Rene Girard on the False Promise of Modernity

Great novelists, however, such as Stendhal, Proust, and Dostoyevsky, show the truly negative nature of the modern project: “In the eyes of the novelist, modem man suffers, not because he refuses to become fully and totally aware of his autonomy, but because that awareness, whether real or illusory, is for him intolerable.”[1] But they also show that modern man is very good at deceiving himself. He sees that the promise of autonomous fullness is not realized in himself, but he continually finds others in whom he suspects it is being fulfilled:

Each individual discovers in the solitude of his consciousness that the promise is false but no one is able to universalize his experience. The promise remains true for Others. Each one believes that he alone is excluded from the divine inheritance and takes pains to hide this misfortune. Original sin is no longer the truth about all men as in a religious universe but rather each individual’s secret…[2]

The contrast between the pre-modern “religious universe,” and modernity is important. In more Christian times, it could be recognized that the emptiness and misery of man were the products of original sin, and thus common to all, but in the age of secular humanism the experience of nothingness is a shameful secret. We can see here a reason for the infinity of desire that Girard does not make fully explicit: desire (especially in its modern form) is the desire to be God. God is therefore the ultimate rival, and desire includes an implicit hatred of God.

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Footnotes:

1. René Girard, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, trans. Yvonne Freccero (Baltimore: John Hopkins UP, 1965), 159

2. Ibid., 57.

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Source: Edmund Waldstein, "Desire, Deicide, and Atonement: René Girard and St. Thomas Aquinas," Sancrucensis blog, May 12, 2016, accessed February 2, 2017, https://sancrucensis.wordpress.com/2016/05/12/desire-deicide-and-atonement-rene-girard-and-st-thomas-aquinas/. 

Flannery O'Connor on Tenderness

[I would substitute the word "tenderness" with "compassion" or "mercy" since those seem to be the buzz words these days. With that in mind...]

One of the tendencies of our age is to use the suffering of children to discredit the goodness of God, and once you have discredited his goodness, you are done with him [....] Busy cutting down human imperfection, they are making headway also on the raw material of good.

Ivan Karamazov cannot believe, as long as one child is in torment; Camus’ hero cannot accept the divinity of Christ, because of the massacre of the innocents.

In this popular pity, we mark our gain in sensibility and our loss in vision. If other ages felt less, they saw more, even though they saw with the blind, prophetical, unsentimental eye of acceptance, which is to say, of faith. In the absence of this faith now, we govern by tenderness.

It is a tenderness which, long since cut off from the person of Christ, is wrapped in theory. When tenderness is detached from the source of tenderness, its logical outcome is terror. It ends in forced labor camps and in the fumes of the gas chamber.

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Source: Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1957), 226–227.

Sergius Bulgakov on the Unattainable Eden

[178] One can say that the remembrance of an edenic state and of God's garden is nevertheless preserved in the secret recess of our self-consciousness, as an obscure anamnesis of another being, similar to the dreams of golden childhood and most accessible to childhood. These are distinct, palpable revelations of the world's sophianicity in our soul, although they are usually obscured in the soul by our failure to believe in their genuineness or even in their possibility. But it is important to understand the possibility and reality of the edenic state of the world and of man irrespective of the presence or absence of their traces in our present world. The Garden of Eden is conceived in the biblical story as expressly planted by God so that man would dwell in it (see Gen. 2:8).

Beyond the Garden stretches the whole natural world, which is born in the instinctive exertions of the world soul, of the "earth," which actualizes the creative seeds of its sophianicity. This is the future place of Adam's "expulsion" from the edenic (and as if supranatural [sic]) conditions of being into the natural world, full of the "struggle for existence." He is cast into this world by God's determination, which, of course, does not change human nature but only affirms the ontological inevitability of this path of life in the natural world after and as a consequence of the fall. This earth, which had contained the possibility of becoming God's garden through Adam's creative obedience in "keeping and dressing" it, now, because of his disobedience, has become a meager land, bringing forth "thorns and thistles." Only this natural world is known to fallen man. In it there is no Eden, which for a time is removed, as it were, from the world after Adam's expulsion from it: "Therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken" (Gen. 3:23). From this earth are emitted the moans of "evolutionary" being, with the struggle for existence, "economic materialism," and death. The first attempt to inwardly overcome this evolutionism did not appear to succeed. Eden was taken from the world as an unactualized and unactualizable possibility. It was removed to the heavenly plane of the prototypes of the world that is known to fleshless spirits, its protectors and servants. And Eden, closed to man, is protected for a time by the flaming sword of the angel.

But what was this earthly and "historical" Eden? First of all, it was an edenic perception of creation: Sinless man could not see it except as God's garden. His knowledge might have been incomplete and limited, because [179] in Eden he lived separated from the rest of the world, as, in general, all in him was in a state of preliminary, not final harmony. But Eden, as the express dwelling of man, was possible on the earth only on the condition of this sinlessness, with man's openness to all of creation, which is proper to him as one called to become its king. (This openness finds its expression in his ability to name the animals; Gen. 2:19.) But, in conformity with this ability of man to perceive Eden, it could have appeared on the earth by a special and complementary creative act of God (see Gen. 2:8-9), which nature could have received thanks only to the presence of a perfect creature, sinless man.

Eden was a preparation for what was hidden in the recesses of all of natural being. It was a sort of eschatology of natural being: The image of the new Eden sketched out in Revelation 22:1-5, with the river and tree of life, includes what was in the original Garden of Eden. But the original Eden, which appeared on the earth only in connection with the sinless state of man, becomes inaccessible, transcendent to creation, and as if nonexistent after its fall. Eden's trees degenerate and turn wild, while its rivers become those of actual geography and history. Between them there is no longer a place for Eden, for the edenic vision has faded. If, prior to his fall, man could have a habitation only in Eden, in the preliminary revealed perfection of nature, then after the fall he could no longer contain this perfection, and only the earth of exile became accessible to him, that is, a state of the natural world that was proper to the world prior to and apart from man, outside of his lordly protection and cultivation. And man himself became only natural.

Therefore, in the natural world, one does not find and cannot find traces of Eden as the supranatural illumination of natural being. A rupture has formed in the inner life of nature, owing to which "the creature was made subject to vanity" (i.e., lost its edenic perfection) "not willingly, but by reason of him who hath subjected the same," and "groaneth and travaileth in pain...until now" (Rom. 8:20, 22). Two possibilities were marked out in the life of creation: (1) the "evolutionary"-instinctive development of creation before man, but one that later, under man's rule, was to acquire the light of reason and become liberated from the power of nonhypostatic elementalness; and (2) the development of creation with man, who was called to become the created god, the protector and cultivator of Eden. But instead of humanizing nature, man himself became the slave of nature and a prisoner to its necessity. And he will be a slave until the new Adam, the "Man from heaven," returns to humankind the kingship that it has lost, and the natural world becomes a new heaven and a [180] new earth, with a new city, the holy Jerusalem (see Rev. 21:1). At the same time that Eden was removed from the earth, or (what is the same thing) Adam was expelled from it, Adam was deprived of God's glory (see Rom. 2:23), and donned the "coats of skins" (Gen. 3:21) of history "to till the ground from whence he was taken" (3:23). That is, he was called to ascend, by a long historical path, to his original state, which he had lost.

Thus, in history, we know neither Eden nor the state of the sinlessness of our progenitors, in statu naturae purae. All this belongs to meta-history, and one should therefore not seek this in the historical world and time. It belongs to history only as its prologue. Prior to his fall, Adam is the only "progenitor." After the fall, he is one of many progenitors; he belongs to a specific generation and is empirically connected with the whole organic world. And Eve becomes "the mother of all who live," that is, she represents the unitary naturalness of humankind, which is actualized in a series of natural births. One can say that an ontological abyss lies between the meta-history of the first three chapters of Genesis and the history of Adam's race. Even if we accept that the Adam of the initial Genesis narrative is the same person as the Adam of the later chapters (which is not really necessary, since the "adam" of the first chapters is man in general, whereas in the later chapters he is a specific individual, with his own name), they are still separated by the threshold lying between meta-history and history. Beginning with the fourth chapter, Adam is a "patriarch," the progenitor of a specific generation, and this is clearly a generation that is by no means unique in history. From the text of chapter 4 it follows that other human tribes, besides the "adamites," are meant here.

We can draw the following general conclusion about the historical and meta-historical Genesis 1-3. On the pathways of the development of life on our planet, on the phylogenetic ladder of man, there appear both the animal species homo sapiens and, in this species, an individual capable and worthy of becoming the vessel for the human spirit, of serving for its incarnation. This corresponds to the passages where it is said that "God formed man of the dust of the ground" (Gen. 2:7), from that very same "earth" that brought forth all the species of organic life (so that in this sense even the identification "dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return" [Gen. 3:19] became possible). This splendid animal, by its form already prefiguring man, takes from God the human spirit and is illuminated by it. Through this act, which transcends the being of the organic world and therefore is not subject to any empirical observation and interpretation, a perfect man arises from this perfect animal. This man is perfect in the sense that he corresponds to the creative design, and he bears [181] within himself the task and potential of the world's humanization. This perfect man issues out of God's hands into the world, into the Garden of Eden that was expressly humanized for him. But, in his fall, man loses his perfect humanity, which remains beyond the limits of history as an unactualized ideal. Human history begins and proceeds in the same "evolutionary" way as the rest of creation, with the difference, of course, that, even in the natural process, man retains the supranatural principle of his spirit.

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Source: Sergius Bulgakov, Bride of the Lamb, trans. Boris Jakim (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2002), 178–181.

