Kronen and Reitan: An Argument from Divine Complacent Love

In their book God’s Final Victory, philosophers John Kronen and Eric Reitan present an argument for universal salvation based on the efficacious grace of God. They lay it out in five steps:

1. It is always possible for God to extend to the unregenerate efficacious grace; that is, a form of grace sufficient by itself to guarantee their salvation (i.e. sufficient to bring about all that is necessary for salvation, including relevant subjective acts such as sincere repentance and conversion).
2. Making use of efficacious grace to save the unregenerate is morally permissible for God, at least when the recipient would not otherwise have been saved.
3. It is therefore possible and permissible for God to save all through the exercise of efficacious grace (1, 2).
4. If God has a morally permissible means of saving all, then God will save all.
5. Therefore, God will save all (3, 4).¹

Does God have compelling reasons to save all? The cogency of premise #4 hinges on whether we are persuaded that the absolute love of God entails universal salvation. In our previous post we reviewed Kronen and Reitan’s Argument from Divine Benevolence: in this argument our two philosophers assert that God’s nature as absolute love provides an internal impelling cause for him to will what is best for every rational creature—and that best is nothing less than eternal union with the Holy Trinity. We will review their second argument, which they believe to be stronger and more compelling than the first. As we shall see, this second argument complements and fulfills the first.

An Argument from Divine Complacent Love

1. Perfect complacent love is an essential divine attribute.
2. If (1) then there is in God an internal impelling cause of’ His willing that every rational creature has the necessary prerequisites for achieving what it is naturally ordered to achieve.
3. Therefore, there is in God an internal impelling cause of His willing that every rational creature has the necessary prerequisites for achieving what it is naturally ordered to achieve (1, 2).
4. If (3) then—unless there is in God an attribute which could root in Him an internal impelling cause not to will that every rational creature has whatever is necessary for it to achieve what it is naturally ordered to achieve—God does will that every rational creature has these necessary prerequisites.
5. There is no attribute in God which roots in Him an internal impelling cause not to will that every rational creature achieve what it is naturally ordered to achieve.
6. Every rational creature is naturally ordered towards union with God.
7. A necessary prerequisite for a rational creature to achieve union with God is that it experiences the beatific vision.
8. Therefore, God wills that every rational creature experience the beatific vision (3, 4, 6, 7).
9. If (8) then unless either: (a) it is metaphysically impossible for God to bring it about that every rational creature experiences the beatific vision, or (b) all the means God could use to achieve this are morally impermissible—every rational creature will experience that beatific vision.
10. It is not metaphysically impossible for God to bring it about that every rational creature experiences the beatific vision, and there are some means God could use to do this that are morally permissible.
11. Therefore, every rational creature will experience the beatific vision (8, 9, 10).
12. Every creature that experiences the beatific vision is saved.
13. Therefore, every rational creature is saved (11, 12).²

What is divine complacent love? The word complacent draws us up short. Webster’s defines complacency as “self-satisfaction especially when accompanied by unawareness of actual dangers or deficiencies.” Err . . . that can’t be right. Surely the God of the Christian faith is not complacent in that way. Obviously some other meaning must be intended.

The Latin word is complacentia: take pleasure in, take fancy to, capture the affections of. Medieval theologians adapted the word for their own purposes. St Thomas Aquinas, for example, used it to speak of love between two people—specifically, the recognition of and delight in the good that inheres in the other:

With respect to the appetitive power, the beloved is said to be in the lover by being in his affections through a certain complacentia: with the result that the lover either takes pleasure in the beloved or in the beloved’s good, if they are present; or if they are absent, by desire he tends toward the beloved, loving him with the love of concupiscence; or he tends toward the good that he wills for his beloved, loving him with the love of friendship. The lover acts this way not because of some extrinsic reason (as if he were desiring the beloved for the sake of another, or as if he were willing good for the beloved for the sake of something else) but because complacentia for the beloved is deeply rooted within him.³

Unlike agape, which bespeaks the pure giftedness of love (willing the good of the other), complacentia highlights the recognition of goodness in another person, which in turn evokes desire for and enjoyment of the beloved. “This affective affinity,” writes Michael Sherwin, “causes the lover to seek deeper union with the beloved and to act for the beloved’s good as if it were his own good.”⁴  We love the other because we perceive their intrinsic worth, beauty, and goodness, thus inflaming desire for union. The 19th century theologian M. J. Scheeben beautifully describes the deep meaning of complacentia:

