From a reader…
QUAERITUR:
At another Catholic site I saw this question and I was wondering how you would answer it. How can it be said that God loves us infinitely when He never speaks to us directly or shows Himself to us directly?
Okay, the pressure is on! Firstly, I don’t want to compete with anyone in questions like this, because they are hard and we can approach them in differing ways, just as we can view the twinkle of a finely cut gem from varying angles.
Let’s break this down.
“How can it be said…”.
It can be said because in the first place God’s love is considered by what God is, not by the degree to which we presently feel or perceive Him.
God does not “have” love as a passing affection. God is love: Deus caritas est (1 John 4:8).
God’s act of loving is identical with His own infinite being.
There is a philosophical adage that guides us here: that which is received, is received in the manner of the one receiving… quidquid recipitur in modo recipientis recipitur. When God loves a creature, the creature receives that infinite love in a finite way, according to its finite capacity. But the divine act from which it comes is not finite. Analogy: a cup receives only a cupful from the ocean, but the ocean is not thereby reduced to a cup.
Now we come to the meat of the question, probably the motive behind the question.
“…when He never speaks to us directly or shows Himself to us directly?”
There is longing in this question, which we should all have.
For the sake of brevity, we leave apart special, rare instances when God seems directly to communicate in clear terms with one of us, such as seems to have been the case with, for example, St. Margaret Mary. Some people experience powerful interior locutions, etc. In the normal course of the developing spiritual life, God “speaks” to us apophatically in silences and seeming distance, in mental prayer, by mediation, etc.
Why does infinite love come to us so often through silence, distance, obscurity, and mediation?
God will not overwhelm us with the unveiled vision of His essence. Even in the Transfiguration Christ did not reveal His divinity to Peter, John and James: He revealed only a tiny bit of His divinity. Scripture gives the reason: “Man shall not see me and live” (Exodus 33:20). The direct vision of God belongs to glory, to the Beatific Vision. Even then, the vision of God will be infinitely beyond our grasp.
In this life, however, we are strangers and sojourners, pilgrim soldiers. We know God through faith, grace, sacraments, Scripture, conscience, providence, transcendentals like beauty, along with suffering, and charity. These are mediated forms, but mediation does not make love unreal. A mother’s love may be signaled, mediated through the food she prepares, her sacrifices, giving correction, in letters during absences, and the self-giving labor of years. The child may not always feel loved, yet the love may be most real precisely where it is least dramatic.
God’s hiddenness preserves the conditions of faith and love. There is an old saying in theater: everything is nothing. That is, if the entire set is red and costumes are red without contrasts, if the music is always fortissimo and relentless, people simply tune out. If God were constantly manifest with irresistible clarity, obedience might become compulsion, repentance panic, worship self-preservation. He gives enough light to seek Him, enough obscurity to make seeking a free act. “We walk by faith, not by sight” (2 Corinthians 5:7). We continue to peer through that “dark glass”, like Moses who peered through the crack in the rock hoping to see God pass.
Finally, the Christian answers that God has in fact spoken and shown Himself directly, above all in Christ.
“In many and various ways God spoke of old to our fathers by the prophets; but in these last days he has spoken to us by a Son” (Hebrews 1:1–2). And again: “No one has ever seen God; the only Son… he has made him known” (John 1:18). The Incarnation is God’s direct self-disclosure accommodated to human weakness.
I think it was St. Hilary of Poitier who describes the eternal Son as the perfect invisible image of the invisible Father and describes the incarnate Son as the perfect visible image of the invisible Father. In all that Christ said and did, He reveals God, shows us God.
The Christian answer is the Cross. “God shows his love for us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8).
Infinite love is not demonstrated chiefly by private voices or visible apparitions. It is proven by the Son of God giving Himself for us, then drawing us toward the vision where silence will end and …
“We shall see him as he is” (1 John 3:2).
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