In Layman's Terms: On Creation and the Fall of Man

*Quick housekeeping note: as you are well aware, this series has long since ceased being weekly, or even biweekly. For the foreseeable future, therefore, consider it a "when it's done" series. Sorry for the inconvenience. 

           When last we left our story (way back when), God had created the Heavens and the Earth and the high angel, Lucifer, had fallen out of Pride, taking many of the other angels with him and introducing death and decay into the world. Today, we’re going to talk some more about that creation and about the coming of that particularly strange creature, Man. 

            “And God created Man to his own image; to the image of a God He created him; male and female He created them.”

-Genesis 1: 27

            Now, there are four major ‘steps’ in Creation. These are the points where a strictly materialist interpretation of the world breaks down, as ‘natural’ laws as we understand them are wholly inadequate to account for them. Today we’ll be talking about the first three.

            

            Step One: Nothing to Something

            The first, and most obvious step is the change from non-existence to existence.

Before: No Things

After: Things!

             We talked a little about this in our first post; it is entirely absurd to posit the idea of nothing becoming something through natural laws (even if we allow that natural laws don’t count as ‘something’). As The Sound of Music taught us, nothing can come from nothing. It’s like the old computer joke of wondering how long someone will sit and look at a ‘loading’ screen: no matter how long you sit there, the computer will not just spontaneously start working again. 

No, you didn't, Ted.

            And so the first act of Creation is the change from nothing into something. Or, what might be more accurate to say, the appearance of ‘things not God.’ Since God alone is eternal and absolutely real, the first step beyond that is the creation of things that are not absolutely real; things that are separate from and contingent upon God.

            Here let me point out that Christianity is not Pantheism; we don’t believe that everything is God (somehow). We believe that everything expresses God in some way (as noted earlier), but God alone is God; every creature is distinct from Him, in the same way that a book is distinct from its author or a child is distinct from its father.

            So from ‘nothing’ was brought forth, by some unimaginable means (Fr. Lemaitre called it ‘The Big Bang,’ which is good enough for our purposes), what we call ‘the Universe.’ That is, the matter and energy that we live in and use on a day-to-day basis and which so fascinates us.

Now, what are matter and energy? Well, basically, they are the tools by which we participate in creation. Matter and energy are not the sum total of creation; we perceive within ourselves things that are neither matter nor energy (generally we give them names like ‘spirit’ or ‘personality’). But they are the normal means by which we act. When we wish to communicate with others, we manipulate sound waves to convey meaning. When we wish to harm, we apply energy to other people using bits of matter, such as fists or bullets, as conduits. When we wish to think, we manipulate our brains to form images and concepts in our minds.

Now, that’s an odd point there. A materialist would say that all thought is nothing but synapses firing within the brain in response to stimuli. We would agree that this is indeed thought, but thought cannot be nothing but that, since the question is ‘whence come those stimuli’? That is, we think by making parts of our brain send signals to each other, but what makes it do so? Materialists like to point out that we can stimulate sections of the brain in the laboratory, making people feel happy or sad or think of cheese, but they never seem to ask the question “so what stimulates the brain outside the laboratory?” What force allows us to make our brain shift, at will, from considering the problem of God to the problem of how we’re going to ask out the cute girl behind the Starbucks counter and vice-versa?

We’ll return to this point, but for right now let us acknowledge two things; the first great step of creation is the transition from ‘no universe’ to ‘universe,’ and that while this universe appears to be made up of matter and energy, in our own experience something more is involved, since something allows us to manipulate that matter and energy at will.

Step Two: Non-life to Life

So, the universe is made, with all its beautiful stars and planets and moons and asteroids and quarks and whatever else. But, so far, it’s dead; lifeless. Until, somehow or other, another unimaginable change takes place and life appears on at least one of those planets. 

What is life? Life is when a created thing can somehow contribute to creation; it can alter its position in space, it can manipulate the matter around itself, and it can reproduce itself. Dead matter cannot participate in creation; it can only ‘follow orders,’ so to speak; move when it’s been moved. The Earth was formed not because it was a living thing, but because it basically ‘fell’ into place. Gravity pulled bits of gas and matter together, which in turn had been knocked into place by other bits of matter, and the end result (much like those big balls of clay we all made during art class) was a planet. Living things, on the other hand, are necessarily creative. They can change their environment. They can move without being moved. Most importantly, they can make more living things.

It is this latter capacity that makes life such an overwhelmingly drastic shift in creation. Dead things cannot generate more dead things; a rock cannot make another rock, nor can a cloud of gas produce another cloud of gas. A rock can be split, or melted down and combined with another rock, but it cannot generate a similar rock while remaining more or less as it is. But living things can. And they do this via the mind-bendingly complex substance known as DNA.

Take it away, Mr.Coulton!

Picture a tiny computer composed of four different proteins present in every single unit of life, containing within itself all the information needed to copy the particular composition of matter that comprises this particular creature. Now, the idea that DNA, the Platonic ideal of information storage and transfer that Steve Jobs and Bill Gates combined could never hoped to match, developed solely by accidental chemical reactions is so laughably inadequate that you would make Friar William of Okham (he of the razor) cry just by suggesting it.

See?

            So, life began as nothing more than little single cells, barely large enough to contain their DNA. From there, they slowly grew, over the course of millions of years through some unknown process (call it evolution if you like), first into multi-celluar organisms, then into large, complex structures, and finally into what we call ‘animals:’ those unfathomably complex, active, fertile, and endlessly fascinating bits of life.

            Another major shift (that is on the borderline of needing its own category) was the emergence of sexuality; Male and Female. Life could reproduce itself from the very beginning (that’s part of the definition of life), but sexuality brought something quite new to the table. Here, rather than just copying the DNA of the parent, two sets of DNA are brought together, mixed up, and used to create something unlike either parent. Life, you might say, was branching out; getting creative.

            But there was more, much more. With sexuality came the idea of complementality and cooperation. With sex, creatures were forced to look beyond themselves, to acknowledge (after their own fashion) that they were not and could not be the center of the universe. With sex came the great mystery of the fact that a given species could no longer be represented by only one individual, but instead would always require two. No individual fish could be a complete fish, nor could any individual spider be a complete spider. The totality of any sexual species is only found in the relationship between the sexes. It’s an image of the Trinity; as God is three persons in one, so each sexual species is two distinct beings in one. Thus the interplay of distinction and unity, which is found in the core of existence, where the distinction does not separate and the unity does not subsume, found its expression in life.