Humility and Relation

Humility depends on recognizing what is relative between us and God. God is All; relative to the All, we are nothing, purely contingent, existing solely by God's will. The more we recognize that God is All and that we are nothing, the more humble we shall be.

We must recall that the deeper a canyon is, the taller are the walls of that canyon; hence height and depth are two sides of the same coin, relative to where one stands. If one stands at the top of a canyon, the canyon is deep; if one stands at the bottom of the canyon, its cliffs are tall.

In our relation with God, we stand at the bottom of a canyon. We shall recognize that as we descend deeper and deeper through humility, God becomes more exalted through faith. But we also know through faith that God does not abandon us in our wretchedness but desires to save us. Hence the deeper we go, the more exalted God becomes, but also the more intimate and immanent God becomes through charity. The three work together simultaneously, enhancing each other. Humility, faith, hope, charity, humility, faith, etc.

The Astounding Truth of God's Relationship with Us

Ignatius shows no hesitancy in accepting in its fullness the central truth of Christian faith and all its consequences—unlike most of us who, if not in theory, at least in practice, are hesitant to accept the full astounding truth. If God so loves us as to send his Beloved, Jesus Christ, to be one with us in the flesh; to be a sacrifice for our sins; to give us all that the Father gave him, his life, his truth, his love, his joy, his glory; to give us his body to eat, his blood to drink; to give us the Holy Spirit who makes us children of God in Christ, who lives in us, enlightens us about Jesus and his teachings, pours out God's agape, defends and cherishes the Christ-life in us—if God so loves us as to do all this, then after that there is no problem in believing that God is constantly attending to each of his children, calling each of them by name, speaking to them, listening to them, sometimes in extraordinary ways but usually through the ordinary motions of their own minds and hearts, and giving them power to discover when it is he who is speaking and what he is saying. Given what a Christian is called to believe about his relationship with God, is it not surprising to our way of thinking that God does not speak and act in our lives even more obviously than Ignatius, with all genuine Christian tradition, has said he does?

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Source: Fr. Jules J. Toner, S.J., A Commentary on Saint Ignatius' Rules for the Discernment of Spirits: A Guide to the Principles and Practice (St. Louis, MO: The Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1982), 32.

Dr. Rudi te Velde on the Concept of God

There is something in Thomas' conception of God as ipsum esse per se subsistens that does not fit very well into the picture of 'classical theism.' Classical theism, as it is usually understood, tends to view God as an absolute entity existing independently of the world. The theistic God looks more like a being, a 'self-contained substance' above and apart from the world, than the pure actuality of subsistent being itself. From Thomas' perspective, this would mean that the independence of God, as over against the world of finite beings, is conceived wrongly. It is as if the character of subsistence, attributed to a theistically conceived God, is a logical expression by means of which we think of God as separated from the world, as a distinct reality, while Thomas intends to express by subsistence that the being of God is separated through itself from all other beings. The difference is crucial. For Thomas, God is not 'separated' from the world as a subsistent entity conceivable apart from his causal relationship to created beings; it is as cause of all beings that God 'separates' himself from all his effects by distinguishing those effects from himself. In this sense the 'concept' of God is, in truth, the concept of the relationship of God and world, conceived as an ordered plurality of diverse beings, each of which receives its being from the divine source of being. For Thomas there is no way of thinking of God concretely outside this relationship. The independence, or absoluteness, of God characterizes the way He relates as cause to all other things; it is the independence of the perfect goodness of God, who is not under any obligation or necessity to fulfill himself by creating, but who acts out his own goodness, establishing all other things in being by letting them share in his own perfection.

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Source: Rudi te Velde, Aquinas on God: The "Divine Science" of the Summa "Theologiæ" (Hants, England: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2006), 85.

Repost: Why God is Called Father and Not Mother

I've copied below an excellent article from Catholicculture.org on why we call God Father and not Mother. It is accompanied by some commentary set off by three dashes (---).

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"Why God is Father and Not Mother"
by Mark Brumley

"The Fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man" is how the 19th century liberal Protestant theologian Adolph Harnack once summarized the Christian faith. Nowadays Harnack would find his brand of reductionist religion dismissed as hopelessly sexist and exclusive by many feminist theologians. The "brotherhood of man" might be reworked into "the family of humanity" or its equivalent. But what would they do about the Fatherhood of God? Can we replace the allegedly "sexist" language of Divine Fatherhood with so-called gender-inclusive or gender-neutral terms such as Father/Mother or Heavenly Parent without further ado?

Many people — including some Catholics — say "yes." "We not only can," they contend, "we must. God is, after all, beyond gender. Calling God 'Father', without adding that God is also Mother, unfairly exalts one image for God above all others and ignores the culturally conditioned nature of all our images of God," they argue.

A Consensus of the Many and the One

Of course, not everyone agrees. While most "mainline" Protestant churches have acquiesced, Evangelicals, the Orthodox churches and the Catholic Church have maintained traditional language for God — although even within these communions some people's sympathies run in the other direction.

That the Catholic Church and these churches and ecclesial communities would agree on a point of doctrine or practice presents a formidable unity against feminist "God-Talk." How often do we find that kind of united witness among that range of Christians? Yet as solid a prima facie case as that makes, a more serious obstacle to feminist revisionism exists — an insurmountable one, in fact. Not the witness of this group of Christians or that, but of Christ Himself. The commonplace manner in which Christians address the Almighty as Father comes from Him. In fact, Jesus actually used a more intimate word, Abba or "Daddy." 

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My notes thus far: 

Primary objection: We should not call God our "Father" because it is sexist (i.e. it favors the association of one sex over the other with the divine, masculine over feminine, an instantiation of patriarchy), portrays a diminished understanding of God.

Resp. 1: Prima facie argument from the agreement of three large Christian bodies/churches: Evangelical, Orthodox, and Catholic.

Resp. 2 (to be developed below): The witness of Christ Himself.

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Unfortunately, twenty centuries of Christian habit has eclipsed the "scandal" of this. For the Jews of Jesus' day, however, it stunned the ear. They did not usually address the All Powerful Sovereign of the Universe in such intimate, familiar terms. Yes, God was acknowledged as Father, but usually as Father of the Jewish people as a whole. Jesus went further: God is (or can be at least) your or my Father, not mere our Father or the Father of our people. Anyone who wants to fiddle with how we talk of God must reckon with Jesus.

But did Jesus really call God "Father"? Few things in modern biblical scholarship are as certain. Skeptics may question whether Jesus turned water into wine or walked on water. They may doubt that He was born of a Virgin or that He rose from the dead. But practically no one denies that Jesus called God "Abba" or "Father." So distinctive was the invocation in his day, so deeply imbedded in the biblical tradition is it, that to doubt it is tantamount to doubting we can know anything about Jesus of Nazareth.

What is more, not even most feminists deny it. What then to make of it?

Since Christians believe that Jesus is the fullest revelation of God, they must hold that He most fully reveals how we, by grace, should understand God: as Father. Otherwise they tacitly deny the central claim of their faith — that Christ is the fullness of God's self-disclosure to man. Non-Christians may do that, of course, but Christians cannot — not without ceasing to be Christians in any meaningful sense of the word.

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Premise 1: Jesus is God.

P2.1 Jesus brought us the fullest revelation of God's nature and purpose for humans.

P2.2 Under revelation, Jesus shows us how we return to God, how we enter into a relationship with Him in every aspect of human life.

P2.3 Jesus shows us how we are to speak to God and of God.

P3.1 Jesus tells us to call God our "Father." 

P3.2 Jesus uses the language of Father many times Himself.

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"But surely we must hold," someone will object, "that Jesus' view of God was historically conditioned like that of his contemporaries? His masculine language for God cannot be part of the 'fullness of God's self-disclosure,' as you suppose. It was merely a residue of first century Jewish sexism. We must look instead to the 'transhistorical significance' of his teaching. And that is not the Fatherhood of God but the Godhood of the Father — that God is a loving Parent."

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Obj. 1: Jesus' view of God, and hence how Jesus spoke to & of God was historically-culturally conditioned, a "residue of 1st c. Jewish sexism." Hence the use of masculine language is an accident.

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Two Errors

At least two false claims lie hidden in that objection. The first is that Jesus' own concept of God was "historically conditioned." The second, that we can strip away a patriarchal "coating" to His notion of God to get at the gender-inclusive idea of the Divine Parent beneath. In other words, God's Fatherhood, per se, is not central to Jesus' revelation of God, only those qualities which fathers share with mothers — "parenthood," in other words.

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Obj. 1.1: Jesus' concept of God was historically-culturally conditioned by 1st c. Jewish sexism.

Obj. 1.2: Jesus' teaching regarding God as Father are not central teachings but peripheral and therefore may be downplayed.

Obj. 1.3: The essential content of Jesus' revelation regarding how we speak to & of God is God as Parent, not as Father.

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But was Jesus' view of God "historically conditioned"? Not if you mean by "historically conditioned" "wholly explicable in terms of the religious thinking of His day." We have no reason to think Jesus uncritically imbibed the prevailing ideas about God. He certainly felt free to correct inadequate ideas from the Old Testament in other respects (see, for example, Matt. 5:21-48) and to contravene religio-cultural norms, especially regarding women. He had women disciples, for example. He spoke with women in public. He even allowed women to be the first witnesses of His resurrection. How, then, on this most central point — the nature and identity of God — are we to suppose He was either unable, due to His own sexism and spiritual blindness, or unwilling, to set people straight about God as Father? Even if you deny Jesus' divinity or hold to a watered-down notion of it, such a view remains impossible to maintain.