This deeper concept of sanctity rests on this, that the proper life of the will in its innermost power and full energy does not merely consist in the will’s direction and ordination to or conformity with the objectively good and beautiful, a conformity that is the result of some sort of recognition of its value [that is, the value of the good and the beautiful], but in an affective union and fulfillment with it (or transformation into it) that appears in part as the root of the will’s ethical and practical recognition of the good and beautiful, or of its striving for the possession and enjoyment of it, but in part also as the end and perfection of this practical recognition and this striving and in general as the soul or forma of all further activity of the will. In other words, it [that is, this proper life of the will] consists in love, inasmuch as love, by “being well pleased” in the objectively good and beautiful, binds the lover to the good and beautiful, plunges him into it, forms him into it, and thus penetrates and fills him with it, so that it grows together with him, as it were, and, as a principle immanent to him, propels him to act and strive, filling him with a flow of joy and pleasure. This life of the will, however, is completely pure and perfect only if the will does not merely strive to draw the beloved to itself and into itself as something belonging to its subjective perfection, but attaches itself to it so that it goes to it, unites itself with it and gives itself to it and rests in it.⁵

As odd as it may initially seem to those of us who emphasize the prodigal unconditionality of the divine love, theologians within the Latin tradition have also spoken of the divine love as complacentia. Kronen and Reitan explain:

For in much traditional Christian theology, God’s love consists in more than the sheer benevolence (or agape) directed to creatures irrespective of their intrinsic worth. God also has what has traditionally been called a ‘love of complacency’—that is, a love directly responsive to the merits of its object, one which delights in what is intrinsically good. In addition to being a bestower of value, God is also a respecter of it. He recognizes and honours the intrinsic worth that something possesses because of what it is. While God’s benevolence is directed outward, creatively bringing goods into existence and bestowing further goods on what He has created, His complacent love is directed to anything with intrinsic worth—especially the most intrinsically valuable thing of all: God Himself.⁶

Complacentia begins with God himself: God loves himself with a complacent love because he is the supreme Good and thus infinitely worthy of love. This is not selfish or egotistical love but truthful recognition of who he is—infinite, illimited, overflowing, consummate Goodness. Scheeben elaborates on God’s self-love as an affection of the will:

God contains formally only such affections as are determined by his own Essence. The Divine Will cannot be affected by anything external; hence, if by analogy with ourselves we distinguish many affections in God, they ought not to be conceived as really distinct or conflicting, but as virtually contained in the one act of the Divine Substance. Between the affections which have God Himself for their immediate object, such as complacency in His goodness, love, benevolence, and joy, it is almost impossible to find even a virtual distinction. The other Divine affections, which have creatures for their object, spring from the former, and are ramifications of the Divine Self-Love. . . . The affection most properly attributable to the Divine Will is delight in what is good and beautiful. The primary object of this Divine complacency is the infinite Goodness and Beauty of the Divine Essence; the secondary objects are its created representations.⁷

“God loves His own essence,” comment Kronen and Reitan, “not out of narcissism, but because doing so is objectively right.”⁸ To be morally perfect means acknowledging and responding to that which is intrinsically valuable. Because God’s perfection and worthiness are infinite, “it would be a moral failure on God’s part to fail to love Himself with anything but the most perfect delight and respect for His own merit.”⁹

Kronen and Reitan then go on to suggest that God especially loves and values his Goodness in its aspect of benevolence:

What renders God worthy of being the object of such limitless respect might well be His boundless agapic love, the unwavering and life-giving benevolence that does not wait on worth. It seems to us that God would not be benevolent unless He valued benevolence. By implication, God would not he benevolent above all else without valuing benevolence—and its most perfect embodiment—above all other moral goods. Hence, one might think that the reason God loves Himself most of all (with the love of complacency) is precisely because He values agapic love above all other things, and because it is God Himself who most perfectly embodies such love.¹⁰

This affirmation seems to imply the following: if God wills and respects his benevolence, which is ultimately rooted in the Trinitarian relations, then the failure of his rational creatures to affirm, respect, and glorify his benevolence must be understood as a grievous failure. “God cannot be perfectly benevolent without being angered by such disdain for, or indifference to, perfect benevolence,” remark Kronen and Reitan.¹¹ This is the basis for the traditional claim that sin is an affront to God’s majesty. Just as we become justly angry when someone fails to respect our worth as a person made in the imago Dei, so God becomes justly angry “when he is treated in a manner that falls short of what is fitting with respect to the ultimate source of all good and value.”¹²