            We also see that, in sexual creatures, creation depends on cooperation; neither the male nor the female can create on their own (okay, okay; Parthenogenesis, but even that’s typically just an emergency procedure to re-introduce males into the population). Thus, life could no longer be simply competitive; there had to be some form of giving, of sacrifice, of common-purpose.

In short, with sexuality came the first shadow of love into the world.

Now, don’t think I’m getting anthropomorphic here: this earliest drive to reproduce that sent the little proto-Juliet in proto-Romeo’s arms (er, flagellum) in all likelihood had nothing of commitment or affection to it (indeed, it’s quite possible that proto-Juliet ate proto-Romeo when they were done). My point, though, is that here we had the first instance of something like the self-forgetful openness and gratuity that is found in God. The smallest seed of love had entered the world at last.

And so life continued to grow at a new and faster pace. Fish emerged, and with them came vertebrae. The fish took to land, acquiring the four-limbed, one-headed, two-eyed template that would be copied again and again on practically all land-based vertebrates. The arthropods (bugs) also took to land, and even to the air. The cycle of life and death was in full swing; each individual, each species, and even each class and order would emerge, create offspring through the mystery of sex, and then die, bequeathing the world to their issue, who in turn would repeat the cycle.

In this way emerged the different dynasties: the mighty Gorgonopsids rose and fell. The Dinosaurs took their place, crafted the mightiest and longest empire the world had ever or would ever see, and then in a flash they were gone as well. The Birds, the Dinosaurs’ heirs, briefly strove to take their fathers’ place, but the Mammals, descendents of the Gorgonopsids, who had lain hidden for all the long millennia that the Dinosaurs ruled, rose up and reasserted their dominant place in the world.

And it was from the Mammals that a most curious creature emerged. At first it was nothing more than a modified version of the already-venerable primate family, adapted for life on the plains rather than the trees. Indeed, it seemed like a somewhat ungainly offshoot, doomed to a short life. It was slow compared to most of its predators. It had pathetically small teeth and no claws to speak of, and it was an awkward, gangly thing, running about erect on its hind legs, scavenging from the kills of other predators or hunting for berries and roots in the forest. In short, here was one of those creatures that nature had dealt a poor hand; a being that had managed to slip through the cracks of survival via luck or circumstance, but which would have no staying power, and would soon slip back beneath the waters of extinction, having left nothing but a few bones in the grass.

Then the third shift happened.

Step Three: Animal to Man

This poor creature’s only real weapon was that it had an unusually well-developed brain. It could use rudimentary tools, form simple plans, and, in short, survive by its wits. But then, one day (or it might have been over the course of many days), a change took place. One of these creatures became aware of itself. His eyes were opened. He suddenly showed new powers of understanding and control. Predators would not touch him. Prey animals were unafraid of him. He could see meaning in the world about him, and so began to assign names to things. Things that before had only sent simple signals to his brain (“danger” “food” “drink” “companion” “unknown”) now were seen as things in themselves; things with names (“lion,” “fruit,” “water,” “wife,” “forest”). Most importantly, he could understand himself as an “I;” as a unique individual, as more than just the body.

This scene shows something like what must have taken place.

And for the first time, he truly saw the world around him. Water was not just a source of refreshment, but something beautiful to look at and fun to play in. The forest wasn’t just a place of danger, but a place of adventure and mystery. Perhaps this can best be conveyed by the fact that, for the first time, he looked up. Animals don’t look up unless they think they might see food, or a predator. There’s no other reason for them to. But this creature looked up and he beheld the stars and the moon above him. Who can imagine, what pen or tongue could tell of his amazement, of his wonder at what he saw? How can we begin to dream of what that first day was like when he first experienced beauty, and so became Man?

Now, we don’t know whether this shift happened in only one individual or in a community (though virtually every account of the event has it happen to only one at first), but the important thing is that it took place. An animal had crossed the immeasurable gulf and become Man.

Assuming that it was only one individual at first, he (let’s call him ‘Adam’) was quickly joined by another, this one a female (‘Eve’). When this happened, the seed of love that had been planted when the very first protozoa had become sexual beings finally blossomed into full flower. Sex had come a long way since then; in its highest forms it had grown to include monogamy, affection, and sacrificial impulses. But only now, with the coming of Man, could it truly take on its full meaning. Now that Adam had become conscious of himself as an “I,” he could be fully conscious of Eve as also a “you.” Now he could see her as she was; a mystery as infinite as himself, which he could spend eternity attempting to comprehend.

For there was one more aspect of Man’s awakening; he became aware of God. Adam and Eve were intimately and uniquely connected with God; they could discern His presence wherever they were, they could ‘hear’ Him speaking to them, and most important of all they were keenly aware of His will and perfectly inclined to follow it.

A couple more points about Adam and Eve. Their initial state was much different from anything we have ever experienced. What we experience is a perpetual struggle between our animal instincts and our higher, more spiritual nature. Now, I want to be clear: the point is not that our animal instincts are evil, and our spiritual nature is good. Either can be turned to good, and either can draw us into evil. The point is that they are in conflict; our animal instincts draw us to pleasure, food, sex, and so forth, while our spiritual nature encourages us to reason, contemplation, understanding etc. In Adam and Eve, the higher nature was in complete control and the animal instincts were directed by the reason. So, while their instincts remained, they were always directed toward rational ends and they were never overwhelmed by passion or cravings into overindulgence. This is why, in Genesis, it describes them as being “Naked without shame.” (Genesis 2: 25). They were in such control of their passions that they were never even tempted to see each other as anything less than what they were, and, as such, had no temptation to lust.

Another element in their original state was that they had much more power over nature than we do. Obviously, we don’t know exactly what the extent of these powers were, but from evidence found among the Saints I think we can gather a rough idea. For instance, we can suppose that, among other things, Adam and Eve never got sick, they could communicate to some extent with the animals, and they probably could fly.

I spoke earlier about the great mystery of will, of the ability of the soul to act on the body, of spirit to move matter, as seen in the human brain. Well, in Adam and Eve this capacity of the soul to move matter extended beyond their brains to the rest of their bodies, allowing them much greater freedom of movement and action than we enjoy, along with greater awareness and presence within their bodies. To put it bluntly, they experienced things in a much more intense manner than we do (and yes, that means exactly what you think it means).

