Love is an attitude that exults in the sheer existence of the other and wills the other’s good. In the words of the Thomist Josef Pieper, it wants to say, “It is good that you exist; it is good that you are in this world!” Thus it is not primarily a condition of the feelings but an attitude of the will. But does God love the things that He creates? Does He cherish even the least of His creatures, as the Tradition claims? Much earlier we established that He is good. But does He will to impart good? Objections can be offered from many different directions. Of course, Scripture asserts God’s love for all things, but St. Thomas inquires whether it can be demonstrated by logical considerations alone.

If any book could be said to condemn the whole idea of human beings attempting to become like God, then surely it is the Bible. At the very beginning of Genesis, a serpent (later identified as Satan) tempts Eve with the promise that, if she disobeys God by eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, then she will be “as a god.” According to the Bible, the root of all evil is pride; and pride means precisely thinking that we could become divine. Jesus himself is condemned by the Jewish priests for the blasphemous arrogance of claiming to be divine. And yet, the Bible also promises the faithful that they can become “partakers of the divine nature.” What the Bible condemns, of course, is self-deification. If we surrender to God’s love and seek intimate relation to him, God promises to transform us into creatures who possess divine sanctity and everlasting life. The biblical God is less a paradigm of perfection that we might imitate and more a divine person with whom we might have a loving relationship. According to the Bible, we are divinized not by merely imitating God but by loving and being loved by him.

In the second chapter, the role of the dialogue’s Proem is treated in detail. Socrates’ first words are not those of concepts but of courtship, and Alcibiades’ pending metamorphosis is begun by means of love. The Neoplatonic reading of the dialogue’s opening section is not just a reflection on Socrates’ pederastic obsession with a beautiful young man and his attempt to seduce him away from his other lovers; it is a prolonged meditation on the nature of love and its ultimate expression in the philosophical life. Far from being a playful preface without philosophical substance, the Proem is an introduction to this introductory dialogue, an isagogic first step in a lengthy rite of philosophical transformation that begins with erotic initiation. The Neoplatonic student finds that Socrates nurtures the seeds of erotic contemplativity in Alcibiades prior to his formal questions and arguments.

Divine determinism has been an unpopular topic in recent theology – widely dismissed, habitually avoided. One might wonder, therefore, what a theological contribution to understanding this possibility might look like. Some have proposed that reflection on divine transcendence helps us avoid misunderstandings that put secondary, creaturely agency in competition with God’s. I argue that this “non-competitive” approach offers limited insight into the agential and theodical problems raised by divine determinism. Drawing on doctrines of election, I then explore the possibility that divine love itself might require determinism. If, having imagined specific characters in a particular story, God loves them and desires to bring them to life, God might find it necessary for history to take the directions required for them to come to be. This possibility challenges caricatures of a determining God as tyrannical and suggests that even divine authorship may face constraints in eliminating evil.

In this conclusion of the book, I begin by offering some advice on evaluating the positions of others, especially concerning what we might think of as their willingness to reject clear and obvious intuitions we have in the defense of their positions. I especially call attention to doing so in a way that suggests that all those who reject our intuitions about divine determinism must be willing to do anything to preserve irrational religious beliefs. Intuitions, of course, are not universally shared, and the willingness to accept what others view as implausible is not limited to religious issues. I close by reviewing the challenges to divine determinism that I have explored in this work, noting what I view as the best responses to each and highlighting those that I find the most problematic.