Because God loves himself with complacentia, so he also loves human beings with complacentia:

In traditional Christian theology, all creatures participate in God’s goodness, especially rational creatures who were made in God’s image. . . . God is moved to save the unregenerate because of the nature of the rational creature. The rational creature is, essentially, a being bearing the divine image and ordered towards union with God. The idea is this: God can no more cease to value rational creatures—even if they fall into sin—than He can cease to value Himself, because rational creatures are a reflection of His own essence. Therefore, He is always faithful to them, even when they are unfaithful to Him and must seek to destroy their sin. When rational creatures fail to love God, they fall short or their own nature as beings ordered towards union with God. A respect for what the creature essentially is would thus motivate God to seek to overcome this corruption of it.¹³

Kronen and Reitan insist that the above must not be understood as claiming that God’s complacent love for rational beings reduces to his complacent love for himself, as if God only loves creatures because he narcissistically sees himself in them. God truly respects the intrinsic goodness and integrity of rational beings. The authors borrow a distinction from the Lutheran scholastic John Gerhard: while creatures are not essentially good (they receive their goodness from God’s creative act), they are intrinsically good:

Although they do not have their goodness from themselves (a se), they do have goodness in themselves (in se). In short, rational creatures have an intrinsic worth—one that demands respect—which cannot be lost so long as they exist. God would fail to respect the very goodness that flows from Himself if He failed to respect the intrinsic worth of creatures.¹⁴

Now recall that God is both the supreme good and final end of rational creatures; that is to say, God has created them with a teleology directed to deifying union with himself. As the 19th century theologian Isaak August Dorner observes: “Human nature finds its only true reality, or realization, in union with God.”¹⁵ If this is so, if the nature of rational beings is only completed in final salvation, if this nature possesses a value that God respects and must respect, does this not entail that God has a motive to save all rational beings? “In short, God may be bound in duty to save (if He can) even the most recalcitrant of sinners out of respect for their intrinsic worth.”¹⁶

The invocation of divine duty at this point surprises. Until I read George MacDonald’s sermon “The Voice of God,” I had never entertained the notion. Yet I can see its logic, though it must be carefully qualified lest it be misunderstood:

However, we must stress that even if God has a duty to save the rational creature (at least if doing so is possible and would not contravene any other moral obligations that God has), such a duty must not be supposed to rest on anything the creature does, but on what it is. God gives the creature what is due to it based on what He has already given it, in effect crowning His own work; but if creatures exist as beings that God has created distinct from Himself, and are not merely facets of God, then it seems God can have duties towards creatures. One such duty may be to save even the worst sinners, just as a father has a duty to save, if he can do so legitimately, even his most erring child—even if he had no duty to bring the child into being in the first place.

The tradition has been reluctant to speak of any duties on the part of God to creatures, holding with [Johann Wilhelm] Baier that God’s distributive justice must ultimately be recalled to benevolence since the creature only exists out of God’s benevolence. Nevertheless, the tradition has also asserted that once God does create, He cannot fail to act in a way that befits the creature’s essence. To do so would be contrary to His own nature. For as He loves Himself He loves all creatures proportionate to their degree of similarity to Him.¹⁷

Theologians, both West and East, have avoided any suggestion that God might have duties to his creatures, as this seems to imply that God owes a debt to them. But creatures cannot put God in their debt. They receive everything from God, and God receives nothing from them. God is the infinite plenitude of being. Finite creatures cannot add to his actuality and Triadic bliss. In this respect, the God–creature relationship is asymmetrical. Indebtedness runs only one way. “Even so,” our philosophers conclude, “the rational creature’s intrinsic perfection may still ground in God an obligation based on the respect that any intrinsically valuable thing demands—analogous, perhaps, to the respect a creature owes itself.”¹⁸ Or as I might prefer to express it: the Father owes a debt to his Son Jesus Christ to bring rational beings to their eschatological consummation by the Holy Spirit.