Finally, Adam and Eve’s bodies were free from the death and decay that had plagued the world since its creation. They never got sick, they never got injured, and they would never know mortal death. As for what would have happened at the end of their time on Earth, we can only guess, but I believe that they would have met the same fate as Mary or Elijah; when their Earthly time was ended, they would have been assumed, body and soul, into Heaven.

But, as you probably guessed, they never got that far. We don’t know how long it was that they enjoyed this state, nor what precisely led to their fall from it. Genesis, of course, tells the famous story of the tree of the forbidden fruit, and the tempting Serpent, but I think we can call that more allegorical than literal. In any case, Satan was still at work in the world, as he had been from the beginning, and he set to work on Man. However it happened, he managed to tempt Adam and Eve into going against God’s will, which, again, they knew and were inclined to follow. They were tested, and thanks to the Devil’s influence, they failed the test.

It was the Second Great Fall. Just as the Devil’s fall threw the whole of creation out of synch, so Adam and Eve’s had equally drastic consequences. Their two natures were ‘jarred loose’ you might say, the animal from the spiritual, so that they were no longer in accord and it would take massive effort to achieve even a semblance of the unity they enjoyed before. With this their animal natures could run rampant, unrestrained by reason, and their spiritual natures could likewise conceive of pride and envy, despising both the lower instincts and worshiping the “I” without perceiving the “you.” In other words, they now knew good and evil, having before only known good.

 Their souls lost all power over their bodies, save for their brains, and so death and decay in the form of illness and injury were able to enter their bodies. The microbes, kept at bay by their perfectly controlled wills, broke in and began to infect them. Their understanding with the animals was severed.

In short, Adam and Eve became as we are now. Their natures were broken and corrupted. For the first time, sin; the corruptive force that drove the angels out of heaven, had entered the world. Death had been a part of the world from the beginning, but without rational beings – without Man – sin could not exist. Now, with Man’s fall, the world knew sin.

As for what, exactly, caused this fall, we honestly don’t know. It might very well have been a tree they were forbidden to eat from. The Devil’s lie “Thou shalt be like God” almost certainly is more or less verbatim, as that same lie has troubled us ever since. The thing to take away is that Adam and Eve were told that they could make themselves like God by disobeying Him, and, unfortunately for us, they believed it.

And so Adam and Eve were ‘thrown out of the Garden,’ so to speak. By choosing to reject God, they lost the unique experience of Him they had enjoyed. Now, bereft of the unique control over their bodies and their passions, they had to make their own way in the world and survive more or less in the same way their animal ancestors had, only with the added bitterness of remembering what they had lost and the added comfort of what remained.

For Adam and Eve were not wholly corrupted. They retained their knowledge of God, their awareness of beauty, and their ability to love: all broken and imperfect, of course, but still real and still able to inspire them. Moreover, God had inscribed a promise on their hearts; that He had not abandoned them, and that He would one day redeem them from the state they had fallen into.

Up next: Man Ascendant. 

Vive Christus Rex!

In Layman's Terms: On Evil

“And the Serpent said to the woman: “No, you shall not die. For God knows that on the day you shall eat the fruit, your eyes shall be opened; and you shall be as Gods, knowing good and evil.”

-Genesis 3: 4-5

                  In our last post on the Catholic Worldview, we talked about God. Today, we’re gonna talk about the opposite of God: Evil. 

 

                  Thomas Aquinas said, correctly, that the problem of evil was the strongest argument for the non-existence of God. If God exists and if God is all good and all powerful, then how can evil exist?

                  Before I delve into this question, I would like to just note an interesting fact; the reality of evil is axiomatic. No sensible person would ever deny it, and if he did no one would believe him. Now, the question arises: what does that do to the idea that morality is not objective? If evil is so real that it is the best philosophical weapon against God, then moral standards must be equally real (since evil is nothing but a failure to meet moral standards). Evil might or might not disprove God, but it certainly disproves Relativism.

                  The indispensable G.K. Chesterton wrote of people who denied evil: “If it is true (as it certainly is) that a man can feel exquisite happiness in skinning a cat, then the religious philosopher can only draw one of two deductions. He must either deny the existence of God, as all atheists do; or he must deny the present union between God and man, as all Christians do. The new theologians seem to think it a highly rationalistic solution to deny the cat.”

"There is no cat...there is no cat..."

                  So we shall waste no time proving that there is such a thing as evil. Instead we have to ask two questions; what is it and why does it exist if God is all powerful and all good?

                  The answer to the question “what is evil?” is, to put it bluntly, nothing. Evil is nothing. It’s non-existence; unreality.

Catholicism is an encounter with Reality. It’s a striving to become more and more ‘Real:’ more as we ought to be. As Jesus says, “I have come that you may have Life and have it more abundantly” (John 10: 10). Last week we discussed how God is the core of Reality, the absolute principle of existence. The more like Him we become, the more ‘Real’ we become.

                  Evil, therefore, is a kind of corrosive unreality; something that makes an object less ‘as it should be.’ It’s like rust on metal, progressively weakening the thing until it’s corroded away entirely. 

This is your soul on evil; any questions?

There is no such thing as “positive” evil: no Ahriman, no ‘It,’ no monolith at the center of the Earth that the Legion of Doom can re-purpose as a laser-cannon. Evil is entirely a negative force, involving the removal or rejection of some good. Nothing is created evil, and nothing is ‘pure’ evil, not even the Devil. To exist itself is good, because to exist at all is to be, to some extent, like God. Evil is always parasitic; it can’t exist on its own. As Frodo says in The Lord of the Rings, “The Shadow…can only mock; it cannot make.”

Frodo’s point is emphasized in the climax to A Nightmare on Elm Street. At the end of that picture, it’s revealed that Freddy doesn’t actually exist at all. He’s just, well, a dream; a parasitic force dependent on the frustration and disorder of his victims for existence. Once Nancy refuses to keep ‘feeding’ him, he vanishes into nothingness. 

"I'm your boyfriend now, Frodo!"

 As noted, therefore, nothing can be ‘pure evil.’ However, something can be so entirely corrupted that it is irretrievably evil; so twisted and corroded that it hates the very thought of good. Creatures like that long for non-existence, both for themselves and for everything else.

How does that happen? It happens because the world isn’t as they would want it. The first sin, you see, is always, always Pride: the desire to put oneself before God. When we steal, we are saying “I’d rather God made the laws governing property differently.” When we kill, we say “I wish I had the power over life and death.” Most of us do this unconsciously; justifying our sins with things like “oh, who could it hurt?” or “well, he deserved it, didn’t he?” But such decisions are not ours to make; we don’t get to personally decide that, say, this person is undeserving of life, or my need of this money is greater than his, or I should be able to enjoy sex without worrying about what it might lead to. God made the world and made us a certain way. If we live the way He intends, we will be happy and whole as we can never imagine. But for most of us, it is so hard to live as God wants, and it’s so much easier to live as we want.

