What if it is impossible to love God with your whole heart?
An often overlooked question with objections that should give us pause. (ST.II-II.Q27.A5)
To love God with your whole heart is the first principle of action for the Christian. “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with thy whole heart” as it says in Deuteronomy 6:5. Actions, decisions, deliberations, should have increasing the love of God in view if one is to be a good Christian. But what if it is impossible to love God with your whole heart? What if we are not capable of accomplishing the most fundamental directive in Christianity? This would be problematic to say the least. Thomas Aquinas, in being a fair thinker, asks that question and even raises powerful objections against it, even though he was sure that it could lead to devastating conclusions. Let us look at what he has to say. Here are his three objections:
1. We cannot love God perfectly because we cannot know God perfectly.
We only can love something to the extent that we know it. If I love Paris, but have never visited or know practically nothing about it such as its language, history, or cuisine, then my love of Paris is not authentic, true, tested love, but only provisional. We can only deeply love something if we deeply know it, otherwise our love would be superficial just like our knowledge of it.
2. God is above our hearts
If we are to love God, our hearts need to be wholly united to God. However, this seems impossible since it explicitly says in Scripture that God is greater than our heart (1 John 3:20)
3. Only God can love Himself wholly
Because God already loves Himself wholly, it would follow that we would need to love God as God does. But it is impossible for us to love anything like God.
Here is the solution.
Recall that “wholly” can have at least three meanings.
First, it can refer to the object itself. Every part of God, so to speak, should be loved. There is nothing unloveable about God. If someone says, “I love Paris,” she could mean “I love everything about Paris.”
Second, it can refer to the agent, the one loving. It means we love God as much as humanly possible. There is nothing in our lives that cannot or should not be directed to loving God. All actions, whether big or small, can be directed to God. There is a place for God in all our decisions.
Third, it can refer to the fact that the love fittingly corresponds to the loved. The love does justice to how good the object of love really is. This is where creatures fail short. It cannot be done because God infinitely exceeds us. God is infinite, and we are finite. We cannot love him in every possible way, only in the ways possible for human creatures.
The objections, therefore, can be clarified by Thomas’s subtle distinction of “wholly.” The first two objections understand “wholly” in the third sense so Thomas concedes the objections. We cannot love God in such a way that does justice to how good God is. The third objection assumes that we should love God in a way that only God can do, that is not true—we are called to love humanly, although in a way elevated by grace.1
Text for reference: https://aquinas.cc/la/en/~ST.II-II.Q27.A5.T