The Supreme ‘Thing’
In the Old Testament book of Genesis God reveals that He has made us in His image and likeness (Genesis 1:26). That being so, no image of God can be complete if it does not reflect to some degree the image of a human person. While the Person of God as Father was depicted in the Old Testament, the Gospels make very clear through the life and death of Jesus Christ that God truly is to be personified in not just one, but three Persons in one God.
The habit of personifying God is hardly new. Before Christianity the Egyptians personified their gods in Isis and Osiris. The Greeks personified their gods in Zeus, Athena, Apollo and others. Most of these gods reflected, at least to some degree, the worst of human personality traits. But it was precisely because they did not reflect the best elements of humans that they went the way of all flesh into historical irrelevance. Only the God known as perfectly good could outlive all the others.
When I hear the Deists say there might be a Supreme ‘Thing’ but no Supreme Person, I have to ask myself why they do not see evidence of a personal God. I can’t come up with a reason. Just the fact that humans everywhere since the dawn of human history have reached out to God, not just as a Thing, but as a Personal Thing, suggests very strongly that the Supreme Thing who created us also created us to reach out to a Person, not just a Thing. If we remove from us all our need for divine love and truth and mercy and justice, we become as mere stones hurtling through the universe.
Are we to believe that an impersonal Thing unconsciously created us to want a personal relationship with It? That would put us in a position of possessing attributes the Thing itself was powerless to possess. It also puts us in the position of assuming that the Thing created us without wanting to know and love what It had created, whereas humans knew they had been created to know and love the Creator. Why does a mindless impersonal Thing appeal to anybody as an idea of a Supreme Being?
When the people who deny God is a Person think about it, sometimes they will concede that one trait of human personality God might possess (but one trait only) is the trait called Reason. The Deists of the 18th Century – Voltaire for example – allowed this possibility. It is to their credit, I suppose, that being intellectuals they could imagine a power of Reason greater than their own. The existence of this God as Reason was suggested to them by the growing discovery, especially among the astronomers and physicists, that the universe seems to follow a certain set of laws. But how, they wondered, could there be Laws if there is no Lawgiver?
Less than a century ago Albert Einstein, the most prominent scientist of his age, but no believer in a personal God, announced his belief in the God of Reason. As he said: “I believe in Spinoza’s God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with fates and actions of human beings.”
But this kind of logic seems truly self-defeating. If you are going to assign the one human trait of “reason” to God, why not grant other traits in God such as “love” and “mercy”? When Mozart composed beautifully sacred music by which to celebrate receiving the Eucharist, the hymn Ave Verum Corpus; when Michelangelo painted powerful images of God the Father in the Sistine Chapel; when the magnificent spires of the Medieval cathedrals reached boldly heavenward; when people of every age and every continent have spent themselves searching and finding a reason to know God as a Person, not a Thing; when the same searchers have been consoled and lifted up by the loving embrace of Jesus Christ … we have to wonder why anyone would think that God’s powers are limited to Reason, to the mere act of creating the universe, winding it up with rational and harmonious laws, then abandoning the scene like a petulant child who tosses aside a toy that has lost its novelty. The dreadfully persistent and gnawing question will not go away.
Why is this God of Reason even reasonable to those who worship Reason?
Saint Kateri , Canada’s Protectress
This was the title given to Saint Kateri Tekakwitha, by Pope Benedict XVI, when he canonized her on October 28th, 2012, along with six others, in Saint Peter’ Square (she had been beatified by Pope John Paul II back in 1980). With Saint Joseph as our protector, along with the Canadian martyrs, we seem to[…]Continue reading→
Remembering Father Alphonse de Valk
(Today marks the sixth anniversary of the death of Father Alphonse de Valk, C.S.B., a faithful, courageous and indefatigable Basilian priest, pro-life-and-family apostle, and the founder of Catholic Insight magazine. Here is what we wrote those on his entering into eternity five years ago, as we continue to remember him in our prayers and thoughts)[…]Continue reading→
My Name is Bernadette
April 16th is a propitious day, for besides the anniversary of Father de Valk’s death, who founded Catholic Insight in its print form decades ago, and the commemoration of the ‘two Benedicts’, mentioned in accompanying posts, today we also recall Saint Bernadette Soubirous, the young visionary to whom the Virgin Mary appeared numerous times at[…]Continue reading→
Canonizing Sister Faustina and Divine Mercy
HOMILY OF THE HOLY FATHER MASS IN ST PETER’S SQUARE FOR THE CANONIZATION OF SR MARY FAUSTINA KOWALSKA Sunday, 30 April 2000 1. “Confitemini Domino quoniam bonus, quoniam in saeculum misericordia eius”; “Give thanks to the Lord for he is good; his steadfast love endures for ever” (Ps 118: 1). So the Church sings on the Octave of[…]Continue reading→
Divine Mercy Sunday – An Echo of Every Mass
Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt but believe’… ‘My Lord and my God!’ (Jn. 20:18)). Today is Divine Mercy Sunday, and as we celebrate the end of the Easter Octave, we contemplate the wounded side of our Saviour, the Church’s source of life. On Good Friday in the[…]Continue reading→
Saint Stanislaus of Szczepanów
We celebrate Saint Stanislaus today (+ April 11, 1079), in light of this Easter Octave, a bishop and martyr who accepted the episcopacy only at the direct order of Pope Alexander II. He proved a wise and courageous leader of his flock, put to death by his own king, Boleslaus, for rebuking the monarch’s ‘immoral[…]Continue reading→
First Holy Communion: Sermon from May 16, 1943
Here is a sermon from the good old days by +Rev. Msgr. Vincent Nicholas Foy (August 14, 1915 – March 13, 2017), from 1943. Readers may recall that Pope Saint Pius X, by the decree Quam Singulari in 1910, lowered the customary age of reception of Holy Communion – after the rigours of the plague[…]Continue reading→
In the Glorious Light of Easter, Alleluia!
Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth, for you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ who is your life is revealed, then you also will be revealed with him in glory (Col. 3:3-4). The Resurrection of Our Lord and Saviour[…]Continue reading→
An Ancient Homily for Holy Saturday
The time between Good Friday and Easter Sunday is one of waiting, in silence, as the world wonders – anticipates – what will happen, after the death of Christ. We re-live this time each year in the anamnesis of our liturgy, and in turn look forward to the glorious re-creation of all things at the[…]Continue reading→
Europe’s Long Descent
(As we meditate on this day on Christ’s burial, and His descent into hell, it is fitting to ponder here with contributor Peter Marcus how the world seems to be heading there as well. The difference is that, although God cannot ‘redeem’ hell, nor those therein, He can and did redeem the world. There is[…]Continue reading→