So, we try to ‘cheat;’ to get around God, to ignore or deny the reality of creation in favor of something more amenable to our own wishes. It’s similar to those “scripture scholars” who try to explain that most of the Gospels were later additions, and that the only ‘genuine’ sayings of Jesus are the ones that (by an astounding coincidence) agree with their own views! In the same way, we like to find reasons to ‘cut out’ the bits of reality that we don’t like in order to do, well, pretty much what we’re doing right now! Therefore we do things like overemphasizing the ‘fun and bonding’ aspects of sex while trying to cut out the (rather vital) ‘makes babies’ aspect. Or we ignore the fact that it’s wrong to take innocent lives because, well, it’d just be so convenient if that little village weren’t there! Or we deny the right to own one’s own property because, damn it! Why does he have so much and I don’t?

                  This ‘cheating,’ this attempt to get around God, is amateur evil. Oh, it can corrode our souls and send us to Hell, all right, but only if it graduates into what we might call ‘mature evil.’ Those who are in ‘mature evil’ are smarter than we are. They recognize that you can’t get around God; you can’t pick and choose the parts of Reality that you want to follow any more than you can choose the parts of the Gospel you want to believe. It’s an all-or-nothing deal; the world is as God has made it and you have to either accept it or rejected. So, rather than submitting to a world in which they are not God, they will have nothing; no world, no God, and not even themselves. As Nietzsche put it, “If there were a God, how could I stand not to be Him?”

 In other words, some men just want to watch the world burn.

You knew I'd get to him at some point in this post, didn't you?

                   The Joker is a good image of ‘deep evil.’ Ra’s Al Ghul and Bane are amateurs; they think they can cut out bits of the world to make it as they would like. The Joker just wants chaos; non-existence. That’s why he only laughs when Batman beats him, why he practically wants Batman or Two-Face to kill him; what’s pain or death to someone who longs for non-being? The world, as he sees it, is cruel, meaningless, and corrupt; just like him. So he wants is to tear it to pieces as much as he can before dying. He doesn’t want anything to be at all. Everything is meaningless, so everything burns.

                   Another example of this comes in The Lord of the Rings from a character who is not actually evil himself, but who succumbs to evil: Denethor. Faced with what he is convinced is the inevitable victory of Sauron and the end of his own reign even if Sauron is defeated, Denethor declares that if he cannot have things as they were, he will have “nothing.” And so he kills himself.

         

             In the end, this is the choice we will all have to make. When we face God, we will see the world as it truly is and ought to be, and almost all of us will see something we won’t like. Will we accept reality as it is, or will we prefer unreality? If we can’t have things as we would like them, will we accept them anyway, or will we declare that it is either “our way or the highway”?

                  When we last left our story, God was poised on the act of creating Heaven and Earth by His Will. At the uttermost beginning of beginning, in the very first act of creation, God made the creatures that we typically call ‘Angels.’ Angels are beings of pure spirit; pure intellect. They have no bodies, only minds (though they can assume bodies when they need to, in the manner of what you might roughly call “uniform”), and they participate in God’s act of Creation as secondary causes.

J.R.R. Tolkien, writing to his son, described an image he had of his own guardian angel while praying in front of the Blessed Sacrament. He said that he envisioned it as God’s own concern and love for him personified into a separate being of its own. That, I think, is as good a description of the angels as any; they are God’s ineffable love for every aspect of His own creation made into beings themselves.

Or, another helpful image comes from one of the villains of C.S. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength, who (after his materialistic fashion) called them ‘macrobes:’ the opposite of microbes; beings as far above us as we are above bacteria, and who influence the world even more than microbes do, but just as invisibly. 

In any case, for our purposes it might help to think of angels as being ‘lesser gods;’ something akin to the pagan deities (with a lot less sex and a lot more contemplation).

Aren’t I getting sidetracked from the subject of evil? A little, but I have a point. You see, the angels exist in a hierarchy. No two angels are alike, and they are arranged each in their own place in creation. The greatest of all the angels; the being closest to God in power and beauty, was called Lucifer (which means ‘light bearer’). Now, as part of their contemplation of God, the angels each discerned part of His plan for creation. Lucifer, together with many other angels, foresaw the coming of man. Not only that, but they foresaw that they, the glorious creatures of light and spirit, would one day be required to serve and even worship a certain Man.

To Lucifer, this was intolerable. Here he was, the beautiful, glorious first work of creation, and he was expected to submit to something made out of dust; something that sweated and ate and excreted. Something born out of a woman, that nursed and played and worked in the dirt. Moreover, he foresaw that in addition to having to worship a man he, Lucifer, the bearer of light, would one day be considered lower in the celestial hierarchy than a mere woman.

Dazzled with his own greatness and furious at the thought of relinquishing it, Lucifer rebelled; he refused to go along with the plan. Together with many other angels who shared his indignation, he tried to attack the others who wished to remain with God. But there was another angel named Michael from much lower down in the hierarchy, who rose up in righteous indignation against Lucifer’s pride. Asking “Who is like God?” Michael drove Lucifer out of Heaven.

Unable to corrupt or harm the other angels, Lucifer and his angels turned their sights instead upon ‘earth:’ the physical creation, introducing corruption, death, and decay into the world and, once man came on the scene, inducing him to fall as they had fallen (but all that will have to wait until next week).

The above is a crude, symbolic outline of an event that is simply beyond our knowledge or comprehension. Don’t worry about taking it too literally. The important thing to take away is that Lucifer’s fall happened because he preferred himself, or his own vision of reality, to God. In so doing, he was embracing a false vision of reality; one in which he was the center of the universe. And if he couldn’t have that, he’d rather have nothing.  

So, what happens then? What does the image of being ‘driven out of heaven’ mean? Well, the way I like to think of it is that a fallen angel (or demon) is like a black hole. A black hole is a star that has collapsed upon itself and grows progressively smaller and smaller by the force of its own gravity. It’s black because its gravity is so strong that light can’t escape its pull.

Wisconsin farmer Harold Swanson took this photo of an actual demon. Anyone with information about the current whereabouts of Mr. Swanson is encouraged to call...

