Love. There are many different kinds of love. Love of benevolence, beneficence and complacency. Consubstantial Love. Eros. Philia. Agape. Storge. Mania. Ludus. Pragma. And Philautia.This post will focus on the inter Trinitarian love of the Father to the Son and Son to the Father. The Love that is God’s Holy Spirit. This is more of a cut and pasting of what Jonathan Edwards says about it, rather than me talking about it.
Gods idea of himself, His Son, His image, the Word. Which is also consubstantial. Consubstantial means of the same substance or essence.
Some moderns will say that intelligence is not action, and that to know is not to produce. I answer that perception is not an action; but conception is the highest act of the understanding. To receive ideas, sensations, or modifications from objects that act upon us is, purely passive. But to form or create in the mind new ideas, is a real production. We do not form our simple ideas; we receive them from external objects that act upon us. God is impassable and eternal, and so cannot be acted upon by other objects. He does not perceive, but he CONCEIVES his essential, consubstantial idea, image, or representation; he does not receive this idea from others, he produces it in himself. We form our complex ideas by a successive combining of our simple perceptions. God forms his consubstantial idea by one unsuccessive act. Now this is the highest and most exalted of all activities and perfections.
“The eternal, permanent, consubstantial idea God has of himself, produces necessarily in him an infinite, eternal, and immutable LOVE.
“Thus it is certain that antecedent to all communicative goodness towards anything external, God is good in himself and just to himself, as he is infinitely, eternally, and essentially active and intelligent; because as he produces within himself an absolutely infinite effect and idea, so he is infinitely, eternally, and essentially good and just. Infinitely good, because from the knowledge and enjoyment of his consubstantial idea flows an infinite sensation of joy, an unbounded love, an unspeakable pleasure, and an eternal self-complacency, which constitute his uninterrupted happiness. Infinitely just, because it is this permanent love that constitutes his essential justice; for by this love he renders to himself all that is due to his supreme perfection. He does not therefore want to create innumerable myriads [of]3 finite objects to exert his essential beneficence and equity; since he produces within himself from all eternity one infinite object that exhausts, so to speak, all his capacity of loving, beatifying, and doing justice.
“The Deists, Unitarians, and Socinians, who deny the doctrine of the Trinity, cannot explain how God is essentially good and just, antecedently to, and independent of the creation of finite; for God cannot be eminently good and just, where there is no object of his beneficence and equity. If then he be essentially, eternally and necessarily good and just, he must be so immanently; he must be so in himself; he must therefore find an infinite object within himself, to whom he displays all his essential love, beneficence and equity.”
“Hence God’s consubstantial love of himself is sufficient to complete the felicity of his infinite will. Here all its motions, tendencies and desires fix, concenter and reunite. Wherefore all other acts and productions, that do not necessarily flow from and enter into this consubstantial love, are not essential to the perfection of the divine will.”
To complete the idea of perfect felicity, there must be an object loving as well as an object loved. […] Such is the nature of love, that it must be communicative. Infinite love therefore must be infinitely and necessarily communicative. It must have an object on which it exerts itself, and to which it displays itself; into which it flows, and that flows back to it again. There is a far greater felicity in loving and being loved than in loving simply. It is the mutual harmony and correspondence of two distinct beings or persons, that makes the completion of love and felicity. […] Hence God could not have been infinitely and eternally loved, if there had not been from all eternity, some being distinct from himself, and equal to himself, that loves him infinitely; since, as we have shown, creation could not be coeternal.
“The eternal, infinite, and immutable love, which proceeds from the idea God has of himself, is not a simple attribute, mode, or perfection of the divine mind; but a living, active, consubstantial, intelligent being or agent.” Therefore, “we may represent the divine essence, under these three notions, as an infinitely ACTIVE MIND that conceives; or as an infinite IDEA that is the object of this conception; or as an infinite LOVE that proceeds from this idea…. There are three, there can be but three; and all that we can conceive of in the infinite mind may be reduced to these three; infinite LIFE, LIGHT, AND LOVE.
“Hence we may conceive in the divine nature three real distinctions, and we can conceive of no more; since all we can comprehend of absolute — 188 —
infinite, is either MIND conceiving, IDEA conceived, or LOVE proceeding from both. GOD self-existent; GOD OF GOD; and GOD THE HOLY GHOST. These three distinctions in the Deity are neither three distinct independent minds, as the tritheists alleged; nor three attributes of the same substance represented as persons, as the Sabellians affirmed: nor one supreme, and two subordinate intellectual agents, as some refined Arians maintain: but three co-eternal, consubstantial, coordinate persons co-equal in all things, self-origination only excepted.”
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