7. Still, Judaism does not proclaim love, absolute and unrestricted, as the divine principle of life. That is left to the Church, whose history almost to this day records ever so many acts of lovelessness. Love is unworthy of God, unless it is guided by justice. Love of good must be accompanied by hate of evil, or else it lacks the educative power which alone makes it beneficial to man.
God's love manifests itself in human life as an educative power. R. Akiba says that it extends to all created in God's image, although the knowledge of it was vouchsafed to Israel alone.(367) This universal love of God is a doctrine of the apocryphal literature as well. "Thou hast mercy upon all ... for Thou lovest all things that are, and hatest nothing which Thou hast made.... But Thou sparest all, for they are Thine, O Lord, Lover of souls," says the Book of Wisdom;(368) and when Ezra the Seer laments the calamity that has befallen the people, God replies, "Thinkest thou that thou lovest My creatures more than I?"(369)
8. Among the mystics divine love was declared to be the highest creative principle. They referred the words of the Song of Songs,--"The midst thereof is paved with love,"(370) to the innermost palace of heaven, where stands the throne of God.(371) Among the philosophers Crescas considered love the active cosmic principle rather than intellect, the principle of Aristotle, because it is love which is the impulse for creation.(372) This conception of divine love received a peculiarly mystic color from Juda Abravanel, a neo-Platonist of the sixteenth century, known as Leo Hebraeus. He says: "God's love must needs unfold His perfection and beauty, and reveal itself in His creatures, and love for these creatures must again elevate an imperfect world to His own perfection. Thus is engendered in man that yearning for love with which he endeavors to emulate the divine perfection."(373) Both Crescas and Leo Hebraeus thus gave the keynote for Spinoza's "Intellectual love" as the cosmic principle,(374) and this has been echoed even in such works as Schiller's dithyrambs on "Love and Friendship" in his "Philosophic Letters."(375) Still this neo-Platonic view has nothing in common with the theological conception of love. In Judaism God is conceived as a loving Father, who purposes to lead man to happiness and salvation. In other words, the divine love is an essentially moral attribute of God, and not a metaphysical one.