A demon is a ‘collapsed’ angel; it’s an angel that is so wrapped up in itself that it actually ‘shrinks;’ becomes progressively smaller, less Real for all eternity. Like a dead star it compacts upon itself. It never ceases to be (since God never ‘unmakes’ the things He has made), it just progressively ‘decays;’ a little like how even if you divide by two an infinite number of times, you will never reach zero. You can only reach zero by removing exactly as much as was put in, and God is the only one who can do that.

And it is this state of ‘progressive unreality’ that is what we mean by “Hell.” Some people try to rather sneeringly claim that God made Hell, but Hell is not a thing or a place that needed someone to make it. Hell is a state of mind; a state of being so wrapped up in yourself that you basically fade into near-nothingness. The Devil wasn’t thrown out of Heaven; he fell out because Heaven could no longer hold something so insubstantial.

But there is one point I need to make before we move on; a black hole may be smaller than the star it once was and may create darkness rather than light, but the interesting thing is that it has just as much mass and, consequently, just as much gravity as it ever had. Even so, a collapsed angel is just as powerful and as intelligent as it ever was. The devil may be an infinitely ‘small’ creature now, but he’s still unfathomably dangerous.

Another point is this; the devil’s fall didn’t just affect him, it also affected all of creation. Somehow the fact that the angels turned away from God caused a change in the world. Death, decay, and disease, the progressive dissolution of all that is, became a fact of life. The angels, therefore, are intimately connected with the world as we know it.

So, that’s a broad view of what evil is. Now the bit question; why does evil exist? Why does an all-powerful, all-good God permit evil to exist?

The first thing to remember is that God does not see things the way we do. For instance, we generally consider death to be the worst thing that can happen to us. When someone dies, particularly if they die young, we see it as a great disaster. For God, however, death is not the worst thing; sin is the worst thing. Death can bring us to Him; sin separates us from Him. Hence, when someone dies in the State of Grace (in communion with God) He sees that as a good thing because it means that that person has been saved and will be with Him for eternity. We see it as a bad thing because we miss that person and don’t know whether we’ll see them again.

This is not to say that death itself is good, or that life on Earth is bad, or that we shouldn’t mourn the passing of loved ones. It’s merely to remind us that sometimes we are wrong to call a certain event evil in the sense that God could not have willed it.

But that only delays the issue; what about genuine evil? What about the evil committed by men, or demons, or seemingly by God Himself? Why does He permit genocide, or war, or the abuse of children? Why does He send hurricanes, earthquakes, and other disasters?

I must warn you, there are no easy answers to this. Nothing that I am going to say here will make you say “oh, well that explains it! I’m not bothered by X event anymore.” The ideas I am going to present may be philosophically and theologically sound, and they may even be comforting (I tend to find them so), but they are not a ‘cure all’ for grief or anger or anything like that. In short; there’s an answer, but you’re probably not going to like it.

There are, as far as I can tell, three reasons why God permits evil: in order to give us Free Will, in order to chastise us, and in order to bring about something better.

Whenever someone asks the question “how could God allow this to happen?” I always want to answer “Well, what would you expect Him to do about it?” If a man decides to murder his wife, do you expect God to turn the knife into rubber, or make the gun misfire, or cause the poison to fail? Do you expect Him to stop the man’s brain from forming the plan, or conceiving the desire to carry it out? And if so, what would that make of the world? If every time someone tried to do something wrong the world altered itself to prevent him, that would be a pretty chaotic world, wouldn’t it? And why stop there? Wouldn’t it be neater if God simply prevented the synapses of the brain from forming in such a way as to conceive of evil thoughts?

You see, if God stepped in to stop us from ever doing anything wrong, we would cease to be free. God permits us to do evil because He is willing to risk sin in order to grant us freedom. God always knew that, given the choice, some would prefer their own will over His. He thought that the chance for the rest to freely choose to love Him was worth it. God creates us to love, and love can only exist in freedom. If He didn’t make us free, He wouldn’t have bothered to make us at all. And since He made us free, we can freely choose to reject Him.

The other question people typically ask in the face of a disaster is “why? Why did this happen?” Typically, there is no clear answer to that, but even on the rare occasions that there is, typically we don’t actually want to know it. Think about: what’s your response whenever you’re being punished for something? Isn’t it usually to protest that the whatever it was wasn’t that big a deal anyway, or it “wasn’t what you think,” or that you’re sorry enough as it is? Have you ever once greeted an explanation for your punishment with “Oh, I see. Yes that’s quite reasonable and just; carry on”?  If you have, I’m impressed.

God punishes us for the same reason parents punish their children: to draw attention to an unacceptable situation. It’s a cliché to say that the ‘God of the Old Testament’ (as if there were two Gods for the two parts of the Bible) doesn’t sound like a very loving God. I wouldn’t vouch for everything in the Old Testament, but the idea that a loving God would never send the punishing plagues or earthquakes or exiles to his people simply doesn’t square with what we know of love. Fathers may punish their children. Mothers may order their sons to go cut them a switch. Coaches make their players run laps. Drill Sergeants ‘smoke’ their worthless maggots cadets. Punishment is hardly contrary to love, and punishment of a whole nation must necessarily involve disaster.

Now, what I want to emphasize about God’s chastisements is that He does them to make us see that something is not right. He  “whispers in our pleasures, but yells in our pains” (as Lewis puts it). God let’s evil happen to us because we can’t really ignore evil. We can ignore good; we can pass by a beautiful garden with our nose buried in our iPhone. But if one of the plants suddenly started sending feelers in your direction and singing “Feed Me” in the voice of the late Levi Stubbs, you’d forget about your iPhone pretty quickly and start taking notice of your surroundings. Evil gets our attention in ways that most other things do not. So, when God wants to wake us up and snap us out of our atrophy, he lets something bad happen.

"Change your ways, Seymour!"

In C.S. Lewis’s delightful Screwtape Letters, the demon Screwtape complains about how whenever the forces of Hell manage to make the majority of men despise virtues like courage and self-sacrifice, God sends a war or an Earthquake, ruining all their work. Once you actually see extreme virtues like that on full display, as happens in almost every disaster, they become so obviously good and admirable that all the selfish, materialist lies of the Devil are blown away. In the same way, God sometimes allows us to hit absolute rock bottom before He brings us out of it. That way the illusion of self-sufficiency is destroyed, and we can fully understand just how absolutely we need Him. That’s why it’s fairly common for people to have conversions in jails, or half-way-houses, or warzones. Faced with the full brunt of their own helplessness, it’s only natural for men to turn to God.

