“Maybe the thwarted lover still has enough love to be well off/happy.”

Certainly you are correct, Dale. Maybe a lover can be happy while not enjoying requited love. But for R. St. V., perfect love, by definition, includes a full return to the lover. Another concern you pose is a bit more on target:

“…how could there be any intrinsic top limit to what God can own and enjoy?”

By ‘intrinsic’ I shall understand Dale to mean necessary in some interesting sense, perhaps metaphysical or logical necessity. It may be that R. St. V. is not committed to an upper limit of happiness in any sense of necessary. More strongly, R. St. V may not be committed to an upper limit of happiness at all.

God’s supreme and perfect happiness, for R. St. V., is characterized by qualities such as *having charity*. A necessary condition for charity is *having a person to direct love towards* (Bk III, Ch.II). Therefore, a necessary condition for perfect happiness is *having a person to direct love towards*. As R. St. V’s proof develops, we see that supreme love would be “disordered” if directed at creation, and therefore must be directed at a divine person. This definitional/argumental clarification may be a step towards an answer to your question, and here is why: I do believe R. St. V’s proof allows for the possibility that love is in some sense ‘infinite’ [God is eternal (Bk.II), He is simple (Bk. II) and therefore His supreme love is eternal]. If this is possibly the case, if God’s love is possibly eternal, then it is at least possible that the ‘top limit’ of God’s happiness is eternally/infinitely high. In other words, there may be no upper limit of happiness at all.

So at least one of your worries may be alleviated. I believe your bigger worry is how God can love His creation whatsoever given His already supreme-love-from-eternity. And to this Scott posits an answer along Victorine lines. The problem is not, however, that supreme happiness requires perfect love.

Also, I suppose Richard believes that x’s being happy with regard to y, and x’s being grief-stricken with regard to y, are contraries. The grieving divine person (because of unrequited love) might hope that the other returns the love; but hope is not happiness (right now). After all, if I hope for something, like finding a $20 bill on the ground, this hope doesn’t make me happy– it might give me apparent happiness given an expectation. It’d be different if a reliable person made a promise to me that I’d get a $20 bill sometime in the future in my mailbox. I can have some happiness about that b/c I know (in some sense) that i’ll get the $20– but in the case Richard is considering, there is no promise of requited love.

I’m not really clear on the conception of happiness Richard is presupposing here… Perhaps it means: not lacking in (a sufficient amount of) any (sort of?) good thing? Or: not having any unmet desire. On the face of it, a being might be happy/well off with unrequited love – it may be (as your premise 3) that one’s love is as yet unrequited, but one may be hopeful that the wanted lovee will accept one’s love. Maybe the thwarted lover still has enough love to be well off/happy.

If happiness is a matter of enjoying/having certain goods, it is hard to see what “perfectly happy” could amount to – how could there be any intrinsic top limit to what God can own and enjoy?

So I don’t really get what it is about happiness that requires perfect love, i.e. love of at least two others (with some extra condition). I don’t see why having unrequited love must bring happiness destroying grieving, although it by definition involves an unmet desire. Doesn’t happiness tolerate tons of unmet desires? It had better – God desires that all be saved, and that we all always do what is good and right, and yet these desires regularly are frustrated. But we don’t say on that account that God is unhappy.