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Resp. to 1.1: 1) No evidence that Jesus' views of God were historically-culturally biased; in fact, to the contrary, He broke many social and religious norms of the day: a) He corrected Old Testament commandments and teaching; 2) He located the fulfillment of OT prophecies in Himself; 3) He had women disciples, spoke with women in public, even public sinners, and gave women the 1st place of encounter after His resurrection.

2) If Jesus demonstrated such thorough transcendence above the cultural norms of his environment, it is not reasonable to maintain that Jesus' views regarding how we speak to & of God were biased by those norms.

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Furthermore, even if Jesus had "picked up" the notion of God as Father from His surrounding culture, we can not simply dismiss an idea as false merely because it happens to have been held by others [NB: an example of the genetic fallacy, a form of non-sequitur]. Otherwise Jesus' monotheism itself could be as easily explained away on the grounds that it, too, was generally affirmed by the Jews of the day and therefore must, on this view, be only 'historically conditioned.'

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3) The obj. is a non-sequitur in the form of the genetic fallacy. Even if the premise were granted, Jesus could very well still have been correct in prescribing masculine language when speaking to & of God.

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Nor can we simply ignore Jesus' teaching about God's Fatherhood, as if it were peripheral to His revelation. Time and again Jesus addresses God as Father, so much so that we can say Jesus' name for God is Father. If Jesus was wrong about that, so fundamental a thing, then what, really, does He have to teach us? That God is for the poor and the lowly? The Hebrew prophets taught as much. That God is loving? They taught that as well.

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Resp. to Obj. 1.2: 1) [Material response] Jesus' repeated use of calling God Father and the direct prescription to address God as "Our Father" suggests that the teaching is central.

2) [Formal response] If we grant P1 & P2.1 above, that Jesus is God and the fullness of God's revelation, then we cannot say that Jesus taught something false, misleading, or stunted. His teaching must be truth in its fullness, truth that overwhelms our reason, dazzles us by its transcendence, truth that can never be exhausted by its infinite depths. To grant that Jesus erred is to say God errs, which is impossible. Therefore, Jesus could not err, and hence Jesus could not be wrong in calling God Father and telling us to do likewise.

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Notice too that these truths — still widely held today — are subject to the "historical conditioning" argument. They are just as liable to be wrong as Jesus' views about the Fatherhood of God, are they not? They, too, can be explained away as "culturally conditioned."

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3) The obj. falls under its own premises via a reflexive criticism, namely, historical conditioning. The obj. is itself historically-culturally conditioned and problematic only on the assumption of specific concepts foreign to the Biblical and authentically Christian worldview.

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Furthermore, Jesus' way of addressing God as Father is rooted in His own intimate relationship to God. Now whatever else we say about God, we cannot say that He is Jesus' mother, for Jesus' mother is not God but Mary. Jesus' mother was a creature; His Father, the Creator. "Father" and "Mother" are not, then, interchangeable terms for God in relation to Jesus. Nor can they be for us, if Catholicism's doctrine that Mary is the "Mother of Christians" is correct.

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4) To call God the Mother would also amount to a serious theological error because Jesus' mother is Mary, who is a creature. Mary is truly the Mother of Christ, and God the Father is truly the Father of Christ as the one who generates, and Christ, the one generated.

5) By extension, Mary is the mother of all Christians by virtue of her femininity and her relationship with Christ. To call God the Father as mother would open the road to a serious confusion of the role in salvation that God predestined for Mary.

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The Real Issue

Undergirding Jesus' teaching about God as Father is the idea that God has revealed Himself as to be such and that His revelation should be normative for us. God, in other words, calls the theological shots. If He wants to be understood primarily in masculine terms, then that is how we should speak of Him. To do otherwise, is tantamount to idolatry — fashioning God in our image, rather than receiving from Him His self-disclosure as the Father.

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The implied conclusion of PP1-2.2 is that Christ's commands and teachings are normative for the follower of Christ.

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Many Feminist theologians seek to fashion God in their image, because they think God is fashionable (in both senses of the word). Many feminists hold that God is in Himself (they would say "Herself" or "Godself") utterly unintelligible. We can, therefore, speak only of God in metaphors, understood as convenient, imaginative ways to describe our experience of God, rather than God Himself. In such a view, there is no room for revelation, understood as God telling us about Himself; we have only our own colorful, creative yet merely human descriptions of what we purport to be our experiences of the divine.

Whatever this is, it is not Christianity, which affirms that God has spoken to us in Jesus Christ. C.S. Lewis, in an essay on women's ordination in Anglicanism, put the matter thus:

But Christians think that God himself has taught us how to speak of him. To say that it does not matter is to say either that all the masculine imagery is not inspired, is merely human in origin, or else that, though inspired, it is quite arbitrary and unessential. And this is surely intolerable: or, if tolerable, it is an argument not in favor of Christian priestesses but against Christianity.

Cardinal Ratzinger made a similar point in The Ratzinger Report: "Christianity is not a philosophical speculation; it is not a construction of our mind. Christianity is not 'our' work; it is a Revelation; it is a message that has been consigned to us, and we have no right to reconstruct it as we like or choose. Consequently, we are not authorized to change the Our Father into an Our Mother: the symbolism employed by Jesus is irreversible; it is based on the same Man-God relationship he came to reveal to us." [p. 97]

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Revelation is a given, not a construction. Givens, or gifts, are received, not created or even altered, especially if there is no defect in the gift. To alter the gift implies a defect in the gift, but God wouldn't give a defective gift. Hence there ought to be no alteration of the gift.

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Now people are certainly free to reject Christianity. But they should be honest enough to admit that this is what they are doing, instead of surreptitiously replacing Christianity with the milk of the Goddess, in the name of putting new wine into old wineskins.

Taking Another Tack

Here proponents of feminine "God talk" often shift gears. Rather than argue that Jesus' teaching was merely the product of a patriarchal mindset to which even He succumbed, they say that Jesus chose not to challenge patriarchalism directly. Instead, He subverted the established order by His radical inclusivity and egalitarianism. The logical implications of His teaching and practice compel us to accept inclusive or gender-neutral language for God, even though Christ Himself never explicitly called for it.

This argument overlooks an obvious point. While affirming the equal dignity of women was countercultural in first century Judaism, so was calling God "Abba." Some feminists counter with the claim that the very idea of a loving Heavenly Father was itself a move in the feminist direction of a more compassionate, intimate Deity. The first century Jewish patriarch, they contend, was a domineering, distant figure. But even if that were so — and there is reason to doubt such a sweeping stereotype of first century Judaism — revealing God as a loving, compassionate Father is not the same as revealing Him as Father/Mother or Parent. That Jesus corrected some people's erroneous ideas of fatherhood by calling God "Father" hardly means we should cease calling God "Father" altogether or call Him Father/Mother.

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Obj. 1.3 reformulated: 1) Because Christ challenged patriarchy indirectly, His calling God a Father as well as insisting that God was caring implies that Christ was moving towards a conception of God as intimate, compassionate. 

2) But the notion of Parent exemplifies intimacy and compassion greater than simply Father.

3) Therefore, we ought to call God Father/Mother.

Resp. to obj. 1.3: Christ was primarily moving towards a conception of God that was fuller and truer, and included in this fuller notion is the notion of an intimate and compassionate God. But the fullness of the conception does not reside in our interpretation of revelation but in the revelation itself. Hence because Christ remained with the word Father and because the notions of intimacy and compassion as properties or attributes of God are secondary to the notion of God as Father, even if fuller considered in themselves when exemplified by the concept "Parent," we must remain with Christ's revelation and not alter it.

And as will be shown below, to replace "Parent" with "Father" ultimately follows from serious philosophical (regarding analogy) and theological (regarding Trinitarianism, Christology, and Mariology) errors. Parent =/= Father. While it may be granted that Parent contains a fuller notion of intimacy and compassion than Father (although this is culturally relative and hence one reason to reject the replacement in itself), we do not call God Father with respect to our affective relationship with Him. God's self revelation and relationship with us is not about allowing us to feel closer to Him than before. It's about God's glory and our salvation, and involved in this, following from it, consequent to it, but not principal or primary, is an intimate relationship with God.

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Feminists also sometimes argue that Scripture, even if not Jesus Himself, gives us a "depatriarchalizing principle" that, once fully developed, overcomes the "patriarchalism" of Jewish culture and even of other parts of the Bible. In other words, the Bible corrects itself when it comes to male stereotypes of God.

But this simply is not so. Granted, the Bible occasionally uses feminine similes for God. Isaiah 42:14, for example, says that God will "cry out like a woman in travail." Yet the Bible does not say that God is a woman in travail, it merely likens His cry to that of a woman.

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The use of maternal or feminine imagery in the Bible in relation to God is always clearly metaphorical. But the use of patriarchal language in the Bible is not presented as metaphor but as eminently and formally true by means of analogy.

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The fact is, whenever the Bible uses feminine language for God, it never applies it to Him in the same way masculine language is used of Him. Thus, the primary image of God in Scripture remains masculine, even when feminine similes are used: God is never called "She" or "Her." As Protestant theologian John W. Miller puts it in Biblical Faith and Fathering: "Not once in the Bible is God addressed as mother, said to be mother, or referred to with feminine pronouns. On the contrary, gender usage throughout clearly specifies that the root metaphor is masculine-father."

In fact, the Bible ascribes feminine characteristics to God in exactly the same way it sometimes ascribes such traits to human males. For example, in Numbers 11:12 Moses asks, "Have I given birth to this people?" Do we conclude from this maternal image that Scripture here is "depatriarchalize" Moses. Obviously, Moses uses here a maternal metaphor for himself; he is not making a statement about his "gender identity." Likewise, in the New Testament, both Jesus (Matthew 23:37 and Luke 13:34) and Paul (Galatians 4:19) likened themselves to mothers, though they are men. Why, then, should we think that on those relatively rare occasions when the Bible uses feminine metaphors for God anything more is at work there than with Moses, Jesus and Paul?

