God's nature (2)

 Infinity

No limits are to be placed on the goodness of God, as no limits are to be assigned to any other divine attribute. How can you have a fence with nothing, absolutely nothing, on the other side of it? What is there of reality, that God will not have, to mark the spot where the fence must begin? Limitation is essentially a declaration of potentialities achieved or potentialities capable of achievement; without potentiality limitation is a contradiction in terms. And there can be no potentiality in God, for potentiality is a declaration of dependence. God has not received existence within the limits of a human, an animal or an angelic nature; He has not received at all, He is. The idea of reception is the idea of change, of potentiality actualized, of perfection within limits--something that our proof for His existence forced us to exclude from God. He is infinite, and He alone; for He alone is first, receiving from no one, giving to all.

Ubiquity

In a very real sense, this utterly limitless God overflows the limits of the universe. He is everywhere within it, yet not contained by it. Everything in the universe comes from God; existence is His proper effect. Where anything exists,\ there is God. Understand, now, this is not merely a matter of God first giving existence and then abandoning the universe to its fate; He does not give us a pat on the back as we leave the corner of nothingness to jump into the ring of life, leaving us to take the blows while He shouts advice that takes none of the sting out of the blows. Existence belongs to God; as long as existence endures, there is the hand of God sustaining it as a mother supports her infant or the throat of a singer sustains his song. God is everywhere, and only God; for only God is the infinite, the first cause explaining every existent thing.

The ubiquity of God, in common with all the divine perfections, is not a cold, abstract thing meaningless to men. Its significance for human living is inexhaustible. In thc concrete, it means, for instance, that God is in the surge of the sea, the quiet peace of hills and valleys, the cool refreshment of rain, the hard drive of wind-driven snow. In the cities He is in the bustling of crowds, the roar of traffic, the struggle for pleasure, for life, for happiness, in the majesty of towering buildings. In homes He is not to be excluded from the tired, drowsy hours of night, the hurried activity of morning, from the love and quarrels, the secret worries and unquestioning devotion, the sacrifice and peace that saturate a home. In every individual one of us God is more intimately present than we are to ourselves. Every existing thing within us demands not only the existence of God but also His constant presence, from every rush of blood from our hearts to every wish, every thought, every act. In other words, everything that is real must have God there as the explanation, the foundation, the cause of every moment of its reality.

Thomas puts this all succinctly and beautifully when he says that God is in the world, in everything and everyone in the world, by His essence, causing all things, by His presence, all things being naked and open to the eye of this intelligent cause, by His power on which everything depends, to which everything is subject.

There is in this conception a majesty that transforms the earth. The mistaken exaggerations of Eastern philosophy made men walk carefully lest, treading on a living thing, they tread on the soul of a man. We have no fear of treading on the soul of man nor on God; but we do live in a world vibrant with divinity. We can give a real reverence to every being because within it, supporting its very existence, is the living God Himself. There is terror in this conception, the terror of moving in an atmosphere pervaded with divinity, of being ourselves wrapped about with divinity, penetrated with the infinite. But there is also courage and comfort here to be had from no other source. We bar the world in general from everything but the surface of our lives; friends are allowed to enter a few rooms of our palace; love throws open the gates as far as it is given us to open them--as wide as physical signs or clumsy, stumbling, inadequate words can open our souls, as wide as sacrifice and devotion can keep those gates open. Only God can walk freely about the innermost corridors of our being. And He does. Unless He be there, we could not be.

The pessimistic pantheism of the East, to which our modern philosophy edges closer every day, distorted the truth of the intimate presence of God to the point of identifying everything with divinity. On such premises there was good grounds for pessimism. All distortions are false, this one is as absurdly false as the identification of my image in a mirror with myself or the inability to see any difference between the poet and his poem. None of the things created by God are divine; rather they are the mirrors of divinity, the effects of the divine cause that depend every instant on that cause for their reality.

Immutability

Nor is this intimate presence of God in the world to be mistaken for that tortured, twisting, developing god of the moderns that fights its way towards perfection through the struggle of the universe, changing as we change, getting better as we improve. God is altogether unchangeable. For what is change but the realization of a potentiality, the receiving of something new or the loss of something old. In God there can be no potentiality, nothing to be lost, nothing to be gained. He is pure actuality, pure being, possessing all things. He is beyond change and He alone; for He alone is first, dependent on no other, free of all potentiality.

To the modern philosopher this notion makes God completely static; if this be true, then this is a dull, stagnating, deteriorating God. His reason is not dissimilar from thc reasons for a New Yorker's distaste for travel, an Englishman's tolerance of the continent or an American tourist's amusement at the strange antics of the rest of the world. In his own little world of creatures, the modern philosopher sees clearly that there must be change for progress, that immutability is closely akin to stagnation and deterioration. The point is that he is provincial enough to judge everything, even God, by the standards of that created world. It is true that change is inseparable from perfection in the world of unrealized potentialities; but it is also true that such a world is inconceivable without a Being of pure actuality, a Being Who is pure activity, Who has no potentiality, no possibility of losing or gaining but is a white flame of perfection. Such a Being is not in a state of static inertia; His is an activity so intense that change of any kind is impossible to it.

Eternity

This God did not begin; He cannot end. For both beginning and end proclaim a change, a reception or a loss, an imperfection, a dependence. He is eternal and He alone; eternal with that absolute, complete eternity of a divinely unchangeable Being.

Unity

Obviously there is only one such God. More than one demands some ground for difference -- something one would have and another lack; this God lacks nothing. Where would infinity stop, which has no limits, that another infinity might begin? How could there be beginning or end, limitation, to the infinite perfection and pure act that is God? He is one, distinct from the world of finite, limited creatures, yet intimately within it. In the beautiful words of the divine Office: "To the King of ages, the immortal, invisible, the only God be honor and glory forever and ever."

