There’s a purely rational argument for the divinity of love. The core Christian claims can be translated into straightforward analytical philosophy without appealing to mystery, faith, or superstition.
I am not saying this argument is true, merely that it’s reasonable, coherent, and understandable in the context of standard philosophy.
Here’s the argument:1) Patterns are real and mind-independent (we’ll call them “Forms”).2) There is a metaphysical hierarchy of Forms.3) At the top of the hierarchy is the Form of the Good.4) The highest form is Love.5) Therefore, Love is the Form of the Good.
We can break this argument into two parts: Propositions 1-3, which can be understood as a simple Platonism (using the word “patterns” instead of the usual term “universals”); and Propositions 4-5 which can be understood as an empirical Christian claim which clarifies and updates the Platonic idea.
What I mean by Platonism
By “Platonism,” I do not mean a faithful reconstruction of Plato’s ideas—rather, a metaphysical framework which says that patterns, abstractions and relations are real features of existence, separate from our minds. There are cats, and there is Cat-ness, the pattern which all cats have in common, which sits outside the material world in an abstract domain.
The point of this article is not to make an argument for this kind of Platonism (which I’ve done extensively elsewhere.) The point is to say that within this view, there is a hierarchy of Forms. As you go up the abstraction ladder, you reach higher and higher forms. Eventually you’ll find the Form of Justice Itself, which is an extremely high-level, high-dimensional pattern that every just action participates in.
Impersonal Form of the Good
At the top of this hierarchy, the Platonist wants to say, is the Form of the Good. This form is so absolute, so fundamental, that it’s the Form which grounds all of our ethical judgements. The form of the Good isn’t something which can be judged “good” or “bad”—it is Goodness itself, the Form-that-we-use to determine goodness.
Functionally, this Form plays a similar role to God in theism. However, the classical Form of the Good is critically impersonal. If there is a Creator-God (or “demiurge” in the Platonic vocabulary), he sits underneath the Form of the Good, participating in it. The theistic God, by contrast, has nothing above him; he sits at the apex of the metaphysical hierarchy.
That gives us the meaning of Propositions 1-3 of the original argument. Now the Christians come along.
Empirical Revelation
The Christian wants to say: by the way, it turns out the Form of the Good is not a distant, impersonal abstraction.
The Form of the Good turns out to be Love.
In other words, Love is The Good. Love is Goodness itself—it’s the thing which we use to determine the goodness of everything else; it’s the Value underpinning all other values; it’s the objective meaning of life; it’s the first and final cause of everything.
And Love is in the Form of a Person. Love is alive.
This is not an aprioristically-true claim. It’s an empirical claim—that is how we can understand the meaning of “divine revelation”—God reveals his face, not through a purely logical argument, but through Incarnation.
The Form of the Good “comes down from [Platonic] heaven” to live among us.
Immediately, if such a thing happened—or if it plausibly happened—we would find ourselves grappling with the same philosophical questions as the early Christians. Divine Love is fully instantiated by Jesus Christ. So, what was Jesus’s exact relationship with God? Clearly he was a man, yet divine at the same time... and suddenly we’re back in the 4th century.
So that’s the claim. If there is a hierarchy of Forms, then the Christians are saying Love is the highest Form and the essence of God.
Note:
If we want to replace the Platonic conception of the “Form of the Good” with the Neo-Platonic idea of “the One,” the Christian argument still holds.
So we can swap out premise (3) for the claim “At the top of the hierarchy is The One,” which would change the conclusion to: (5) Therefore, Love is The One. Either formulation works.
Get full access to Steve Patterson's Substack at stevepatterson.substack.com/subscribe