Of course there is a crucial difference between God and Moses, the Incarnate Son and Paul. The latter possess human natures in the male gender, while God, as such, is without gender because He is Infinite Spirit. Furthermore, the biblical authors obviously knew that Moses, Jesus and Paul were male and intended to assert as much by referring to them with the masculine pronoun and other masculine language. The same cannot be said about the biblical writers' notion of God. Even so, they speak of God as if He were masculine. For them, masculine language is the primary way we speak of God. Feminine language is applied to God as if it were being used of a masculine being.

Why the Masculine Language to Begin With?

Which brings us to a more fundamental issue, namely, "What is the masculine language about in the first place?" Since Christianity, as St. Augustine was overjoyed to learn, holds that God has no body, why is God spoken of in masculine terms?

We could, of course, merely insist that He has revealed Himself in this way and be done with it. That would not, however, help us understand God, which presumably is why He bothered to reveal Himself as Father to begin with. No, if we insist that God has revealed Himself as Father, we must try to understand what He is telling us by it.

Why call God Father? The question is obviously one of language. Before we can answer it, we must observe a distinction between two different uses of language — analogy and metaphor.

Sometimes when we speak of God, we assert that God really is this or that, or really possesses this characteristic or that, even if how He is or does so differs from our ordinary use of a word. We call this way of talking about God analogy or analogous language about God. Even when we speak analogously of God, however, we are still asserting something about how God really is. When we say that God is living, for example, we really attribute life to God, although it is not mere life as we know it, i.e., biological life.

Other times when we speak of God, we liken Him to something else — meaning that there are similarities between God and what we compare him to, without suggesting that God really is a form of the thing to which we compare Him or that God really possesses the traits of the thing in question. For example, we might liken God to an angry man by speaking of "God's wrath." By this we do not mean God really possesses the trait of anger, but that the effect of God's just punishment is like the injuries inflicted by an angry man. We call this metaphor or metaphorical language about God.

When we call God Father, we use both metaphor and analogy. We liken God to a human father by metaphor, without suggesting that God possesses certain traits inherent in human fatherhood — male gender, for example. We speak of God as Father by analogy because, while God is not male, He really possesses certain other characteristics of human fathers, although He possesses these in a different way (analogously) — without creaturely limitations.

With this distinction between analogy and metaphor in mind, we turn now to the question of what it means to call God "Father."

The Fatherhood of God in Relation to Creation

We begin with God's relationship to creation. As the Creator, God is like a human father. A human father procreates a child distinct from and yet like himself. Similarly, God creates things distinct from and like Himself. This is especially true of man, who is the "image of God." And God cares for His creation, especially man, as a human father cares for his children.

But does not what we have said thus far allow us to call God Mother as well as Father? Human mothers also procreate children distinct from yet like themselves, and they care for them, as human fathers do. If we call God Father because human fathers do such things, why not call God Mother because human mothers do these things as well?

No doubt, as the Catechism of the Catholic Church (no. 239) states, "God's parental tenderness can also be expressed by the image of motherhood, which emphasizes God's immanence, the intimacy between Creator and creature." Scripture itself, as we have seen, sometimes likens God to a mother. Yet, as we have also seen, Scripture never calls God "Mother" as such. Scripture uses feminine language for God no differently than it sometimes metaphorically uses feminine language for men. How do we explain this?

Many feminists simply dismiss this as sexism by the biblical writers. But the real answer rests with the difference between God and human beings, between fathers and mothers and between metaphor and analogy. The Bible sometimes speaks metaphorically of God as Father. But it would be strange for Scripture so often to call God Father and so seldom to use maternal language, if the whole thing were merely a difference in metaphor. By never calling God "Mother" but only likening God to a human mother, Scripture seems to suggest that God is really Father in a way He is not really Mother. In other words, that fatherhood and motherhood are not on equal footing when it comes to describing God. To understand why this is so, let us look at the difference between fathers and mothers.

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If someone insists that we must call God as Mother or She, one must ask in response, "Why?" One could also just say, "No, we don't," but there's no conversation there.

The purpose of "why" is to attempt to uncover the ideological presuppositions of the objection. Insisting on gender equality with respect to naming God makes sense only in a modern worldview. It is presupposed that an equality of dignity and an equality of rights/opportunities also amounts to an equality of nature. While male and female are human, they are also fundamentally different and in fact differentiated precisely on these notions of male and female. Hence it is on the notion of male and female that the discussion turns.

Besides, to insist on the feminine qualities of God to the exclusion or belittling of God as Father out of an appeal to gender equality is the reduction of the supernatural to natural, political concerns. Our relationship with God does not exist primarily to set straight political inequality, and treating God as such would inevitably mean sacrificing what is proper to the character of God's revelation: that He tells us to call Him a He. To insist on political autonomy is, as Karl Marx once astutely observed, at the expense of being authentically Christian.

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Father and Mother

What is the difference between fatherhood and motherhood? A father is the "principle" or "source" of procreation in a way a mother is not. To be sure, both father and mother are parents of their offspring and in that sense both are causes of their offspring's coming-to-be. But they are so in different ways.

Both mother and father are active agents of conception (contrary to what Aristotle thought). But the father, being male, initiates procreation; he enters and impregnates the woman, while the woman is entered and impregnated. There is an initiatory activity by the man and a receptive activity by the woman. Furthermore, modern biology tells us that the father determines the gender of the offspring (as Aristotle held, though for a different reason).

Thus, while father and mother are both parents of their offspring and both necessary for procreation, the father has a certain priority as the "source" or "principle" of procreation. (This "priority as source" is complemented by the mother's priority as first nurturer, due to her procreating within herself and carrying the child within herself for nine months.)

This difference between fathers and mothers for the Fatherhood of God is crucial. As Dominican Fr. Benedict Ashley has argued, so long as we compare God's act of creating to a human father's act of procreation through impregnating a woman, we speak only metaphorically of God as Father. For God does not "impregnate" anyone or anything when he creates; He creates from nothing, without a partner. But if we move beyond the particulars of human reproduction, where a father requires a mother to procreate, and instead speak of the father as "source" or "principle" of procreation, then our language for God as Father becomes analogous rather than merely metaphorical. As a human father is the "source" or "principle" of his offspring (in a way that the mother, receiving the father and his procreative activity within herself, is not), so God is the "source" or "principle" of creation. In that sense, God is truly Father, not merely metaphorically so.

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What is properly male refers to the possibility of fatherhood. What is properly female refers to motherhood. Qualities, such as compassion, intimacy, and love, while commonly associated with the feminine, are not strictly feminine but may be shared by the male sex. Hence the use of masculine and feminine language ought not be dictated by accidental qualities but what is proper to each sex.

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Can we make a similar jump from the occasional metaphorical likening of God to human mothers in Scripture to an analogical way of calling God Mother? No, and here is why: A mother is not the "principle" or "source" of procreation the way a father is. She is a receptive, active collaborator in procreation, to be sure. But she is not the active initiator — that is the father's role as a man in impregnating her. A father can be an analogue for the Creator who creates out of nothing insofar as fathers — while not procreating out of nothing — nevertheless are the "source" or "principle" of procreation as initiators, as God is the source of creation. But a mother, being the impregnated rather than the impregnator, is analogous neither to God as Creator from nothing, nor God as the initiating "source" or "principle" of creation. As a mother, she can be likened to God only in metaphorical ways — as nurturing, caring, etc., as we see in Scripture.

One reason, then, Scripture more often speaks of God as Father than likens Him to a mother is that fatherhood can be used analogously of God, while motherhood can only be a metaphor. We can speak of God either metaphorically or analogously as Father, but we can speak of Him as maternal only metaphorically. Thus, we should expect that masculine and specifically paternal language would generally "trump" feminine and specifically maternal language for God in Scripture. For an analogy tells us how God truly is, not merely what He is like, as in metaphor.

But we can go further. Even on the metaphorical level, it is more appropriate to call God Father rather than Mother. To understand why, we return to the difference between father and mother, this time introducing two other terms, transcendence and immanence.

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Two points before continuing should be borne in mind: 1) whatever we call God by analogy is more dissimilar to what God is than similar (cf. IVth Lateran Council); 2) insisting that the use of masculine language is more proper to speaking of God does not denigrate the feminine nor suggest that women are worse than men. That simply doesn't follow logically although it may follow affectively to those politically inclined.

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Transcendence and Immanence

Transcendence here refers to the fact that God is more than and other than His creation — indeed, more than and other than any possible creation. This is part of what it means to call God "the Supreme Being" or "that than which no greater can be thought" (to use St. Anselm's description). Immanence, on the other hand, refers to the fact that God is present in His creation — as the author is "in" his book or the painter "in" his painting, only more so. God created the world and it is marked by His creation of it. But God also continues to sustain the world in being. If He ever withdrew His power, the cosmos would cease to be. In that sense, God is closer to the cosmos than it is to itself — closer than its very own existence is, for God gives the cosmos existence, moment by moment.

Now back to fathers and mothers. We said a father "initiates" procreation by impregnating the mother, while the mother "receives" the father into herself and is impregnated. The obvious difference here is that the man procreates outside and "away from" himself, while the woman procreates inside and within herself. Symbolically, these are two very different forms of procreation and they represent two different relationships to the offspring.