Unspeakable Modern Gods

This is the God rejected by modern philosophers. Caught by the glitter of their words, thousands of men and women have turned their backs on the only God and their faces to the gods of modern philosophy. What is offered to them?

A Subjective God

One group of philosophers suggests a subjective god, one of our own manufacture. To some of these, such a god would be no more than a projection of our subconscious states or of our social and racial instincts. The god-makers would be, for the most part, the weak, the oppressed, the downcast; for such a god is offered by way of compensation for inferiority. The superior man, they say, does not need this sop; but for the others, who still remain children, it is necessary that they have some enduring symbol of parental shelter to which they may run when life becomes too much for them. Others of this group suggest a deification of humanity: the spirit of a people, of the world of humanity, or of living beings taken in their associated and ideal experiences. This conception of divinity, says one of these philosophers, is best expressed by such terms as "alma mater" or "Uncle Sam"! Still others advise that we make our divinity of a quality of the world peculiarly akin to ourselves; or perhaps the material best suited is the higher reality on which we lay hold when we comprehend a truth or obey a noble impulse. These are the doctrines American universities are swallowing whole!

A Finite God

A second group of philosophers cast their vote for a finite god, not a subjective god, but one who needs our help, who is sustained by the world, whose interests are at stake in the world. God cannot be infinite, omnipotent, a static absolute if he is to work and make a difference to us. They will have a god who began but will never end; one who is not a creator, not infinite. But one who began with the human race, grows with it, an ideal gathering up to itself the achievements of humanity.

In the last analysis, both of these are stark atheism, the name of god is a cover-all to hide the ugly body of doctrine; both are violently opposed to the solid facts. In both there is a pathetic note: a note of weakness and of fear. The thesis paints a picture of lonely men trying to find comfort in a crowd, bundling themselves together with their fellows in the hope that somehow they will add up, not to a number of men, but to divinity; and it paints a picture of men who are not only weak but who are searching desperately for an escape from the fear of life, the fear of liberty, the fear of action.

An Undeveloped God

The third group takes a further step towards madness in advocating a kind of fluid, undeveloped god. God is the perfect in process, the principle of all struggling towards perfection through matter; yet this principle is fluid for everything real is a process of becoming. Others, within the group, insist that god is the next higher step, the empirical quality just above the highest we know; divinity, in other words, is the mechanical rabbit that lures human greyhounds into running their hearts out in a hopeless race. Maybe this undeveloped god is the finite world with its nisus towards deity; maybe this god is evolution: maybe it is the spirit of rational order. Make it anything you like; but do not dare to make it divine!

A Pantheistic God

The fourth group of modern philosophers come out frankly for a pantheistic god. Some say God is the life force identical with man and the universe. Others, not covering their shame with a blush of words, insist there is no ontological separation of one being from another; and this, if it means anything, means I am my dog and my dog is God just as I am. The connection between God and the universe is an organic one.

These last two groups represent the brutal pessimism of the Orient not yet carried to its logical conclusion; logically, these opinions should lead to utter despair and offer self-destruction as the goal of human life. Both are open violations of the facts; on such a basis, obviously the universe could not exist. It is important to remember that all four of these modern ideas of God are sponsored by men of learning, honored in their universities, hailed as leaders of thought.

Crisis of the Ages

God has been crucial to the thought and life of all ages, not only the existence of God, but knowledge of Him, love and hatred of Him. Men of all ages have had to think a great deal about God, for men of all ages have had to think a great deal about a goal to which they might direct their lives. To many men in many ages, the crisis has been one of loyalty, of the heart rather than the head; the difficulty has been in resisting the lure of the world's tempting byways, and of holding fast to the path they knew to be the true one. This crisis will never be absent from the lives of men for it is the crisis of sin. Some men have failed to meet that crisis with any courage. Others will meet the same failure, but their difficulty, and the difficulty of all the sorry ones who follow after them, has not been in finding the courage to admit the truth of God and His law, but the courage to live up to the truth they admitted even though it condemned them.

The Modern Choice

In our day, as in all days, the crisis of loyalty, the crisis of sin exists. But today, on an increasingly alarming scale, men are being forced to meet another crisis, the crisis of choice, the crisis of the head more than of the heart. It is being made difficult for them to know the true God, let alone give Him their hearts, for modern leaders have set up false gods and demanded, with all the influence of their position, their learning, their skill in words, that men bow down and adore.

Evaluation

The choice offered to the man of the twentieth century might be summed up by saying that he is offered a human god, an inhuman god and the divine God. The human god is the product of subjective sentiment or of communal huddling together to the destruction of personality, a god that takes the alternative forms of personal sentiment, humanitarianism or of absolutism. The inhuman god may be the intangibility of a process under the name of evolution or the absurdity of pantheism. The divine God is the Christian God some of whose attributes we have looked at in this chapter. There is, of course, no rational choice between these three. The first two have no foundation in reality or reason; they are flagrant violations of fact arrived at only as a result of the denial of reality, of reason, of the supernatural, while the last is an inescapable truth.

The choice, from man's point of view, can be stated in concrete terms. One gives immediate and complete oblivion in the crushing force of an absolutism where the individual is less than a cog, or in the vague future of the race in the name of humanity to the denial of men; the second is a matter of hiding from life in the sweet nothings of subjectivism with its promise of sure oblivion after death; the third insists on the dignity of man's personality, on its eternally vital character, it demands that man, fully responsible and with eyes wide open, carve out a personal destiny that can never end. This last is the only God, simple, perfect, infinite, unchangeable, supporting the universe and present in the depth of all that is.