Love of God (Christianity)

According to St John of the Cross, spiritual friendship with another person leads to love which encourages love of God. Remembering love of God brings greater desire for God. Adding goodness to goodness makes goodness grow. Conversely, friendship for another person based on lust causes love of God to diminish. Remorse occurs as the person becomes aware that the soul is forgetting God in favour of the friend. Then the growing love for God can make the lustful love diminish and become forgotten.

According to François Fénelon, there are three kinds of love of God:< [Mercenary or selfish love]

, which is love for God originating in desire for one's own happiness. If this is the only love one feels for God, then God is only a means to an end and it is sacrilegious and impious, seeking only self-gratification.

[Mixed love]

, where a regard for one's own happiness, although there, is subordinate to a regard to the glory of God. This is not necessarily wrong, as loving God as He ought to be loved and one's self no more than one ought is both unselfish and right.

[Pure love]

is mixed love carried to its true result. This result implies that the motive of God's glory so fills the mind that the motive of one's own happiness is practically annihilated. God becomes the centre of the soul to whom all affections tend, the sun from whom all light and warmth proceed. Ones own happiness and all that regards one's self is lost sight of. It is not that it is wrong to desire one's own good, simply that when God is in the soul who can think of himself ? God alone is loved, all other things in and for God.