Because the father procreates outside of himself, his child is symbolically (though in reality not wholly) other than his father. Likewise, the father is other than his child (though also not wholly). In other words, the father, as father, transcends his child. Fatherhood, in this sense, symbolizes transcendence in relation to offspring, though we also recognize that, as the "source" of his child's life, the father is united or one with his child and therefore he is not wholly a symbol of transcendence.

On the other hand, because the mother procreates within herself — within her womb where she also nurtures her child for nine months — her child is symbolically (though in reality not wholly) part of herself. And similarly, the mother is symbolically (though in reality not wholly) part of her child. In other words, the mother, as mother, is one with her child. Motherhood, in this sense, symbolizes immanence, though we recognize that as a distinct being, the mother is also other than her child and therefore not wholly a symbol of immanence.

Now God is distinct from and the source of His creation. He is infinitely greater than and therefore infinitely other than His creation (transcendent). As Creator and Sustainer of creation, He is also present in creation (immanent). And we, as creatures who are both part of creation and distinct from the rest of it, can understand God as transcendent (more than creation) or immanent (present in creation). If we go a step further and use "father" for transcendence and "mother" for immanence, we can say that God's transcendence is represented by fatherhood, which symbolizes God's otherness and initiating activity (His being the "source" of creation). Meanwhile, God's immanence is represented by motherhood, which symbolizes intimacy and union with the things God created. Which leaves us with the obvious question, "If this is so, why does traditional theology use only male language for God?"

The answer: because God's transcendence has a certain priority over His immanence in relation to creation. And this is for at least two reasons. First, because transcendence, in a sense, also includes the notion of immanence, although the reverse is not true. When we speak of God transcending creation we imply a certain relationship of immanence to it. For Him to transcend creation, there must be a creation to transcend. And since creation resembles its Creator and is sustained by Him, He is present in it by His immanence.

But the opposite is not necessarily so. We do not necessarily imply transcendence by talking of divine immanence. Pantheism (Greek for "all is God"), for example, more or less identifies God with the cosmos, without acknowledging divine transcendence. To prevent God's transcendence from being lost sight of and God being wrongly reduced to, or even too closely identified with, His creation, language stressing transcendence — masculine terms such as father — is necessary.

A second reason for putting God's transcendence ahead of His immanence, and therefore fatherly language ahead of motherly language for God, has to do with the infinite difference between transcendence and immanence in God. God is infinitely transcendent, but not, in the same sense, infinitely immanent. Although God is present in creation, He is above all infinitely more than the actual or any possible created order and is not defined or limited by any created order. The cosmos, however vast, is ultimately finite and limited because it is created and dependent. Therefore God can be present in it only to a finite extent — not because of any limitation in God, but because of limits inherent in anything that is not God.

Thus, in order to express adequately God's infinite transcendence and to avoid idolatrously identifying God with the world (without severing Him from His creation, as in deism), even on the metaphorical level we must use fatherly language for God. Motherly language would give primacy to God's immanence and tend to confuse Him with His creation (pantheism). This does not exclude all maternal imagery — as we have seen even the Bible occasionally employs it — but it means we must use such language as the Bible does, in the context of God's fatherhood.

In other words, God's Fatherhood includes the perfections of both human fatherhood and human motherhood. Scripture balances transcendence and immanence by speaking of God in fundamentally masculine or paternal terms, yet also occasionally using feminine or maternal language for what is depicted as an essentially masculine God. This helps explain why even when the Bible describes God in maternal terms — God remains "He" and "Him."

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I think calling God "essentially masculine" is a very problematic phrase precisely because of the ambiguity of the word "essentially" here. Certainly God is Father formally and eminently (see Maritain's explanation of this in his Degrees of Knowledge), but formally and eminently are clearer words than "essentially."

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The Fatherhood of God in the Trinity

We see, then, that God is Father because He is the Creator and creating resembles human fathering in some important ways. But what if God had never created the world or man? Would He still have been Father? Or what about before God created the world or man? Was God Father then?

The doctrine of the Trinity tells us the answer to these questions is "yes." The First Person of the Trinity, Trinitarian doctrine reminds us, is the Father. He is, in fact, Father of the Son, the Second Person of the Trinity (CCC 240). Before all worlds and from all eternity, the First Person "begot" the Second Person, who eternally proceeds from the Father, "God from God, light from light, true God from true God," as the Creed puts it (CCC 242). In the Trinity, the Father is the Underived Principle of the Son (and through Him, of the Spirit as well); He is the Source or Unoriginated Origin of the Triune God.

Again, we draw on the analogy of human fatherhood. As we have seen, a father is the "source" of his offspring in a way a mother is not. The First Person of the Trinity is the "source" of the second Person. Thus, we call the First Person "the Father" rather than "the Mother" and the Second Person, generated by the Father yet also the Image of the Father, we call the Son.

Although the Son is also God and the Image of the Father, He is also distinct from and other than the Father. The Son is begotten; the Father, unbegotten. The Son is originated, the Father, unoriginated. Father-Son language expresses this relationship better than Father-Daughter; Mother-Daughter or Mother-Son language.

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The principal purpose I could see in using Mother-Son to describe the Father-Son Trinitarian relationship would be for deliberate polemical effect, and not a good effect at that, much like insisting on using the word "ze" for every pronoun in a paper or article.

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Of course because we use analogy, there are crucial differences between God the Father and human fathers. In the Trinity, God the Father begets the Son without a cooperating maternal principle, unlike how human fathers beget their sons. Moreover, God the Father does not precede His Son in time as a human father does his son. Both Father and Son are eternal in the Trinity, hence neither Person existed before the other. Finally, while human fathers and sons share a common human nature, they each have their own human natures. The father does not know with his son's intellect; the son does not choose with his father's will. And while they may have similar physical makeup, their bodies are distinct and genetically unique.

Yet in the Trinity, the Father and the Son do possess the same divine nature, not merely their own, respective divines natures as humans possess their own, respective human nature. This is because there can be no such thing as divine "natures"; there can be and is only one divine nature, just as there can be and is only one God. The Father and Son each wholly possesses the divine nature, though each in his distinctive way. The Father possesses it as unreceived and as giving it to the Son; the Son, as received from the Father.

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That is, the differences among the Trinitarian Persons consists precisely in their relations to one another. The Trinity is essentially relational (now I'm using that phrase for polemical effect here, hopefully to good effect). What is for Aristotle an accidental aspect of being is raised to something as fundamental as substance (as Ratzinger phrased it, relation is discovered to be equally primordial with substance) and beyond when speaking of the Trinity.

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Thus, within the Trinity, there is fundamental equality — each Person is wholly God — and basic difference — each Person is unique and not the Others, not interchangeable. And there is also sacred order, with the Son begotten of the Father and the Spirit proceeding from the Father and the Son. This shows that equality and difference, and even equality and hierarchy, need not be understood as opposed to one another, as some feminists claim.

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This is because equality is always with respect to something x that is being equated. Hierarchy, while implying higher and lower, also is hierarchy with respect to something that is being ordered. The Trinitarian Persons are equal in nature, dignity, coeternity, power, omniscience, omnipresence, and all the attributes proper to the Godhead; but the Persons are ordered with respect to their relations: the Father is first, then the Son, then the Holy Spirit.

The confusion of the feminists regarding equality and hierarchy is their constant muddled thinking by not defining equality and hierarchy with respect to what. These aspects of being exist precisely because of relation and hence there must be a fundament, an object, and the relation itself; i.e. A is compared to B and vice versa (the "is compared to" constitutes the relation).

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Furthermore, a proper understanding of the Trinity also helps us to see why we cannot just substitute "Creator, Redeemer and Sanctifier" for "Father, Son and Holy Spirit," as some feminists propose. Traditional theology allows us to associate creation with the Father in a special way because of a similarity between the act of creation and the fact that the Father is the Unoriginated Origin of the Son and the Holy Spirit. Likewise, we can associate Redemption with the Son because He became incarnate to redeem us, and Sanctification with the Holy Spirit, because the Spirit proceeds in love from the Father and the Son and the gifts of the Spirit which sanctify are gifts of Divine love. This process of associating certain divine works in the world with a particular Person of the Trinity is called appropriation.

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The reason we cannot substitute Creator/Redeemer/Sanctifier for Father/Son/Holy Ghost is because these are fundamentally different descriptors. Creator =/= Father per se; Redeemer =/= Son per se; etc. Each work, Creation, Redemption, and Sanctification, are proper to each Person because they are proper to the Divine Nature as such, but Father/Son/Holy Ghost refer not to the Divine Nature as such but to the relations that exist within the Divine Nature and cannot be confused: the Father is not the Son, etc. To distinguish the Persons by their functions and not their formal relations is the heresy of Modalism (see below).

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But in all these cases what is associated with or attributed to a particular Person of the Trinity — whether Creation, Redemption or Sanctification — really belongs to all three Divine Persons. In other words, the Three Divine Persons of the Trinity are not "defined" as Persons by these actions, since Creation, Redemption and Sanctification are common to all Three. What defines them as Persons are their unique relations among one another, with the Father begetting, the Son being begotten and the Spirit being "spirated" from the Father and the Son. To reduce each Person of the Trinity to a particular function — Creator, Redeemer, Sanctifier — is to succumb to the ancient heresy of Modalism, which denies that there are Three Persons in God and instead holds that there is really only one Person in God who acts in three different modes — Father, Son and Spirit. Or in this case, Creator, Redeemer, Sanctifier.

