God, perfection, and the claim “God is love”
Many theists simultaneously affirm two central propositions: first, that God is maximally great in the sense of perfect-being theology; second, that God is not merely loving but essentially loving—a claim often crystallized in the assertion “God is love.” Yet these affirmations generate a philosophical tension that demands careful analysis. Unlike properties such as mass or color, love is inherently relational. This raises a fundamental question: Can a solitary, unipersonal God be essentially perfect love independently of creation?
Before proceeding, several technical terms require clarification:
Aseity denotes God’s absolute independence—the doctrine that God depends on nothing outside God for existence or essential properties.1,2 Contingent creation refers to the theological position that God could have refrained from creating; there exist possible worlds containing no creatures.3 Possible worlds serve as a philosophical tool for analyzing modal claims about necessity and possibility—they represent ways reality could have been.4 Finally, a property is essential to God if God possesses it in every possible world in which God exists.5
Perfect love
To avoid equivocation, I employ “perfect love” in a robust, great-making sense. Perfect love involves personal communion: self-giving for the good of a distinct personal other, with knowledge and delight in the other as other—not merely love of oneself-under-a-description. While self-respect and self-approval may constitute genuine goods, the highest form of love—what we typically recognize as paradigmatic—is other-regarding communion.
The formal argument
P1. If God exists, God is maximally great and has the essential great-making moral perfections.
P2. Perfect love is one of those essential great-making moral perfections.
P3. Perfect love is irreducibly interpersonal: it requires an actual relation between a lover and a distinct personal beloved (not mere self-relation, and not merely a conditional readiness).
P4. Creation is contingent, so there are possible worlds in which God exists and creates nothing.
P5. If God were unipersonal, then in a world with no creation there would be no distinct personal beloved for God to love—so God would not be actually instantiating perfect interpersonal love in that world.
C. Therefore, if God is essentially perfect love, God is not unipersonal: there must be eternal intra-divine personal plurality—at least Lover and Beloved—within the divine life.
The aseity constraint
Aseity strengthens the argument’s motivation: if God’s being “perfect love” required creating someone to love, then the instantiation of that perfection would depend on a contingent creative act. The modal structure makes this precise: since creation is contingent, there exist possible worlds containing no creatures; if love is essential to God, God must still be actually loving in those worlds—therefore the beloved cannot be merely creaturely.
Distinguishing perfect love from lesser forms
Three distinctions prove crucial for the argument. First, actuality versus potentiality: if perfect love is a great-making perfection and is essential to God, it is most plausibly understood as actually instantiated love, not merely the state of being disposed to love if a beloved were to exist. Second, personal versus impersonal: the highest form of love involves knowledge, will, and personal presence—communion between subjects—not merely beneficence toward non-personal entities (such as abstract objects) or impersonal causal “goodwill.” Third, other-directed versus self-directed: appropriate self-love may be fitting and necessary, but the paradigmatic excellence of love is realized in genuine otherness: interpersonal self-giving and communion with another who is truly distinct.
Preview of the argument’s structure
Part II will formalize this intuition through modal logic, demonstrating how the conjunction of divine aseity, essential perfect love, and contingent creation generates a valid argument for intra-divine plurality. Part III will address the most pressing objections: whether divine self-love suffices, whether dispositions can ground essential properties, and what exactly this argument establishes about the divine nature. The complete argument does not purport to prove Christianity or even strict Trinitarianism, but rather establishes a philosophical pressure toward some form of eternal relationality within the divine life.
- James E. Dolezal, God without Parts: Divine Simplicity and the Metaphysics of God’s Absoluteness (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2011), especially chap. 2 on divine aseity; Jay Wesley Richards, The Untamed God: A Philosophical Exploration of Divine Perfection, Simplicity and Immutability (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2003), 41–67; Brian Davies, The Reality of God and the Problem of Evil (London: Continuum, 2006), 40–45. ↩︎
- Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae (hereafter ST), I, q. 3, a. 1–8. ↩︎
- Norman Kretzmann, “A General Problem of Creation: Why Would God Create Anything at All?” in Being and Goodness, ed. Scott MacDonald (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 208–228; Katherin A. Rogers, Perfect Being Theology (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000), 99–117; Thomas V. Morris, Our Idea of God: An Introduction to Philosophical Theology (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1991), chap. 8. ↩︎
- Alvin Plantinga, The Nature of Necessity (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), chaps. 4–6; Robert Merrihew Adams, “Theories of Actuality,” Noûs 8, no. 3 (1974): 211–31; David Lewis, On the Plurality of Worlds (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), chap. 1. ↩︎
- Alvin Plantinga, The Nature of Necessity (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), chaps. 1–3; Kit Fine, “Essence and Modality,” Philosophical Perspectives 8 (1994): 1–16. ↩︎