162. Love’s two dimensions, objective and subjective
162. LOVE’S TWO DIMENSIONS, OBJECTIVE AND SUBJECTIVE
Is perfect love (charity) subject to reason? If so, it should be limited. But if love should not be limited, if you can’t have too much of it, then it should not be limited by reason either, right?
Every act should be proportionate both to its object and to the agent (subject, actor). But from the object it takes its species (nature, definition, form, “what”), while from the power of the agent it takes the mode of its intensity; thus movement has its species from the term (end) to which it tends, while the intensity of its speed arises from the . . . power of the mover. Accordingly, love takes its species from its object, but its intensity is due to the lover (II-II,26,7).
What St. Thomas means by this technical distinction can perhaps be put more clearly if we use many more words.
I may love you, or sunsets, or ice cream; but my love for you is very different from my love of sunsets or ice cream. My love for you is personal because you are a person. My love of sunsets is a love of beauty, not of persons, and that is a different kind (“species”) of love. My love of ice cream is a still different kind of love because its object, ice cream, makes the act of love an act of desire to eat and taste this food, not a desire to talk with you or live with you, or a desire to contemplate a sunset or paint a sunset. I don’t want to paint you or ice cream, I don’t want to talk with sunsets or ice cream, and I don’t want to eat you or sunsets. The object of love gives the love its “species”, form, character, nature, or “whatness”. “What kind of love is this?” You must know love’s object to answer that question. Thus the object is the “formal cause” of the love. It determines, specifies, defines the love. This object is also the “final cause” or intended purpose of the love: what my love of you seeks is conversation or life together, what my love of the sunset seeks is appreciation of beauty, what my love of ice cream seeks is the pleasure of taste.
The “efficient cause” of the love, the power that originates the love, is my personal will or desire. That sends the love forth, “creates” (or rather makes) the love, as the sun makes sunlight and storms make rain. There can be more or less energy in the sunlight or the rain, but sunlight can’t be more or less sunny, and rain can’t be more or less rainy. The quantity comes from the efficient cause but the quality comes from the formal cause. Thus the efficient cause of the love—the person who loves—determines the quantity of love, how much energy, how much passion is in it. And the person who causes the love is the loving subject. Thus passion is subjective. But the object of the love gives it its species or form or nature, and that is objective. (Of course the subject is subjective and the object is objective!)
One application of this distinction is that God loves good men more than bad men, as He loves angels more than men and men more than animals—in terms of the distinctions between the objects of love. God discriminates. He loves angels into angel nature and humans into human nature and animals into animal nature. If God did not discriminate thus in His love, there would be no hierarchy, no superiority of angels over men and men over animals; for God’s love does not conform to the hierarchy but creates it. So God loves angels more than men, and good men more than bad men, in terms of what they are. For there is more goodness in angels than in men and more goodness in good men than in bad men, more goodness in the object loved. Angels are greater than men as men are greater than animals.
But God loves men more than angels in intensity, because He became one of us, and because our need is greater. And thus God may also love the wicked more than the good in intensity of care, as the shepherd left the ninety-nine good sheep to search for the one lost one, and as the father of the prodigal son worried more passionately about his prodigal than about his loyal son. A mother loves her child more than her dog, but she may have more intense passion and compassion for a dog suffering great pain at that moment than she has for her own child’s tiny scratch, which is all he has at that moment.