The Father of the Incarnate Son

But we must not stop with the First Person of the Trinity's Fatherhood of the Son before all worlds. For the Triune God has revealed Himself in history. The Son united Himself with human nature. He is the Son of the Father in His human nature as well as His divinity. This, in part, is the meaning of the Virginal Conception of Jesus in the womb of Mary (Lk 1:35). Jesus has no human father — St. Joseph is His "foster-father." Jesus' Father is God the Father and He alone. That is why Jesus refers to God as "Abba" — a highly personal and intimate form of paternal address. Jesus' existence in time and history parallels His eternal, divine existence as God the Son. For this reason, we must not speak of God as Jesus' Mother, as if the terms "father" and "mother" are interchangeable when it comes to Jesus' relation to God. God is Jesus' Father; Mary is Jesus' Mother and she is not God.

Fatherhood of God by Divine Adoption and Regeneration in Christ

We come now to God and humanity. Is God the Father of all mankind? In a sense He is, because He created us and, as we have seen, to create is like fathering a child. Yet God also made rocks, trees and the Crab Nebula. How is He Father of man but not also Father of them? Granted, humans are spiritual, as well as material, beings, which means they are rational beings — capable of knowing and choosing. In this, they more closely resemble God than the rest of visible creation. Nevertheless, human beings, as such, do not share God's own life, as children share the life of their fathers. Thus, we are not by nature "children of God" in that sense, but mere creatures. And, as a result of sin, we are fallen creatures at that.

Yet Jesus tells His followers to address God as Father (Mt 6:9-13). He says the Father will give the Holy Spirit to those who ask (Lk 11:13) and that the Spirit of their Father will speak through them in times of persecution (Mt 10:20). He tells His disciples to be merciful as their heavenly Father is merciful (Lk 6:36). He speaks of being "born from above" through baptism and the Holy Spirit (Jn 3:5). On Easter Sunday, He directs Mary Magdalen to tell the other disciples, "I am going to my Father and your Father . . ." (Jn 20:17).

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We can speak of God as Father only because we are adopted by grace. Otherwise God remains simply Creator.

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Elsewhere in the New Testament, God is also depicted as Father to Christians. Through Jesus Christ we are more than mere creatures to God; by faith in Him we become the children of God (1 Jn 5:1), sharing in Jesus' own Divine Sonship, albeit in a created way (Rom 8:29). God is our Father because He is Jesus' Father (Jn 1:12). What God is for Jesus by nature, He is for us by grace, Divine Adoption (Rom 8:14-17; Gal 4:4-7; Eph 1:5-6), and regeneration and renewal by the Holy Spirit (Tit 3:5-7).

Behind this language of Divine Adoption and regeneration is the idea that God is our Father because He is the "source" or "origin" of our new life in Christ. He has saved us through Christ and sanctified us in the Spirit. This is clearly more than a metaphor; the analogy with earthly fatherhood is obvious. God is not merely like a father for Christ's followers; He is really their Father. In fact, God's Fatherhood is the paradigm of fatherhood. This is why Paul writes in Eph 3:14-15, "For this reason I kneel before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named . . ." (RNAB). It is not that God the Father is earthly fatherhood writ large; rather, earthly fatherhood is the faint copy of Divine Fatherhood. This is why Jesus says, "Call no man on earth father. For you have but one Father in heaven" (Mt 23:9). In other words, no earthly father should be seen as possessing the fullness of patriarchal authority; that belongs to God the Father. All earthly fatherhood is derivative from Him.

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The description of God as Father is not simply a metaphor. If God is Father to Christ because of the formal relation that exists between the two Trinitarian Persons (we're leaving out the Third just for the moment), and if we are adopted by grace into Christ Himself and thus become mystically identified with Christ, then God is Father to us by grace in the same what that God is Father to Christ by nature. There is no exaggeration, no confusion; the only difference between Christ's and our relationship to God the Father is that the relationship for Christ is a formal relation by nature, but ours is a formal relation by participation (an accidental quality, which is habitual grace in the soul).

Because Christ is Son of the Father, not only with respect to the Divine Logos but also with respect to Christ's human nature (because Mary is Christ's mother), we are by force of deductive logic to call God as Father too.

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Thus, God is not Father of those who have not received the grace of justification and redemption in the same way as those who have. Yet they remain potentially His children, since the Father wills the salvation of all (1 Tim 2:4) and makes sufficient grace necessary for salvation available to all. God desires that all men become children of the Father through the Son in the Holy Spirit, hence the universal mission of the Church (Mt 28:19-20; Mk 16:15; Acts 1:8). We can speak, then, in general terms of God as the Father of all men, inasmuch as He created all men to be His children by grace and makes available to them the means of salvation.

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Sufficient grace necessary for the salvation of all is a Thomistic doctrine expounded clearly by Garrigou-Lagrange in his various works and Thomistic commentaries.

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Language Given by God

We see now that there are good theological reasons for why we call God "Father," not the least of which is that such language is not ours to adapt or abolish to begin with. God gave us this language — admittedly through a particular culture and its images — but it was God who nevertheless gave it. God wants us to understand Him as the Transcendent Source of creation, a truth better expressed using the language of fatherhood than motherhood. Within the Triune Life of God, the First Person is Father because He is the Unoriginated Origin of the Son and the Holy Spirit. Furthermore, He is also Father of the Son in history, through the Incarnation. And, by Divine Adoption and regeneration, He is Father of those who are united to Christ in the Holy Spirit — "sons in the Son." Finally, as a result of God's universal salvific will, all human beings are potentially children of God, for all are called to share in the Divine Life of grace through Christ in the Holy Spirit.

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In choosing to use our language, God perfects and elevates what is inherent in our concepts. This is how analogy was transformed by the intervention of the divine, and how faith changes our ideas of these concepts, such as paternity, family, generation, etc. This is a point explained well by Maritain in Degrees of Knowledge.

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Source: Mark Brumley, "Why God is Father and Not Mother," in The Catholic Faith (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 1999), Caholic Culture, accessed October 13, 2014, http://www.catholicculture.org/culture/library/view.cfm?recnum=8279.

Questioning the Our Father

Our Lord gave us the Our Father, the most beautiful and perfect expression of prayer possible in any human language. It begins by addressing God as "Our Father." Can we believe that this expression was arbitrary or ruled by cultural biases? Isn't such a doubt precisely that—a lack of faith in the divinity and hence the transcendence of Christ, the God-Man who unites all mankind and culture in Himself perfectly, transcending every divide, even the divides of sin and death? Is it possible that the Man who came to give us life to the full should stifle the potential growth of the spiritual life of so many because He chose a culturally-relative term rooted in Patriarchy?

Rather, if we take seriously that Jesus is God, that His self-consciousness included the divinity in all of its clarity and comprehension, and if we take seriously that God's perfections are the eminent expression of all transcendental qualities in the created order (or rather that the created order shares in and reflects these qualities that find their perfect source and expression in God's nature), then ultimately the implication of calling God our Father is that paternity finds its perfect expression in God the Father, and all fatherhood is a model of God's Fatherhood (à la Platonic philosophy).

Since the Bible uses maternal expressions, pronouns, and descriptors for God, we must also hold that maternity somehow finds its perfect expression in the inner life of the Blessed Trinity, the giver and the receiver, the male and female, the yin and the yang (to be a bit bold). Fr. Norris Clarke, S.J., explored this dimension of being's self-fecundity: all being is in itself, from another, and towards another (esse in, esse ab, esse ad).

We need to examine and understand seriously the implications of calling God our Father and that God Himself has told us to do so: the implications for the Church as a Bride of Christ, creation as a "palace for the Bride" as St. John of the Cross so beautifully put it, for each individual in relation to God, for the life of the Trinity. God bridges the infinite gap between fallen creation and Himself, and therefore He determines its parameters. Isn't it, then, a lack of faith that makes one question the validity of calling God a Father? It betrays an uncritical commitment to a specific modern, Western ideology that comes, actually and shockingly, at the expense of and to the detriment of faith.

The final reflection is that God is the universal cause who reveals Himself in the particulars of history. We are scandalized at the particularity of the Israelites—so-called chosen by God. We are scandalized by the Incarnation, Crucifixion, and Resurrection. We are scandalized by the origins of the Church and that it is headed on earth by a man who resides in Italy. We are scandalized that God would speak to us in our own language, adopting and purifying our own expressions so as to return them to their true referent in Himself. This is the scandal of particularity through which God has willed to reveal Himself. Shouldn't we accept it out of unquestioning faith?

Hilaire Belloc on Beauty, Love, and God

I think that beauty and love, and things which people generally look down upon as not stoic or heroic, are the essence of heroism and manly feeling, and this because they are the essence of God as we hear of Him and understand Him. I felt this in chapel today, that the light feeling which proceeds from love or something beautiful, is not a feeling that will pass, but the happiness of angels in the love of God. Have you ever felt that in one of those beautiful churches, Notre Dame or St. Ouen, how one loves the beauty around one so much that one is convinced that it was the grace of God, as well as man, that helped to build that church?

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Source: Belloc Lowndes, The Young Hilaire Belloc (New York, NY: P.J. Kenedy & Sons, 1956), 20, quoted in Joseph Pearce, Old Thunder (Charlotte, NC: TAN Books, 2014), 20.

St. Thomas Aquinas on the Purpose of Work for Man and God

"Man works in order to supply his wants: not so God, Who works in order to communicate to others the abundance of His perfection."

- St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiæ 3.23.1 ad 2

Prayer Is Always Efficacious

That God loves us is certain; that we have contact with Him by faith is a certain truth; but supernatural penetration in God can be effected without leaving us any light, any feeling, any experience whatever of the riches that we have drawn from it.