The final point is related to the above, but is the hardest to understand. That’s because the first two reasons are familiar to us; we do them ourselves sometimes. We allow someone to rant about “the Jews” because we think a few assholes are worth Freedom of Speech. We punish those we are responsible for in order to help them grow. But this last point is something we can’t and shouldn’t do.

The final reason God allows evil to exist is so that He can bring good out of it. Think back to what I was saying about the Devil’s fall: he didn’t want to have to be counted as less than a mere woman. But his fall is precisely what led to Mary’s position as the Immaculate Mother of God. Now, I wouldn’t want to speculate what might have happened if the Devil had never fallen, but the point is that because he rejected God, he helped bring about the very scenario he found so repulsive. It’s the classic prophecy storyline: in attempting to prevent a dire prediction from coming true, our protagonist has inadvertently brought it about.

God integrates evil into His plan so perfectly that we cannot conceive of the world without it. The devil introduces death and decay; God uses it to bring about his creatures through evolution. Pharaoh hardens his heart against the Israelites; God uses him to show His saving Power. Christ is killed; God opens the gates of Heaven.

Does this seem impossible or contradictory? It shouldn’t. Imagine playing chess against a master. No matter what you did, no matter what move you make, he could integrate it into his strategy. He doesn’t make the moves for you, or tell you what to do, but everything you do unwittingly serves his purpose, and in the end the only one all your bluster and attempted cunning will hurt is yourself.

"Oh, come on! How about best 51 out of a 100?"

Likewise, from God’s perspective no one can do true, lasting harm to anyone else. They can hurt, kill, and take, but unless the other person rejects God it’s all temporary. The only person truly harmed by sin is the sinner. That’s why Jesus reserved some of His harshest condemnations for those who tempt others to sin (Luke 17: 1-3), and that’s why God permits men to sin; in the end, they’re only hurting themselves, and He will use them to bring others to Him. 

                 This faculty of God to bring good out of evil is necessary, because God would not be God if anyone could thwart His Will. Not that He wills men into Hell, but the fact that some choose Hell does not subvert Him (since He wills that men have the free choice to reject Him). He will use them, even in Hell, to bring others to Heaven. 

                  Before I end, I should say a little more about Hell, since that’s one of the doctrines that tends to scare people away from Christianity: “I don’t like the idea of a God who would send people to Hell!” (they never seem to ask whether “I don’t like” is in anyway shape or form related to “it is philosophically unsound”). 

                  The truth is that God doesn’t send people to Hell; people choose to go. “The gates of Hell are locked from the inside.” It’s what I was talking about earlier: Hell is filled with people who would rather have their own vision of Reality than Gods, and who are perfectly willing to suffer in Hell for all eternity rather than not get their own way. A Saint is someone who prefers God to everything; a damned soul is one who prefers nothing to God.

                  Remember, damned souls become more ‘unreal’ for all eternity. In fact, to enter Hell you have to be pretty unreal to begin with. In The Great Divorce, Lewis described Hell as being infinitesimally small compared to Heaven; so much so that the Saints are literally unable to fit inside.

This is due to the nature of sin. In the act of committing evil, we are always accepting some ‘untruth;’ that we have the right to murder this person, for instance, or that sexual urges are uncontrollable anyway, or that all the world’s problems are the fault of (insert group here). In so doing, we invite a little ‘nothingness’ into ourselves; a little bit of unreality that unmakes a tiny part of us. And, of course, the more we ‘unmake,’ the easier it is to continue ‘unmaking’ and the closer we come to breaking down completely (going all the way back to the ‘rust’ analogy).

How many of you have seen Batman Beyond? Do you remember the episode “Sneak Peek,” the one with the tabloid reporter who could make himself intangible? As time went on and he used his power more and more often, the effect slowly became permanent. In the end, unable to touch or hold onto anything, he sank through the ground itself into the center of the Earth.

                 I think that’s a good metaphor for Hell: the more you embrace sin and make it a part of your life, the more unreal you become, until finally you’re lost forever. God tries to hold you, but there’s nothing there to hold; you simply slip through His hands into near-nothingness.

                 Next week: the Coming and Fall of Man.

Vive Christus Rex!

In Layman's Terms: On God

           This week begins a series of posts in which I will attempt, to the best of my ability, to explain the Catholic worldview from start to finish "in layman's terms." This is not so much an attempt to prove or demonstrate it, but more just a chance to lay it out in the open for all to see.

                 

Please keep in mind that I am not a trained theologian or a priest; just a humble layman with a blog, so if I get something wrong please just pass over it with a contemptuous guffaw and turn instead to more learned sources.

                  In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God. He was with God in the Beginning. Through Him all things were made, and nothing that was made was made without Him.

                  -John 1:1-2

                  Everything begins and ends with God. Now, there are a lot of misconceptions of God floating around (and, oddly enough, it tends to be these that atheists reject: there aren’t very many ‘true’ atheists in the world, atheists who reject God as Christians understand Him). For one thing, God is not a thing like us. He’s not a Zeus-like deity; a merely superhuman figure living above the world and meeting out rewards and punishments as He sees fit. He’s not the Invisible Man in the sky.

That would be this fellow

                  God isn’t some invisible ‘force’ operating in the world (the ‘flying spaghetti monster’), or even something operating outside the world. He is not something like a super-powerful ghost, or the android Amazo, or Dr. Manhattan; simply an unfathomably powerful being operating in the world.

                 

As I understand them, atheists conceive of God as something like that; as an invisible, super-powerful ‘boogeyman’ that flies around the world punishing people who have sex before marriage: sort of a cross between Superman and Jason Voorhees.

Just to be clear, this is not what we mean by 'God.'

 

                  So what do we mean by God?

                 

Well, it’s hard to really put a label on God, because anything we call Him will necessarily convey something much less than He actually is. Let me put it this way; St. Thomas Aquinas was quite possibly the most brilliant theologian who ever lived. His life’s work was the massive Summa Theologica, in which he presented some of the most exalted, beautiful, and supremely intelligent ideas about God. A couple years before his death, while he was still working on his masterpiece, he was praying in the chapel and entered a state of ecstasy (a kind of elevated trance in which the subject is so caught up in contemplation of the Divine that he doesn’t notice anything else). When he came out of it, he said that he had had a vision of God, and that everything he ever wrote – some of the finest, most careful philosophy and theology ever conceived by the mind of man – was “all straw” compared to what he had seen. He never wrote another word, but spent the rest of his life in prayer.

