Richard of St. Victor presents an argument for the Trinity that starts with human love. Self-love is not the highest form of love; perfected love is self-transcending love, and ultimately the love of two directed toward a third, who returns love. A God who is love must therefore be Triune.

Along the way, he argues that only an infinite object of love is worthy of the Father’s love. As Edmund Hill explains it, “God cannot love his creature objectively as much as he loves himself - that is, whereas he wills to himself an infinite good, he wills to the creature only its particular finite goodness - and accordingly such love falls short of unconditioned perfection.” Perfect love demands return; infinite love demands infinite return from an infinite beloved.

All quite true, but there seems to be another side to things.

As Dennis Ngien explains Richard’s position, “Since God alone must be loved supremely, a divine person could not express supreme love to a person who lacks divinity. For to love with the highest love that which does not deserve such a love, in Richard’s rendering, is a ‘disordered love.’ . . . God’s love, like Eros , is guided by the worth of the object.” Thus, “a second person is needed within the Divinity as an object on which the Divine love bestows without limit.” Only to such a divine person can the Father’s charity be fully expressed “without disorderly waste.”

Again, true enough. The Son shares the infinity of His Father, and so He is an infinite receptor of His Father’s infinite love. But this concern with “waste” sounds strange. After all, doesn’t the Father love us extravagantly? Doesn’t He love us so much that He gave His only Son for our eternal life? Are we worthy of such a love? If we say so, we seem to be elevating our value all out of proportion to reality; if we say not, then the Father did indeed shower His love
“wastefully” upon us. One might say that we have the value God assigns us, and that we are “worthy” of whatever God deems us worthy to receive. But that sounds odd too, and again seems to elevate us beyond our deserts.

It seems that the answer to this question is to challenge Richard’s assumed idea of love, and to note that love, by its very nature is “wasteful.” Or, perhaps better, it is only appears “wasteful” on some prior definition of un-wasteful love. But what would that be?

Another issue comes up in Richard’s analysis, which is the human capacity to receive God’s love. While we are creatures who never become Creators, Richard’s formulation seems to assume that there is some “natural” limit to how much we are capable of receiving from our Father. It almost sounds as if finitude poses an obstacle to God and His love. It’s much more profoundly creationist to say, with Gregory of Nyssa, that our capacity to receive can expand as far as God can give. There is no created limit over-against God that he has to respect, within whose bounds He is forced to operate. (This doesn’t cancel Richard’s argument that the Father must have, and does have, a divine Son with whom He shares life in a way that can never be true of creatures.)