Here St. Thomas asserts that loving belongs to charity as such, since loving is the principal act of charity, whereas being loved is not an act. Rather, being loved belongs to charity as something that is good, since it is good for a person that others love him out of charity. Again, what belongs per se to someone belongs to him more than what belongs to him through another. But the act of charity belongs to one per se, whereas being loved belongs to him through another.

In support of this claim, St. Thomas notes that friends are praised more for loving than for being loved, and that mothers, "who love in a special way," seek more to love than to be loved.

The reply to the second objection puts it this way: "Those who have charity seek to love in itself, as if this were itself the good of charit--even as any act of virtue is the good of that virtue. Hence it is more proper to charity to want to love than to want to be loved."

Benevolence, properly speaking, is an act of the will by which we will the good to another or wish another well. It differs from love both (i) insofar as love is an act of the sentient appetite and (ii) insofar as love is an act of the intellective appetite.

• Love in the sentient appetite is a passion which inclines one with a certain impetus toward its object, and that arises through "assiduous inspection of the thing loved" rather than suddenly. Benevolence, by contrast, lacks an impetus toward the object and arises, sometimes suddenly, solely from a judgment of reason.
  
  
• Love in the intellective appetite implies a certain affective union of the lover with the loved--so that the lover thinks of the loved as somehow one with him and so moves toward him. Benevolence, by contrast, is a "simple act of will" that does not presuppose an affective union with the object."

Hence, dilectio includes benevolence and adds to it a certain affective union. "This is why the Philosopher says that benevolence is a beginning (principium) of friendship.

Interesting, but what is the force of "affective union"? Well, in the reply to the third objection St. Thomas identifies affective union as that which underlies features of friendship such as grieving and rejoicing over the same things and choosing the same things. These, he implies, go beyond benevolence and that is why they must be added to benevolence in order to get friendship and dilectio.

This makes sense, especially when we read spiritual writers telling us that God wants deeds and not just expressions of good will.

So what does this question mean? First of all, the contrast here is between loving someone because of himself and loving him because of something (or someone) else. As is clear, he is trying to bring order to various Patristic and Scriptural sayings about the reasons for loving God, and he uses Aristotle's four modes of explanations to bring his sources into harmony with one another. That is, St. Thomas says that the question has at least four different things, corresponding to the four causes (final, formal, efficient, material). Let's go through them one by one.

• Final cause: To love someone because of himself in this sense is to love him as an end in himself and not simply as a means to some further end. Since God is the ultimate end of all things, the answer to the question taken in this sense is YES.
  
  
• Formal cause: To love someone because of himself in this sense is to love him for what he is by his substance. In genuine friendship we love someone because of his virtue or moral goodness, but this is to love him because of something else, since a human being's virtue is an accident that brings his substance to perfection--and not his substance itself. In God's case, by contrast, his substance just is his goodness. That is, his moral goodness is not the actualization of some potentiality he has by nature, but is in fact his very essence. Further, other things are good only because they exemplify or participate in God's goodness in some limited way. So the answer to the question taken in this sense is YES.
  
  
• Efficient cause: To love someone because of himself in this sense is to love him for what he has from himself and and not for what he has from another. (An example of the latter would be the love we have for someone because of his parents.) But God's goodness in no way derives from an outside cause. So the answer to the question taken in this sense is YES.
  
  
• Material cause: The material cause here includes dispositions, and to love someone because of himself in this sense would simply be to love him only because of his goodness and not because of anything he has done for us that disposes us to love him. We can indeed end up loving God in this way, but in fact we begin to love him because of the gifts we have received from him or because of the rewards he promises us or because of the punishments he helps us avoid. So the answer to the question taken in this: IT'S OK NOT TO.

St. Thomas begins by reiterating the difference between acts of cognitive virtues, which reach perfection through the objects' being in the knower, and the acts of appetitive virtues, which reach perfection in the appetite's reaching out to the objects themselves. "Accordingly, one should claim that dilectio, which is the act of an appetitive virtue, tends in the first place, even in this life, to God and goes out to other things from him. Thus, charity loves God directly and other things through God." This is just the opposite from cognition, which knows sensible things directly and arrives at God through them.

In reply to the objection that what is not known cannot be loved, St. Thomas says that even though this general principle is true, it does not follow that the order of cognition coincides with the order of love. "For dilectio is the terminus of cognition, and so where cognition stops, viz., in the thing itself which is known through another, dilectio can immediately begin. He clarifies this further by noting that dilectio joins the soul to God directly by the bond of a spirtual union. Another consideration, though St. Thomas does not say so here, is that the exercise of charity, by taking us beyond what we know of God at any given time, disposes us to a sort of knowledge of God that we could not have without love.

