Should we love God disinterestedly, without expectation or desire for return from Him, without any desire for happiness? It’s a common idea, but Milbank rightly argues against it. He asks “what constitutes God’s loveability”?

His answer” “every charm, every attractive feature of anything whatsoever, radiates outwards, rendering things apprehensible and therefore specifically loveable only in the measure that they affect the state of the observer in a positive fashion. If therefore follows . . . paradoxically, that to love anything purely for itself, in abstraction from the special quality of its influence upon oneself, is not at all to love that thing in its specificity, but rather to love it for that mere abstract and univocal quality of ‘being’ that it shares with everything else conceivable.”

If we apply this to God, “it follows that ‘to love him for his own sake’ would turn out to mean not only to over-identify with him, but also to over-identify with a mere cipher, with a sublime void, or at best an infinite will forever suspended over us.”

Were we capable of loving God of His own sake, in short, we could not be able to know that it is God we love.