Nevertheless, the commerce of friendship with God by faith enriches us surely. God is Love, communicating Himself eternally. Just as one cannot plunge his bare hands into water without getting them wet, or into a fire without burning them, likewise one cannot have contact with God by faith without receiving from His infinite riches. The poor sick woman who tried to reach Jesus through the dense crowd, in the streets of Capharnaum, said within herself, "If I can touch but the hem of His garment, I shall be cured." She finally succeeds and, with a touch that thrills her Master, she draws from Him the healing cure (Mark 5:25-34). Every contact with God by faith is likewise efficacious. Independently of the particular graces that it might ask and obtain, it takes from God an increase of supernatural life, a deepening of charity. Love seeks in mental prayer a sustenance, a development, and the perfect union that will satisfy all its desires.

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Source: Fr. Marie-Eugène, I Want to See God, trans. by M. Verda Clare (Notre Dame, IN: Christian Classics, 1953), 59-60.

Preoccupation with Trifles and the Meaning of Human Life

Our mass preoccupation with distractions indicates a spiritual illness. How so? Humans are not made to be bored, to have our energies dissipated, unfocused. We have within us incredible stores of energy and desire but nowhere to focus these powers. Grace has nothing to latch onto because nature itself has become ambivalent and apathetic as to its very purpose.

What are we collectively stating about what it means to be human when, say, nearly everyone waiting in a line must occupy themselves by looking at their smart phones, usually texting, checking email, or watching some media? Few people can endure even a silent car ride. The proliferation of social media and websites that capitalize on uploading and sharing such media reveals a deep desire to entertain ourselves, to occupy ourselves... with something, anything.

Again, this desire to be occupied, to focus our desire simply indicates that we have huge stores of energy, untapped and ready to be used. But the fact that we invest it all in trifles indicates that we have no sense of what to do with ourselves, of whom we are, of what our purpose is. If we would make great strides in virtue, we must put away these trifles, not because they are intrinsically evil but because they are the modern day's, everyman temptation to forget about God and forget about ourselves. We forget God because our mind can be focused on only one thing at a time. And we forget about ourselves because by continually occupying our attention on something exterior, we have no psychological space for self-reflection, no way to realize our sinfulness, our brokenness, our desperation.

Silence and solitude are the only way for a person to face themselves squarely, and it is also, not coincidentally, only in the silence that we find God as the Scriptures tell us (1 Kg. 19:11-13).

Sacrifice: Appeasing Zeus vs. a Loving, Merciful God

Someone I know emailed me about a poetry professor who gave a presentation in class and mentioned that he has an "issue with sacrifice." From the email: "particularly Christ's death on the cross. [The professor] seemed to equate Jesus' sacrifice to the Father with sacrificing an animal to Zeus, trying to appease an angry and jealous god instead of one who can [sic] loving and merciful." My friend wanted to know what I had to say about that, how I'd respond and explain the difference, etc. I thought I might as well include my response here.

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The professor's "issue" with sacrifice is probably less theological-philosophical than it is psychological, i.e. there is an "issue" from the past that makes the idea of sacrifice difficult for him. Did he have an "angry and jealous" parent who acted like a Zeus, demanding sacrifice of some kind? Perhaps it was the "Father"? Without further information, who knows? So that's the first thing.

The second matter is the difference between God and Zeus. Zeus is a fiction of the mind, and even if Zeus existed (hard to prove since there aren't many people getting zapped or raped by huge swans, etc.), he would be only a creature, albeit a powerful one. And actually the Greeks believed that their "gods" were physical, so he wouldn't even been that far up in the hierarchy of beings because angels (and hence demons) are above physical beings and far more powerful. God, on the other hand, is the pure, self-sustaining act of existence itself. Big difference, in fact, an infinite difference.

A sacrifice to Zeus is meaningless because Zeus can't do squat, even if he existed. All he could do would be to threaten us, in which case, sacrifice means appeasing him like an abusive parent who has power over a helpless child.

God on the other hand is pure mercy and pure justice. The idea of mercy is meaningless without the idea of justice after all. Just try to define what exactly mercy is without referring in some way to justice. Mercy, after all, is pardoning someone who doesn't DESERVE to be pardoned; that is, it overrides justice.

Here's where it gets interesting. Sin is an offense against God and hence an offense not only against pure justice but also against pure mercy. The degree of evil is determined by the act, the person committing the evil, and the victim of the evil. In this case, God is the "victim" (although God doesn't actually suffer in any way, God deserves honor and respect instead of rejection by the nature of his being). Sin is a rejection of love. So a sin, no matter how small it seems to us, is an infinite offense because it attempts to violate infinite mercy and justice. Hence Cardinal Newman said quite strikingly,

"The Catholic Church holds it better for the sun and moon to drop from heaven, for the earth to fail, and for all the many millions on it to die of starvation in extremest agony, as far as temporal affliction goes, than that one soul, I will not say, should be lost, but should commit one single venial sin, should tell one wilful untruth, or should steal one poor farthing without excuse."

A farthing was one of the smallest units of currency, by the way, like our penny.

And who would deny that pure justice and mercy should be respected, even if those are merely ideals in our heads?

But remember this key: mercy is impossible to conceive without some notion of justice. Hence, without justice, there is no such thing as mercy. Mercy becomes valuable only insofar as the degree of justice to be administered increases. The more that justice demands, the more merciful the pardon.

Now a sin is an infinite offense. Therefore, any pardon of an infinite offense is an infinite act of mercy. And that is the sacrifice that Christ made. An animal couldn't make it because an animal would just be a victim, literally a scapegoat, where we get the idea of scapegoat today. A sin is a personal act, an act of free will. Hence a human has to make reparation who can freely choose God again. But the one offended is God, so that act of reparation must be infinite. But only God can make an act that is infinite. So the human making reparation to God has to in some way be infinite. Hence in Christ the humanity and divinity were united in one person so that justice could be satisfied. And here's the twist: the same act of satisfying the justice of God was the way that God showed us infinite mercy in pardoning us for every past, present, and future sin. In the Crucifixion is infinite justice and mercy at the same time. It satisfies justice, and in so doing, it bestows mercy.

Because, after all, if we commit sin, we're in the pickle of being unable to do anything to satisfy justice. And we certainly don't deserve forgiveness.

But, could God have simply forgiven us without going through the Crucifixion? Yes. But it was more fitting that God become like us, suffer like us, die like us, to show us an example. In our fallen state, when we are so prone to selfishness and revenge rather than justice, hardness of heart rather than mercy, we need a model of what true humanity looks like, how tall it can stand when it is virtuous and noble.

Because—here's the second interesting thing—St. Thomas Aquinas pointed out that to call sin an offense against God is true but incomplete. Sin is wrong not only because it offends God but because it hurts us, it destroys us, it is contrary to what it means to be fully human. A plant needs water, nutrition, air, and sunlight to grow well. A human has specific physical and spiritual needs. On the spiritual level, the human needs virtue. Virtue alone will make us truly human.

Hence God's act of satisfying justice and bestowing mercy was a double act of mercy. If God simply said, "I forgive you," we would still be left in our same darkness, with no guide as to how to live our lives. But God Himself showed us how we are to find our proper fulfillment, and it is through sacrifice.

Victimization, which is suffering without desiring it, is not sacrifice. Sacrifice is accepting all suffering that comes necessarily from doing the right thing, the thing that will make the individual and those around him more human. Hence, sacrifice is the core of love, and sacrificial love is the core of the family. The family is the core of society. Without sacrifice, love is simply attraction rather than mutual consideration. Without love, the family is simply a game of manipulation. Without family, the society is bored, aimless, and selfish. Without society, there can be no civilization, no leisure, and hence no freedom. Christ freely embraced the suffering that would come.

The Gospel is the most powerful story because it is the story of what happens when infinite Love enters our world. We crucify and reject it because in fact we don't want love. We like Frank Sinatra's song "I Did It My Way." That's why the Gospel is the most poignant story and why every good story is good insofar as it resembles the Gospel. Even B-movie entertainment is good because it resembles the Gospel—we like to see people kicking butt and taking names. Christ did that to Satan. We see huge power, tremendous struggles, high stakes. All of that is in the Gospel. At the heart of it is the notion of sacrifice, which is simply—I'm not a rock. I'm not an island. The only way for me to be happy as a human is to be selfless, to help others, to give consideration to others, to "do unto others what I would have them do unto me." That's love.

In fact, mercy is a sacrifice. I sacrifice the demands of justice and my personal satisfaction at seeing justice administered in order to show mercy. A poetry professor who doesn't understand that must be pretty bad at poetry...

Must God Suffer to Have Compassion for Us?

Jurgen Moltmann’s great theological contribution was the idea of the “suffering God.” In his book The Crucified God, Moltmann refers to the cross as the beginning of the Trinitarian history of the suffering God in which all human suffering is “taken up” into God. He writes, “There is no suffering which in this history of God is not God’s suffering; no death which has not been God’s death in the history on Golgotha.” The idea of a suffering God is also a recurrent idea in Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s theology. He writes in one of his letters from prison, “God lets himself be pushed out of the world on to the cross. He is weak and powerless in the world, and that is precisely the way, the only way, in which he is with us and helps us . . . The Bible directs man to God’s powerlessness and suffering; only the suffering God can help.”

The concept of the suffering God received widespread acceptance in the twentieth century among process theologians, liberation theologians, and feminist theologians, and the idea was also endorsed in Richard Kearney’s Anatheism, which I just finished. Why such broad appeal of the idea of God suffering? In short, the level of atrocities experienced in the twentieth century (World War I, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Rwandan and Cambodian genocides, and most especially, the Holocaust), brought into question the immutability and perfection of God, what is often referred to as the “God of metaphysics.” People assumed that an impassible, immutable, unchanging God must be indifferent, remote from creation, and uninvolved with human affairs, which was inconsistent with the Christian idea of the “God of love.”