                 

Try to keep that story in mind throughout this post.

                 

In the Book of Exodus, God gives His name as “I Am” (sometimes rendered “I Am Who Am”). God is the One who Is; who exists.

                 

But, you say, couldn’t that be applied to…well, anything at all that exists? Not necessarily. Think of it this way; can you say that the computer you are reading this on exists? Of course. Would you be able to say the same thing in a hundred years? Well, probably not. If I sent you back in time a hundred years, would you be able to say the same thing? Of course not.

(Sorry, that was mean)

 

                  So, your computer exists conditionally; it only exists up to certain point. A hundred years ago it didn’t exist, and a hundred years from now it probably won’t exist any longer.

                  And, if you think about it, everything we know of follows the same pattern; you yourself once were not and one day you’ll be either turning to dust in the ground or sitting pretty on a future anthropologist’s shelf. The Pyramids have been around for 4000 years, but at one point they didn’t exist and one day they will go the way of their fellow wonders of the ancient world. The Earth itself was once nothing but a cloud of gas and vapor and one day will get incinerated by an expanding sun (or whatever the current prediction of doom is).

                  So everything we know of only exists up to a certain point: if you could see all of time, you could pick out a point when everything we know of today does not exist. And existence is conditional: the Earth only came into being because gravity worked on the particles, which only were in a position to be worked on because the Big Bang went off, and your computer only came to be because Steve Jobs got fired from his first job.

"You'll never amount to anything, Jobs! Do you hear me? Anything!"

                  But wait a second: if existence is conditional, and if everything that exists didn’t exist at some point, then how could anything at all exist? Obviously, there must be something that exists unconditionally and absolutely; something that always was, is, and will be. Basically, if there ever was a point where there was nothing, when nothing at all existed, then nothing ever could exist. Some people try to get around this by saying “well, given the laws of physics, then you could create from nothing…” but that’s just silly. “Nothing” means “nothing:” the laws of physics don’t exist! And even if they did, there’d be nothing for them to work on; they’d just sit around in the nothingness congratulating each other on their reasonableness for all eternity with nothing else to do.

  

                  God, therefore, is the principle of existence; He is that which Is unconditionally. Everything that exists comes from Him and points back to Him.

                  But there’s more to it than that.

                  God is not just neutral ‘existence:’ He is supremely good. God is pure love, pure beauty, and pure truth. I’ll get into this more in the next post in this series, but Catholics believe that goodness is essentially synonymous with ‘existence.’ A thing is good to the extent that it exists, is real: love is more real than hatred, beauty is more real than ugliness, truth is more real than lies. God, as the source of all existence, is also the source of all goodness.

Therefore, whenever we see something that we call ‘good:’ a beloved friend, a beautiful landscape, a wise saying, a newborn baby, etc. what we are really seeing is a reflection of God. Everything that is good is of God, and what we feel when we experience goodness is an echo of what we will experience in the presence of God.

                  There’s a beautiful Celtic song called Long, Long Before Your Time, in which a man tells his child the story of his life-long love for his wife, who died giving birth to the child. The last verse runs:

“So you ask me why I look so sad

On this bright summer’s day

And why the tears are in my eyes

And I seem so far away.

It’s just you seem a lot like her

When your eyes look into mine,

And you smile so much like she did

Long, long before your time.”

                  Every experience of goodness that we have on Earth is like that; a reminder of the God who made us and for whom we always long. You see, God has inscribed the desire for union with Him into every human heart, and when we experience goodness it rubs that longing raw again.

                  God is the source of all existence and, as such, the source of all goodness. Once you understand that, there’s a kind of shift in your mind. The question “does God exist” seems quaint and almost absurd to you; like asking someone whether they were born or not. It’s so obvious it hardly bears mentioning.

                  So the question moves from the existence of God to the question of what God is like. Here Catholics and other Christians differ sharply from their fellow theists by positing a Triune God; a God in Three Persons. Not three gods, not a god with three identities, but a single, perfectly simple God encompassing three distinct persons.

                  Head spinning yet?

                  Don’t worry; you’re not supposed to be able to really understand it. This is one of those things about God that is simply beyond human comprehension. Some of the most brilliant minds in history have struggled with coming up with ways of expressing it. St. Patrick likened the Trinity to a shamrock (which is why the shamrock is a symbol of Ireland), as a shamrock has three leaves, but is only one plant. St. Augustine of Hippo, operating on a more cerebral level, likened the Trinity to the mind, self-knowledge, and self-love.

                  Leaving aside trying to understand the idea of the Trinity, let us consider what it means and why it is so important. First of all, there’s the fact that if there is love in God – which there must be, as we have already said that all good things have their ultimate origin in God – then there must be a plurality of persons in God, since otherwise God would simply be loving Himself, which would leave Him in a state of imperfect love (since love is necessarily ‘other centric’). This would also impose a necessity on Him; if He were to love, He would need something else to love, meaning that His creation would be based on need rather than a gratuitous gift. In short, without the Trinity we would be faced with the absurd idea of a lonely God.

"All by myself! Don't wanna be / all by myself anymore..."

                  There’s another reason why the Trinity is so important. Most theists agree that God is something beyond mere ‘personality:’ that God is more than a person. But the trouble is that most theists, when they try to describe what this means, instead come up with something impersonal: something less than a person. As C.S. Lewis pointed out, if you’re going to posit that God is beyond personality, the Trinity is simply the only idea on the market.

                  So we see why the Trinity, but we haven’t said much on what is the Trinity. Well, the Trinity consists of the ‘Father,’ the ‘Son,’ and the ‘Holy Spirit’ (I put them in quotes to head off temptations to read those names too literally). The short version; the Father is God the Creator, the Son is the ‘Word of the Father:’ the Father’s perfect conception of Himself. The Holy Spirit is the spirit of love that passes between the Father and the Son.

                  Does that make any sense?

                  I’ll slow down: you have the Father; perfect existence. The Father has an idea of Himself. That Idea is from perfection of perfection, and hence must itself be perfect. But a real person is more perfect than a simple idea of a person, and so for the Father’s self-conception to be perfect, it must be a real person. Thus, the Son proceeds from the Father.

Now, between the Father and the Son, perfection to perfection, a relationship exists; a ‘spirit of love.’ We see this phenomenon in human relationships: success guru Napoleon Hill, taking an idea from Andrew Carnegie, described how when two minds come together for a specific purpose a ‘third mind’ is formed: the mind that comprises the combined knowledge, experience, and personalities of the two individuals. When a devoted husband and wife are together, their friends will notice a kind of ‘combined personality’ formed by their bond (for more information, see these articles on The Art of Manliness).