This question is naturally linked with the preceding one. Here St. Thomas distinguishes three senses of 'total love of God':

• with regard to what is loved: we ought to love the totality of whatever pertains to God.
  
  
• with regard to one who loves: we ought to love God with the totality of our capability to love him.
  
  
• with regard to the relation of what is loved to the one who loves: we cannot love God in a way that is adequate to his goodness, which is infinite. Only he himself can do that, and that love is the third person of the Trinity.

A mode, in this context, signifies "some determination of measure," where such a determination occurs in different ways in (a) the measure and (b) that which is measured. The measure has such a determination essentially, since it is that by which other things are measured, whereas what is measured has it insofar as it attains the measure. Hence, the measure has a mode intrinsically built into it, whereas the thing measured lacks a mode, i.e., is unmodified, if it exceeds or falls short of the measure to be aimed at.

Where appetite or desire is concerned, the relevant measure is the end, since what we desire and what we do have their nature from the end. So the end is itself a measure, and the mode or determination of the means to the end lies in their being proportioned to that end. For example, physicians have as their measuring end as much health as they can produce, but they measure their medicine in such a way that it is neither too much nor too little to bring about that end. So the question before us is: In the case of dilectio with respect to God, is there some determination which it should be aimed at and which it should neither exceed nor fall short of?

The answer is that the love of God is itself the end of all human action and affection, and so in itself it is not measured. In other words, just as there is no such thing as excessive health which a physician should avoid aiming at, so too there is no such thing as excessive dilectio or love of God. "And so to the extent that God is loved more, the love is better." In this sense charity has no mean or measure.

However, this is not to, say, though that our exterior expressions of love of God are not subject to measure. For those exterior actions are means to the end of increasing our interior love of God (dilectio) and so are subject to measure "both according to charity and according to reason."

Matthew 5:46: "If you love those who love you, what merit is there in that .......?" On the other hand, one's friend is better--or at least seems so to us--than an enemy, and one should love those who are better more than those who are not.

St. Thomas replies that since the reason for loving our neighbor out of charity is God, there are two ways to compare love of friends and love of enemies:

• on the part of the neighbor who is loved: Here loving a friend is better than loving an enemy, since a friend is (or seems) better and is more closely connected to us. Hence, a friend is, as it were, a matter or object more fit for dilectio than is an enemy.
  
  
• on the part of the reason for loving: Here loving loving an enemy is better than loving a friend, because (i) there are reasons other than God for loving a friend, whereas loving an enemy has God as its only reason, and (ii) given that both friend and enemy are loved because of God, love of God is expressed more forcefully by that which "extends our soul" to farther reaches, as the love of an enemy does. "Our love of God is shown to be stronger to the extent that we do what is more difficult for his sake."

"However, just as a fire acts more strongly on what is closer to it, so too charity loves those conjoined to us more fervently than those who are remote from us, and to this extent the love of friends, taken in itself, is more fervent and better than the love of enemies."

In reply to the above objection, St. Thomas says that what Christ means is that when we love our friends simply because they are our friends, this has no merit in God's eyes. "And this seems to occur when our friends our loved in a way that our enemies are not loved," i.e., a way that does not necessarily involve charity. "Yet loving our friends is indeed meritorious if they are loved because of God."

If we look at the two sorts of love separately, so that neither is thought of as including the other, then loving God is "without doubt" more meritorious than loving one's neighbor. For such love is meritorious in itself and in its own right, since the ultimate reward is just the enjoyment of God.

On the other hand, if we think of loving our neighbor as loving our neighbor because of God, so that love of neighbor includes love of God but not vice versa, then the comparison is between a perfect or complete love of God, which extends to our neighbor, and an imperfect or incomplete love of God, which does not. Obviously, in this sense it is more meritorious to love our neighbor than to love God.

The replies contain St. Thomas's tentative endorsement of what seems to be a rather strained interpretation of Romans 9:3, "For I could wish that I myself were cursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my brothers the Israelites....," viz., that Paul is saying this about his past, un-believing self. St. Thomas does, however, offer an alternative from Chrysostom: What the verse shows is not that Paul loves his neighbor more than God, but that he loves God more than himself. "For he wished to be deprived for a time of the enjoyment of God in order that the honor of God might be procured in his neighbors."