Aquinas: The Will of God and Love

September 23, 2021

Aquinas lays out a beautiful picture of love, and specifically of the way God loves. He writes, “To love someone is in fact to will good for them” (1, Q. 20, Art. 1). This statement sums up the very essence of God, in that he has a divine will, and that will is intertwined thoroughly with his love for us. There have been a lot of questions this week stemming from my reading of Aquinas that confused me, specifically how God predestines through his will. Some things that I came away with from that are the assurance that God is good and that his will is tied to his love. As Aquinas says, “We are induced to love by good which exists already... With God, it is the reverse. When God wills some good to one whom he loves, his will is the cause of this good being in him, rather than in any other” (1, Q. 23, Art. 4). The key here is understanding the difference in the way God loves because of his innate goodness and humans loving what they see as good. It is difficult to trust that God works good for those he loves, and that all his actions are good, but it is helpful to think about how he loves from his own goodness. There is also the issue of understanding what it means to say that God is good. That said, keeping in mind the things that he has called good and his renewed faithfulness always, it is not hopeless and unfounded to trust that he will continue to love us out of his goodness, even if we do not fully understand God’s goodness itself. He loves us out of his goodness, and because he is not divided into parts, all his deeds are tied to his will, and all this stems from love.