As I mentioned in the last post and will probably repeat in later posts, I think this reflects an inadequate understanding of the God of metaphysics, and so I want to attempt to defend the impassibility and immutability of God as consistent with, not opposed to the Christian God of love.

First of all, one of the main critiques of the impassible God of metaphysics is that such a God cannot experience compassion for suffering creation. In human experience, compassion refers to the suffering one experiences at the distress of another, what is referred to as “affective compassion.” If God is impassible, then God cannot suffer, and hence, God cannot have compassion. Insofar as suffering is an evil in itself, and no evil can be in God, then critics are right in saying that God cannot have compassion, at least in the way we use the term in human experience.

But compassion also includes action on behalf of the person with compassion in seeking to overcome the other’s suffering as if it were her own suffering. That is, when we suffer ourselves, we act in order to make such suffering cease. Likewise, when we experience compassion, we take similar actions but on behalf of another. Aquinas says that mercy as [sic] “heartfelt sympathy for another’s distress, impelling us to succor him if we can” (II-II, Q. 30, art. 1). This action-oriented dimension of compassion is what is called “effective compassion.”

In this sense, God does have compassion, not because God experiences suffering, but because God acts to end the suffering of others. Michael Dodds writes in The Unchanging God of Love that “it is not the degree of suffering as such we admire in the compassionate person, but the degree of love that suffering manifests” (224). Because God’s essence is love, meaning that God is the pure act of love, God’s very essence is the act of ending the suffering of others. As Dodds says, “we attribute to God…the unlimited goodness of compassionate love—a love…bringing unending comfort, healing, peace, and joy” (225). This is what Aquinas calls mercy, “for it belongs to mercy to be bountiful to others, and, what is more, to succor others in their wants, which pertains chiefly to one who stands above. Hence mercy is accounted as being proper to God: and therein His omnipotence is declared to be chiefly manifested” (II-II, Q. 30, art. 4).

In Christology at the Crossroads, Jon Sobrino writes

“We must insist that love has to be credible to human beings in an unredeemed world. That forces us to ask ourselves whether God can really describe himself as love if historical suffering does not affect him… We must say what Moltmann says: “We find suffering that is not wished, suffering which is accepted, and the suffering of love. If God were incapable of suffering in all those ways, and hence in an absolute sense, then God would be incapable of loving.”

But if God is love, and if love is an action of ending the suffering of others, I see no reason to assert that God must therefore be able to suffer if God is to be able to love. Suffering is a privation, a lack of fullness. The fullness of God’s love is capable of overcoming such privations without requiring that God experience privation. This is the power behind the assertion that God is love—not that God has emotions in the sense that we say “God can love.” No, God’s very existence is love, a love which extends to all of God’s creation, and in a particular way to human beings, uniting them to the God of love through mercy in whom is found all peace and succor.

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Source: everydaythomist, "Must God Suffer in Order to Experience Compassion?," Everyday Thomist blog, May 14, 2010, accessed April 8, 2014, https://everydaythomist.wordpress.com/2010/05/14/must-god-suffer-in-order-to-experience-compassion/.

The Glory of God

The classical definition of glory is: clara notitia cum laude ["brilliant celebrity/fame with praise"]. [...] We can distinguish a double glory in God: the intrinsic glory which springs from his intimate divine life, and the extrinsic glory which proceeds from creatures.

Intrinsic glory

The intrinsic glory of God is that which he procures for himself in the bosom of the Trinity. The Father, by way of an intellectual generation, conceives a most perfect idea of himself: his divine Son or his Word, in whom is reflected his life, his beauty, his immensity, his eternity and all his infinite perfections. As a result of their mutual contemplation, there is established between these two divine Persons—by way of procession—a current of indescribable love, an impetuous torrent of fire, which is the Holy Ghost. This knowledge and love of himself, this eternal and incessant praise which God showers upon himself in the incomprehensible mystery of his interior life, constitutes his intrinsic glory, which is rigorously infinite and exhaustive and to which no created being nor the entire universe can contribute absolutely anything. [...]

God's external glory

God is infinitely happy in himself and has no need whatever of creatures. But God is love (Cf. Jn. 4:16), and love is communicative. God is the infinite good, and goodness tends to diffuse itself. As the philosophers say: Bonum est diffusivum sui. Here is the reason for creation. God desired to communicate his infinite perfections to creatures, thereby intending his own extrinsic glory. The glorification of God by creatures is therefore the ultimate reason and supreme finality of creation.

The explanation of this could not be more clear, even to the light of reason deprived of the light of faith. It is a philosophical fact that every agent acts for an end, especially an intellectual agent. Therefore, God, the first and most intelligent of all agents, must always act for some end. But the attributes of God and all his operations are not distinct from his divine essence, they are identified with it. Therefore, if God had intended in the creation of the universe some end distinct from himself, he would have had to refer and subordinate his creative action to that end—for every agent puts its operation at the service of the end which is intended—and hence God himself would have subordinated himself to that end, since his operation is himself. Consequently, that end would have been above God; that is, God would not be God. It is therefore absolutely impossible that God intended by his operations any end distinct from himself. God has created all things for his own glory; and creatures cannot exist but in him and for him. [1]

This does not presuppose a transcendental egoism in God, as some impious philosophers have dared to say; this is the apex of generosity and disinterest. God did not seek his own utility in creation, for he could add nothing at all to his own personal happiness and perfection; but he sought only to communicate his goodness. God knew how to organize things in such a way that creatures would find their own happiness by glorifying God. For that reason St. Thomas says that God alone is infinitely liberal and generous. He does not work because of any need, as if seeking something that he lacks, but only out of goodness, to communicate to creatures his own overflowing happiness.

Sacred Scripture is filled with expressions in which God demands and exacts his own glory: "I am the Lord, this is my name; my glory I give to no other nor my praise to idols" (Is. 42:8). "For my own sake, for my own sake, I do this; why should I suffer profanation? My glory I will not give to another" (Is. 48:11). "Listen to me, Jacob, Israel whom I named! I, it is I who am the first, and also the last am I" (Is. 48:12). "'I am the Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end,' says the Lord God, 'who is and who was and who is coming, the Almighty'" (Apoc. 1:8).

Ultimate End of the Christian Life

Thus the glory of God is the end and purpose of all creation. Even the incarnation of the Word and the redemption of the human race have no other finality than the glory of God: "And when all things are made subject to him, then the Son himself will also be subject to him who subjected all things to him, that God may be all in all" (1 Cor. 15:28). For that reason, St. Paul exhorts us not to take a single step which will not lead to the glory of God: "Therefore, whether you eat or drink, or do anything else, do all for the glory of God" (1 Cor. 10:31). For we have been predestined in Christ in order to become a perpetual praise of glory for the Blessed Trinity: "As he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blemish in his sight in love. He predestined us to be adopted through Jesus Christ as his sons, according to the purpose of his will, unto the praise of the glory of his grace, with which he has favored us in his beloved Son . . . for the praise of his glory" (Eph. 1:4-6, 14). Everything must be subordinated to this finality. Even the soul's salvation and sanctification must be sought for the greater glory of God. Our own sanctification and salvation cannot become our absolute ultimate end; even they must be sought only because our happiness consists in the eternal praise of glory of the Blessed Trinity.

Such is the ultimate and absolute end of the entire Christian life. In practice, the soul that aspires to sanctify itself must place as the goal of all its striving the glory of God. Nothing whatever should be preferred to this, not even the desire of one's own salvation or sanctification, which must be considered in a secondary place as the most efficacious means of giving glory to God. One must seek to resemble St. Alphonsus Liguori in this, of whom it was said that he had in his head nothing else but the glory of God, and one must take as a theme or motto the standard of the Society of Jesus as enunciated by St. Ignatius Loyola: "Ad majorem gloriam Dei." All the saints adopted this attitude, following the teaching of St. Paul, who gave this axiom to the Corinthians: "Do all for the glory of God" (1 Cor. 10:31).

Hence the sanctification of one's own soul is not the ultimate end of the Christian life. Beyond this is the glory of the Blessed Trinity, which is the absolute end of all that exists. And although this truth is so fundamental for those who comprehend the divine transcendence, it nevertheless does not appear to dominate the the lives of the saints until rather late, when the soul is transformed through love in the unity of God, when in the transforming union the soul is fully identified with God. Only Christ and Mary, from the first moment of their existence, realized this glorification of God which is the terminus of all sanctity on this earth. Nothing should so preoccupy the soul which aspires to sanctity as the constant forgetfulness of self and the intention to do all for the greater glory of God. At the summit of the mount of perfection, St. John of the Cross has printed the words: "Here on this mount dwell only the honor and glory of God."
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Notes:

1. In order to understand the finality of creation, it should be noted that God works for an end not only ex parte operis ["out of the part of the work"] but also ex parte operantis ["out of the part of working"]; not, however, as creatures do, for the desire of some end or goal which they do not yet possess, but simply for the love of the end which he already possesses actually in himself, which is nothing other than his goodness identified with his own essence. For that reason, St. Thomas say (De potentia, q. 3, a. 15, ad 14) that the communication of goodness is not the ultimate end, but the divine goodness itself, for love of which God desires to communicate it; for God does not work for his goodness as desirous of that which he does not possess, but as desirous of communicating that which he already possesses. He does not operate for the desire of the end, but for love of the end. "The entire universe with all its parts," says St. Thomas, "is ordained to God as to its ultimate end, in the sense that in all its parts it reflects the divine goodness by a certain limitation and for the glory of God" (Summa, I, q. 65, a. 2).

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Source: Fr. Antonio Royo Marin, The Theology of Christian Perfection, trans. by Jordan Aumann (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2011), 23-26.