God Is Love: Eternal Reality, Sacrifice, and the Incarnation

The author revisits an earlier reflection on divine love, adding theological nuance about the limits of human language when speaking of God. The post begins with the statement "God is Love" from 1 John 4:8 and observes that love cannot be measured arithmetically; sacrifice reveals what is valued above oneself. However, sacrifice is not the ontological foundation of love, because the Father loved the Son before the foundation of the world (John 17:24), before any suffering or death existed.

The Cross reveals eternal divine love within a world wounded by sin, not a love that begins with suffering. The author then addresses evil as a privation of good, arguing that love does not depend on evil or deprivation to be recognizable, since God loved eternally before creation. Human love is presented as participation in divine love, following St. Maximus the Confessor, rather than a projection onto God.

The discussion touches on analogical predication: human concepts cannot apply directly to divine simplicity. The author emphasizes that God's essence remains unknowable while His uncreated energies truly reveal Him, and that the Incarnation makes love visible in history. Citing Philippians 2 and St. Athanasius's On the Incarnation, the post describes Christ's self-emptying as the unveiling of divine character, not a loss of divinity.

St. Maximus is quoted: "What He is by essence the creature might become by participation" and "The one who possesses love possesses God Himself, since 'God is love.'" The post also notes the three ways terms can be applied to God, ontological, analogical, univocal, and suggests that love is not a human idea projected onto God but a reality in which human love participates.

The author writes that "I Love You" means "Your being is worth my loss," and argues that love does not require absence; evil as privation does not make love dependent on it. St. Maximus's teaching that love is the movement of being toward communion is cited, with love as the cause of creation, the ground of unity, and the restoration of humanity in Christ.

The Incarnation solves the problem of love remaining an idea: in Christ love becomes visible as self-emptying, equality with God revealed through voluntary descent, suffering, and death. St. Athanasius is quoted on the Word taking a body capable of death to undo corruption. The post concludes with the Orthodox distinction that God's essence is unknowable while His uncreated energies are God Himself in activity, inseparable from His essence.