Epistemic status: In the back of my head I think I may see things differently somewhat as I work on my Bible commentary. But I think this is my default perspective from natural theology.
Is God lonely, or is he socially fulfilled? MSL (as I currently understand it) requires that there be at least two persons who make up Legitimacy, and the Bible (in the orthodox view) says that God consists of three persons.
Someone I knew made a claim somewhat like this: God the Father enjoys community with the other two members of the Trinity.
I am not sure that person even believed in the Trinity and if not perhaps was trying to make me think of God in such a way that I would live a more conventionally healthy life. It's interesting that our concepts of God affect our concepts of what kinds of life are acceptable and vice versa. Maybe the person I knew believed that there's nothing to really know about God, so we should pragmatically shape our concept of him to serve our purposes, to deal with the obvious and undeniable problems caused by pain.
But if there's a fact of the matter about God, what is it? It makes sense that the Father, Son, and Spirit enjoy a strong bond with each other, and other than times like Gethsemane, which I would assume are rare, we don't see any temptation to discord between them. They have a complete kinship (on the level of who they are) by their faithfulness to being Legitimacy, and other than during Jesus' life on earth, they may have had no experience of parting or lack of communication.
But they are probably not emotionally satisfied on a social level, because of the billions of people who misunderstand them or even reject them. If you think of God as power, wisdom, and permanence, then God is plenitude. But God's power is thwarted by a single feeble human who chooses not to trust him. If you think of God as love, he is poor, because love impoverishes itself. God is disestablished by us and will only be established (really himself) when the beings who exist are fully in tune with him. By being our father (and not some professional deity) while we are strangers to him, he values us personally in a way that we do not reciprocate. And to love someone who does not love you in kind is a lonely thing to do.
One way to think of God is that he (or they) are vast, greater than all the stars we think are in the universe. But another way is to think that God is miniscule, only three beings in a vast sea of living people (and other spirits), and who knows how many dead people waiting to be resurrected.
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Does this mean that God suffers from poor mental health, in some sense? It sounds like it. But maybe that is what is required of love.
God has to manage to do his work anyway. We tend to think that we have to shut off our emotional understanding of reality so that we can get the work done that will make things better. This grown-up way of doing things makes it so that we no longer see the world as vividly, neither the rightness nor the wrongness of it.
If we take this to its logical conclusion, nothing matters, and then getting work done (the thing that was our reason for shutting off emotions) is pointless. We might think that God is a professional and sets his feelings aside to get the job done of serving us. But if he is too professional, maybe he will feel like there is no point to anything and blink us out of existence. We might not mind that, if we too have shut off our emotions to the point that we feel like our own existence doesn't matter. But we might not like it if he gradually lost a sense of meaning, and withdrew from the world on the personal level long before he stopped making the psychological and physical underpinnings of it work. A world that gradually gets more and more neglected by God is one that will get more and more messed up, more and more a hell. So we would want it to be the case that God is bound to an emotional truth, some set of emotional responses following from the meaning of things. God's feelings would enable him to keep us out of hell.
This truth, or these truths, may be inconvenient. They are part of Legitimacy, which is God and who he is. Legitimacy, that things should be and the way that they should be, determines how a person should respond to whatever the state of reality is. God has to respond to the truth even if it's not pragmatic. Instead, he has to feel the feelings that are true and still function. God's job is a hard job, harder than yours or mine.
(Also as a consequence of everything being experience and thus all metaphysical contact being that of consciousness experiencing another consciousness, God feels our pain exactly as we do and thus can't rest if we can't rest.)
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Is loneliness really mental illness? Even intense loneliness? What exactly is "mental illness"? Thinking it over a bit, I wasn't sure I could easily draw the line between mental illness and what is not mental illness. But I thought "Why do we care about mental illness?" Generally we care about mental illness if it's something that makes it so that we are not in touch with reality, or so that we harm ourselves or others. Is loneliness self-harm? There is harm in negative feelings (subjective). Sometimes, but not necessarily to the point that we die, harm others, or fail to perform whatever good that we ought to for them (more objective). (The difference between subjective and objective harm.)
Being lonely might make us more in touch with reality. Both in the sense that when we are alone, we realize that we are alone most truly by being lonely, and because when we seek to be really in touch with reality, it might make us be alone. As a consequence of really being excellent at minimizing harm in the world overall, it may make you different from most other personal beings and thus alone on that level. So if we are trying to minimize "harm-and-being-out-of-touch-with-reality" (H + !R), we might need to sometimes become more lonely. Minimizing mental illness in a conventional sense might cause us to have more (H + !R), because "mental illness" as culturally defined may not consider the bigger picture of what reality could be. (Sometimes, of course, reducing (as opposed to minimizing) mental illness in a conventional sense reduces (H + !R).)
