QUINQUE VIAE AMORIS AD DEUM - Five Ways from Love to the Knowledge of God

By: Josef Seifert

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

The title of the book draws a parallel between these new 5 ways from love to God and Aquinas’s famous 5 ways to the knowledge of God which are considered purely cosmological proofs proceeding from very general metaphysical and cosmological properties of the world (such as motion and temporality, non-necessary existence and limited perfection). The quinque vias of Aquinas do not take the person directly into account, although Seifert showed in From Finite Person to the Infinite Divine Person that they, too, arrive at the knowledge of a distinctly personal and free Creator-God.
This book concentrates entirely on the specific nature of the person, especially of personal love and shows that from it five thoroughly personalistic ways lead to the knowledge of God.
The first way applies the Aristotelian and Thomistic insight that a deep finality permeates the universe in which nothing is “in vain”, without meaning and purpose, to a philosophy of love. If the profoundly meaningful features of human love, such as the desire for perfect union with, and happiness of, the beloved person that exclude from their essence fulfillment without God, are not in vain and do not constitute an absurdity, God exists. They cannot be vain nor constitute an absurdity. Therefore, God exists
The second way proceeds from the insight that moral values culminate in the love for God – which would be an absurdity if God did not exist. Both the inner meaning of love of God as supreme morally good act and the necessity that all morally good persons receive their appropriate reward prove the real existence of God.
The third way starts with the insight that only love can be the appropriate value response that is due to the inner preciousness of the person, a truth that grips us in particular in the smile of a baby. Now this lovableness of the person who deserves love for her own sake, persona amanda est propter seipsam, cannot be the product of chance Nor of an unloving or cruel and cold deity, but only of a supremely loving creator.
The fourth way contemplates that love is a pure perfection: that is a value and perfection which to possess is absolutely better than not to possess it for whatever reason. No being could be perfectly good without being capable of loving and without actually loving. Therefore, God who possesses all perfections in the supreme degree, i.e., in their infinitude, has to love in the supreme degree and even to BE LOVE ITSELF.
The fifth way is prepared by chapter six on the ontological proof of the existence of God discovered by Anselm of Canterbury and defended my many great philosophers such as Descartes and Leibniz, and by Seifert himself who authored the most complete systematic work on this proof ever written.
He showed that it can only be valid under four conditions: first of all, if it does not take its starting point in a mere concept or name but in a necessary and uninventable divine essence which the human mind does not construct and cannot invent but finds no less than he finds the essences of prime numbers, of the triangle and of the circle. Just as these essences contain many characteristics which are absolutely inseparable from them if they exist, so the divine essence, and it alone, contains real and infinite existence itself in itself.
Against Aquinas, who doubts a second necessary condition of the ontological proof of God, namely that we can know the divine essence, the author argues that we do possess a true, though incomplete and imperfect knowledge of the divine essence by human reason.
Now the fifth way from love agues that there is no better and purer way to know the divine essence than love, and particularly the love of God, which thus reveals the ultimate truth and foundation of this unique ad most perfect ontological proof of the existence of God.