love that seeks unity with the other. Undoubtedly, eros tends to be burdened by its own ambiguity, which, as Benedict XVI says, is that the erotic force can overpower reason. Eros, separated from logos (truth, reason), can become a sort of “divine madness,”50 which results in self-destructive excesses. If united to truth (logos), eros seeks a union that does not reduce the good of the other to the satisfaction of one’s own whims.51
It is important, at this point, to correct a common misunderstanding. The fact that eros separate from logos becomes an irrational, maddening desire does not mean that the yearning for unity with the other, the need both for the other and to be received by the other, is in itself negative. One does not understand the nature of conjugal union, for example, by starting out from instances of sexual degradation and violence; in the same vein, eros goes equally misunderstood if greed or lust is taken as its complete form. If eros and agape are two inseparable dimensions of love, this desire is in itself a perfection. In fact, as Aquinas says, every creature yearns for God according to the degree proper to its own participation in being.52 Thus eros reveals that the perfection of oneself is not in oneself. The lover desires to be one with the beloved, who already somehow dwells in the lover. The lover desires, needs, and implores that the beloved let him be part of her as she is in him. Eros indicates that the lover cannot give to himself that of which he already has a foretaste; it must be given to him gratuitously. This is the radical poverty of eros: not that it does not know love, but that it puts itself at the disposal of the other’s gift, orienting itself towards a reception whose occurrence and measure does not lie at its disposal. Of course, human desires are always in need of purification. The desire for unity tends to become possessiveness. Yet to consider the poverty proper to eros as an imperfection presupposes a negative anthropology, according to which all desires are taken a priori as sinful.53 A love that does not desire is a love that cannot suffer and, as such, is a love that cannot find joy in being welcomed by the other. The giving of a gift is an expression of love (eros) inasmuch as it is both a response to a preceding gift and a yearning for a response, a gratuitous unity with the receiver.
If the erotic dimension of love acknowledges the exigence to receive the other and the search for unity with the other, the agapic dimension highlights the oblative gift of self. To love another is to love its good. To love its good, however, always requires surrendering oneself to the other, living for the other’s sake, giving oneself to the other. Agape represents love’s katalogical movement. Just as it is proper to love to ask (eros), it is also a perfection of love to kneel (agape). The lover who is intent only on seeking the unity turns the beloved into a means for self-satisfaction. Instead, the true lover, that is, the person whose agape is true, spends himself for the sake of the beloved. He wishes to affirm the beloved with the radical gift of self. The love that keeps too close an eye on what it has done, acquired, or sacrificed for the sake of the beloved suffocates both parties. This is why agape purifies eros. It ensures that the desire to be one with the other is for the other’s sake and not for one’s own profit. Agape helps logos give form to eros. At the same time, eros is intrinsic to agape because the love that gives without receiving or being permanently open to receive from the other