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We want it to be the case that God's (H + !R) does not get so high that he is untrustworthy, unable to fulfill the role of "good God" for all of us. Clearly, God is untrustworthy at least locally by allowing evil to happen (hence the problem of evil). However, this is bearable if we believe that there was a time before evil and a time after it is gone forever. We would like it to be the case that God is unshakeably good-willed and ultimately competent.
In the MSLN theodicy, it is assumed that God permits evil as a consequence of his holiness. It is because he is unable to will evil that he needs evil beings to will it for him in order for us to be tempted (a necessary part of us having a choice whether to love him or not), and then those evil beings have leverage to make the world worse than it needs to be. God is powerful enough to end any reality (any evil), but it turns out that for the best good outcome to happen (for us to really love him), he must permit the world to have evil in it (to end evil would mean he would have to end us). From that angle, God is behaving in a maximally trustworthy manner, because he is doing the best that can be done for our spiritual well-being. (But it is understandable if not all people can see that all the time, given what happens to them.) Still, what is most trustworthy is some day when evil is gone. God is not on the side of evil and can't stand it forever, so it will be gone, and hopefully each reader of this post will be on God's side when that day comes, rather than identifying with evil in any way.
MSLN theodicy (if it's true) gives us a reason to be certain that God's character is completely trustworthy and that evil exists for an ultimately good reason, and that in terms of "raw power" (what omnipotence may be talking about, I think) God is powerful enough to get his will done, and thus that untrustworthiness is only temporary. But another solution to the problem of evil could conceivably be that God is mentally ill, and inconsistently opposes and supports evil, for reasons that may always be inscrutable to us.
So now I would want to rule out the possibility that God could be mentally ill in a way that threatens his ultimate trustworthiness. I will attempt to do so using (H + !R) as a measure of trustworthiness.
(H + !R) = "harms self or others, is not in touch with reality". If God wills harm for others, it might be because it's the least harmful thing to do in the end ("teaching a lesson"), but if he's not into harm-minimization, he's not legitimate and not God. There are two ways to show this, the "abstract" way, and the "personal" way. The "abstract" way is that harm is a class of damaging something (by definition) which is a diminution of that thing's value on some level -- something which keeps it from its most-valuable state. Legitimacy (value itself) would have to be in favor of whatever was valuable, and thus for each thing to be its most valuable (and thus least-harmed), whenever possible.
The "personal" way is to look at "axizeiology" and consider how we as personal beings think of legitimacy, and especially maximal legitimacy (that which can't be argued against). It is as though we have instilled in us an instinct for recognizing legitimacy, which is helpful in identifying what legitimacy ought to be. We know in this personal way that beings that are maximally legitimate love, and choose the maximally competent course of action. To whatever extent that legitimacy is mentally ill, it still chooses maximally competent courses of action.
What looks like mental illness can be to be two or more wills in one body (or for a body to be possessed by a bad will), or to have a bad will which sometimes masquerades as a good will. In order for legitimacy to love, all of its wills must love (legitimacy can comprise multiple persons). There is a harmony in legitimacy. So what ought to be legitimate is a person (or a set of persons) who are not inclined to harm, and who choose the maximally competent path to avoid harm. Whatever could be called mentally ill in them must be something that doesn't impinge on that. Loneliness or other pains may be psychologically costly (subjectively harm), but they do not prevent God from choosing the maximally competent course of action. He (they, given that God is both a community and its chief member) always does the right thing given the constraints he works with. And to really love sometimes requires suffering, even intense suffering.
Is God in touch with reality? Legitimacy must metaphysically connect with all things it legitimates and thus has all data that exists at its disposal (it is conscious of what it connects to). Legitimacy connects to everything that exists. Does it sufficiently generate enough thoughts to understand reality in depth? (Like generating enough theories to understand given data.) In order to validate something, you have to know how it relates to everything else. Axizeiologically, Legitimacy must understand how everything relates to everything else as part of being competent. So God, as Legitimacy, must be completely in touch with reality, both by possessing knowledge of all that is and by coming to as deep an understanding of it as possible.
In that case, we have reason to think that God passes the (H + !R) test for trustworthiness, and so to whatever extent God is mentally ill, it does not render him untrustworthy. His mental illness is not a form which renders him incoherent internally, so he is of one unified will which loves.
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