God Out-pouring

Sage cautions from de Lubac: In speaking of the generous giving of God, “one must, a fortiori , be careful to correct – if not wholly to avoid – the neo-Platonist metaphors of flux, of gushing, of ‘effluence,’ of emanation, of soaking into things. God is not, as one might think from some Platonist expressions also taken up by Denys, a generosity pouring himself out; it is at best inadequate to see him simply as that ‘fundamental generosity’ which must mean, for the Absolute, simply the fact of being essentially communicable; or that kind of generosity which is no more than a de-sacralized charity . . . . I would not, for instance, be too eager to speak of God as a wave flowing over us, or as a light glowing. No would I say with Simone Weil that ‘God loves . . . as an emerald is green.”

On the contrary, Christians must say that God’s goodness is “a ‘willed goodness,’ a goodness which is also benignity. God is love in person, love which freely, and not because of any law or inner determination, creates the being to whom he wills to give himself, and gives himself freely.” Images of overflow imply, de Lubac recognizes, that there is some possibility or impossibility, some potentiality that is more fundamental, deeper, or higher than God’s will. De Lubac quotes Anselm: “sola in eo operatur voluntas. Voluntatem Eius null praecessit necessitas.”