Establishing the Affective Character of Divine Love

Abstract

In this paper, I have argued for the existence of emotions of God by considering the nature of divine love. At the outset, I observed that virtually all Christians and most monotheists understand love to be one of the essential attributes—perhaps the most essential attribute—of God. I then asked whether love is essentially affective—whether it is sympathetic and responsive to its object—and found that it is, at least when predicated of humans. Considering the objection that divine love is different from human love, I argued that human affective love is more intrinsically valuable than nonaffective love thanks to its emotional nature, and that we have scarce grounds for believing that the relative intrinsic values of these forms of love would differ in the divine life. Therefore, the love we predicate of God should be understood not as impassible benevolence, but as an affective sympathy or compassion responsive to the plight of the creatures God loves. The widespread assumption among religious people that God’s love is affective should not be dismissed as merely sentimental, for while divine impassibility retains many able defenders, there are robust philosophical resources to affirm that the existence of emotions in God would contribute to God’s perfection.