Well, what in humans is a faint, shadowy spark is in God blown into a roaring fire. The elusive ‘third man’ of any relationship must, in a perfect relationship between perfect existence, become a real third person.

So you have the Father, who begets the Son, who is His perfect self-conception, and the loving, perfectly unified relationship between the Father and the Son forms the Holy Spirit between them.

In any case, that’s about the closest I can get to explaining the mystery of the Trinity. It is one of those things that are simply beyond human comprehension, and our greatest minds have only succeeded in catching glimpses of it. But, of course, we’re dealing with God here; we shouldn’t expect to understand. I know that sounds a bit like a cop-out, but logically it’s obviously true. If God is God, and if He is as far above us as all that, then He should always remain, in large part, a mystery. Catholics believe that even in the highest heaven God will remain a mystery to us; a mystery that we will spend eternity trying to comprehend. It’s not so surprising, really; many people spend their whole lives just trying to comprehend the mystery of one other person. It’s called ‘marriage.’

The last aspect of God we have to consider is His status as creator of all things. Since God is the first principle of existence, logically He must be the origin and maker of all things that do exist.

But let’s dig a little deeper: what does this mean?

Catholics believe that God created the world ‘ex nihilo:’ from nothing. All that means is that there is no ‘eternal matter’ which God then worked on until it formed the universe. Instead, everything that exists is from God. How does that work? Basically, God conceived of the world, and it came to be. The Book of Genesis describes this as God speaking His commands into the void and each command bringing forth aspects of creation. J.R.R. Tolkien in The Silmarillian describes God conducting the angels in singing the world into being. The point of all these images is that God made the universe by an act of His will; He conceived of creation and willed that his conception be made real, and it was done (and is still being done).

Does that sound far-fetched, or overly mystical? Well, it really shouldn’t; we see something dimly similar in our own lives. When an artist – a musician, a poet, a painter, etc. – sets down to make a work of art, he starts with a conception; the idea of the thing he wants to create. From there he engages his will to bring the conception to life so that it becomes something apart from him, and yet a part of him at the same time. A painter’s personality is suffused in his painting, an author’s mind is revealed in his novels, and so on, yet once they are made the whole world can experience them without ever meeting the author.

This is an image of what happens with God. Of course, God being much greater than any human artist, His conceptions are expressed perfectly and by an act of Will, and are both much more separate and more united to their creator. Separate because they have a life and will of their own, united because they are absolutely dependent upon God’s love for their existence.

The great mystery and glory of Catholicism (or one of them) is this idea of “united individuality.” That is to say, we believe that individuals do exist; that each person and, indeed, each particle of being is unique and specifically made by God. They are not just “bits” of a single whole, but wholes unto themselves. At the same time, however, they are made for union with God and cannot exist apart from Him. But the union is not the union of a part rejoining a whole (as in, a drop returning to the bucket), but the union of lovers reuniting. The former involves the part ceasing to be a part and instead simply joining in becoming ‘the whole’ (the drop ceases to be when it enters the bucket). The latter requires the parts to remain parts in order to maintain the union (if one becomes completely subsumed into the other, it ceases to be a union because there’s only one individual).

Now, the question might arise “if God is absolutely simple, as you said earlier, then how could everything that exists be an expression of Him? Wouldn’t that require Him to be absolutely complex?” Well, consider it this way; there is only one source of natural light on Earth, correct? The Sun. But that light enters our eyes and our brains in the form of a myriad of different colors and hues. How can that be if there is only one light source? It’s because that one light is reflected in different ways; if it’s reflected off a leaf, it’s green. If it comes off of the moon, it’s white. And if you put a filter in front of your eyes (say, if you’re visiting the Emerald City), then everything appears in one color.

So, if you wanted you could say that everything that exists is a filter through which we see God in a different way; through a thunderstorm, for instance, we might see His power and majesty. Through a baby, we might see His innocence and joy. And through a certain young lady we might see His beauty and goodness.

Now, all these qualities: power, joy, beauty, etc. are the names we give to the effects of the filters; not to different aspects of God. God, again, is absolutely simple. In Him is a ‘total’ quality which includes everything we mean when we say “power, joy, beauty,” and so on. We don’t have a word for this, obviously, but the closest would probably be “goodness.” It is this that is expressed in different ways by everything that exists.

Such is a summary of the Catholic idea of God the creator. Now, before we end, I would like to clarify two images of creation that are not Catholic, but which are often brought up.

One idea (much beloved of 18^th and 19^th century scientists) was the “watchmaker” image of God: a God who set the world into motion, but then more or less abandoned it to its own devices. The trouble with this is that, if God is, as we said, the principle of existence then a thing could only exist through Him. So, if God did ‘abandon’ the world to its own devices, it would cease to be. Moreover, to be active is more ‘real’ than to be idle, and since God is pure Reality, pure Existence, He can only be an active God. Finally, we’ve established that God is Love, and love does not involve abandoning the beloved to their fate. Sea-Turtles are not generally considered images of maternal love.

(Though these days...)

So the watch-maker God won’t fly. God must be actively involved in His own creation.

The second idea (sort of) is ‘Creationism;’ basically the attempt to make the Book of Genesis fit the fossil record. It doesn’t, and it was never intended to. Awesome as the image of Adam and Eve riding around on dinosaurs is, it’s also bad philosophy, bad science, bad theology, and bad literary criticism. Just bad all-around. Trying to make Genesis into a scientific treatise does nothing but give atheists more reason to despise us and make it easier to miss the actual meaning in the creation account. Needless to say, Creationism is not a Catholic idea.

To summarize what have so far: Catholics believe that there is a single absolute and unconditional source of all existence which we call ‘God.’ God is an incomprehensible mystery, but what we can say about Him is that He is absolutely simple, yet expressed in three distinct ‘Persons.’ This reality of tri-part unity is called the Trinity. God willed all things into being, and as all things are created by God, all things direct us back to God. We call things ‘good’ to the extent that they remind us of God.

Now, if God created all things, and God is good, then the question must arise “Then why is there evil?” and that’s what we will deal with next week. 

For today, however, if there is one thing I’d want you to take away from this post, it’s this; Catholics believe that at the center of the Universe, at the uttermost foundation of reality, you will find truth, beauty, and love.

Vive Christus Rex!