Almost as surprising as Kronen and Reitan’s proposal that God owes rational creatures eternal salvation is their invocation of divine wrath as another motive for him to save all. Universalists are often accused of being mawkish sentimentalists, but Kronen and Reitan are too deeply informed by Lutheran scholastics to fall into that hole. They too affirm the divine wrath as a distinct divine attribute, yet one intertwined with God’s complacent love:

Since God’s complacent love for Himself is essentially a love of goodness, it involves love of whatever is good and hatred of whatever is evil. Included in the love of the good is the love of the love of the good, and the hatred of the hatred of (or even indifference to) it. God’s moral nature, then, makes Him truly angry at wickedness. . . . God’s love involves hatred of sin and anger at sinners insofar as they sin. However, unlike the view that treats this wrath as a justification for damnation, [the doctrine of universal salvation] asserts that God’s will to save all flows from His judgment against wickedness (as well as from other motives). For it is only when all are saved that wickedness is stamped out entirely.¹⁹

God’s agapic love and complacent love must therefore be thought together in the simplicity of the divine essence, while maintaining their distinction. On the one hand, we must affirm that God is the source and bestower of the goodness he has bestowed on rational creatures. His benevolence is not responsive to their inherent worth but graciously grants them inherent worth. And because the divine benevolence is not conditioned by the worth he gives, God will respond to the wickedness of rational creatures by “bestowing good where it is lacking”

—that is, by seeking to redeem the wicked, since their wickedness is a vitiation that fundamentally impedes their capacity to enjoy the ultimate human good; namely, union with God. Hence, no conception of divine benevolence towards the creature could include any sort of indulgence towards sin, but would be committed to its eradication—something that can only be achieved through salvation.²⁰

On the other hand, we should also affirm that God complacently values and rejoices in the intrinsic goodness of his rational creatures and hates the sin that blocks final salvation. In his complacentia, the authors maintain, God will therefore annihilate the evil that enslaves his people and bring all to the deifying vision of his essential Goodness, Truth, and Beauty. For that is what eschatological salvation is—the clear and direct experience of the divine essence.

Recall premise #1: “Perfect complacent love is an essential divine attribute.”

Footnotes

[1] John Kronen and Eric Reitan, God’s Final Judgment: A Comparative Philosophical Case for Universalism (2011), p. 131.

[2] Ibid., pp. 71-72.

[3] Thomas Aquinas Summa Theologia I-II 28.2. See Michael S. Sherwin, By Knowledge & By Love (2005), chap. 3.

[4] Sherwin, p. 77.

[5] Quoted by Michael Walstein, “Covenant and the Union of Love in M. J. Scheeben’s Theology of Marriage,” Letter and Spirit, 3 (2007): 139-140.

[6] K&R, pp. 36-37.

[7] Joseph Wilhelm and Thomas B. Scannell, A Manual of Theology: Based on Scheeben’s “Dogmatik”, 4th ed. (1904), pp. 233-234.

[8] Ibid., p. 37. I found the following short meditation in a little book I found online: “Holy Scripture tells us, God is charity (1 Jn 4,16). It does not say, ‘in God there is charity,’ but ‘God is charity,’ that is, everything in God is love, God is essentially love. Now love, even human love, is a desire for what is good; to love is to desire the good of another; it is the act by which the will is drawn toward the good. In God, the infinite Being, love is an infinite will for good, and is directed toward infinite good, the divine essence which God possesses and in which He delights. This love, which is God, is therefore an infinite, complacent love of His own infinite goodness. Yet His embrace extends even to the creatures whom He creates, to communicate to them His own goodness and happiness. Infinite charity, which is God, turns therefore to creatures, bringing them into existence by an act of love which does not stop at the limited good they possess, but brings them back to the infinite good, the Trinity. In other words, God creates and loves them for His own glory.” Fr Gabriel of St Mary Magdalene, Divine Intimacy (1963), “First Sunday of Advent.”

[9] Ibid.

[10] Ibid.

[11] Ibid.

[12] Ibid., p. 38. More on the divine wrath below.

[13] Ibid., 39.

[14] Ibid.

[15] Quoted, ibid.

[16] Ibid., pp. 39-40

[17] Ibid., p. 40

[18] Ibid. Cf. DBH’s formulation: “An intrinsic rational desire for God would constitute a ‘right’ to God’s grace only if our nature were our own achievement. Yes, in a sense God does manifestly owe his creatures grace, within the terms of the gift of creation; but that is a debt he owes ultimately only to his own goodness.” David Bentley Hart, You Are Gods (2022), p. 9.

[19] K&R, pp. 41-42.

[20] Ibid., p. 41.

(Go to “Naturally Ordered to Beatific Vision”)