In the post here, I raised Jesus’s proposal that one should imitate God by treating all alike, since God treats all alike, as for example by sending the rain and the sun upon all. At the time, I promised to explain how such treatment could be seen as the effect of love. While the reader may already be able to gather that from the last few posts, it might be useful to bring a few threads together here.

The idea that the good man treats all alike is not unprecedented. Thus for example in Plato’s Republic, Socrates argues that the just man cannot harm anyone:

But ought the just to injure any one at all?
Undoubtedly he ought to injure those who are both wicked and his enemies.

When horses are injured, are they improved or deteriorated?
The latter.
Deteriorated, that is to say, in the good qualities of horses, not of dogs?

Yes, of horses.
And dogs are deteriorated in the good qualities of dogs, and not of horses?

Of course.
And will not men who are injured be deteriorated in that which is the proper virtue of man?

Certainly.
And that human virtue is justice?
To be sure.
Then men who are injured are of necessity made unjust?
That is the result.
But can the musician by his art make men unmusical?
Certainly not.
Or the horseman by his art make them bad horsemen?
Impossible.
And can the just by justice make men unjust, or speaking general can the good by virtue make them bad?

Assuredly not.
Any more than heat can produce cold?
It cannot.
Or drought moisture?
Clearly not.
Nor can the good harm any one?
Impossible.
And the just is the good?
Certainly.
Then to injure a friend or any one else is not the act of a just man, but of the opposite, who is the unjust?

The basic argument is that good should only be a cause of goodness. Dionysius, in chapter 4 of The Divine Names, makes a similar point about God as the Supreme Good:

For as our sun, through no choice or deliberation, but by the very fact of its existence, gives light to all those things which have any inherent power of sharing its illumination, even so the Good (which is above the sun, as the transcendent archetype by the very mode of its existence is above its faded image) sends forth upon all things according to their receptive powers, the rays of Its undivided Goodness.

He mentions that the sun does this without “choice or deliberation,” in order to indicate that God communicates his goodness to all things, without refusing it to anything.

We might say, like St. Peter in the Book of Acts, that God shows no partiality. But it is not simply that he shows no partiality among human beings; rather, he shows no partiality among beings as such. Every being receives goodness to whatever degree it is able; in this way St. Thomas asserts that form is received by every disposed matter.

From this it is not difficult to see why the rain or the sun falls upon all, or even why the tower fell. It belongs to the nature of these things to exist and to act in this way, and it belongs to the nature of God to give them their proper existence and action, which is good for them and for the order of things.

Someone will object: then God does harm, as when some are killed by the tower, or even by the rain and the sun in various cases.

But the answer to this is evident from what has already been said.