Scott wrote, “But look at Figure B – the object of love there is no more a person than a pizza is a person.”

Could this be a problem with Figure B, rather than a problem with “Latin” theories?

Figure B part 1 shows Paternity loving the Divine Essence. Figure B part 2 shows the Father loving the Divine Essence.

But shouldn’t Figure B show the Father loving the Son?

Can you point towards specific locations in primary sources in the Latin tradition that write of the Divine Essence as the object of love in the Trinity?

Thank you for your time and assistance.

When I talk about loving Y as Y manifests Y’s essential properties, or a human as a human (that is, as the object of love is a human, not necessarily as I am a human), what I mean is this: I am loving Y for what Y is, and not for those properties which are accidental to Y (or perhaps non-essentially necessary). I’ll love my wife primarily as she is a human being, not as a bank account.

This is not to say that I love the abstract properties which make her human, but instead the realization of these properties. I take it that the will is an essential component of human being, and so I would love a human being for the particular realizations of that will. So, loving a human for the free choices that human being has made is precisely the sort of thing that I am talking about.

“if X loves Y as Y, then X loves Y as Y manifests its essential properties” This last “as” phrase, I’m not sure if I understand it. Perhaps you mean this: if X loves Y, then this is *because* Y manifests its essential properties.

That is not an exceptionless principle. A lot of love, it seems to me, is due to things other than expressions of one’s essential properties. e.g. One’s free choices, in particular, how one has interacted with me, the lover.

If you mean “loving as a human” (as rational, social) etc, to mean a different kind of loving, I don’t understand that at all.

I think this is false: “it would seem perverse to love an essence without also loving everything that essence essentially entails”. Some philosophers think that individuals essentially have a certain origin – e.g. they think it is essential to me that I had Dave and Ginny as parents. But it isn’t at all perverse for you to love me without loving that I was produced by Dave and Ginny.

It seems to me that if I really love my wife as a fellow human being, I will love her insofar as she is human (with whatever that entails). For sure, I’ll love her in the concrete realization of the essential properties of humanity, and there may be specific realizations that I don’t care for very much. But, this is still in opposition to loving her merely as my source of income for grad school. I must love her as a rational, social, volitional, etc., or whatever your anthropology says, being.

If this is true, though, then it would seem perverse to love an essence without also loving everything that essence essentially entails (in this case, the persons). God wouldn’t love God as God unless the persons were to love each other, although I suppose that it would be theoretically possible for God to love the divine essence. The love for a pizza may be similar, in that it would be loving the pizza not as pizza, but as a person (which I think goes against most folks’ pizzaology).