"Omnia appetunt Deum": Aquinas on the Metaphysics of the Human Natural Love of God

Abstract

"Omnia appetunt Deum": Aquinas on the Metaphysics of the Human Natural Love of God

The contemporary debate concerning the so-called “problem of love” in the Middle Ages has typically been framed in the terms set out by Pierre Rousselot in 1908. In the world of Thomistic studies, the various works that have addressed this issue have focused either on the particularities of Aquinas’s understanding of love — particularly on the cause of love — or on the more ethical and psychological aspects of a genuinely disinterested love. In this paper, instead of addressing the more psychological or ethical aspects of this debate, I will focus rather on Aquinas’s underlying metaphysics of the natural love of God. If, as Rousselot noted, Aquinas stands out among his scholastic peers as the main proponent of a physical conception of love, then he must have worked out, to some degree, the corresponding metaphysical framework that allowed him to simultaneously maintain the primacy of the natural love of God in each creature — including, clearly, rational creatures — and the fact that all creatures naturally and inevitably seek their own good. I first show how Aquinas accounts for the metaphysical conditions required for all creatures to both strive after their own good and yet also naturally love God above all else, and then lay out his understanding of the uniquely human manner of operating, which allows us to not only strive after the divine resemblance found in the goods to which we are naturally inclined, but also, and more fundamentally, to strive after God Himself and be united to Him in knowledge and love.