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Creation and Destiny of Human Race |
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God, who is love (cf. 1 Jn 4:8), loved both the angels and humanity into autonomous existence, thus benevolently establishing and maintaining a duality between himself and his creatures without which they could neither freely accept nor reject his reality and offer. In the divine plan, creatures are not to transcend this duality by sloughing off their creatureliness and being absorbed into the single divine reality (pantheism), as is proposed in many Oriental religions. Rather, the separate existence of God and spiritual creatures must remain if they are to be united in loving mutual adherence. Divine love’s eternal, infinite self-giving chose not to limit itself to the tri-personal Trinity, but to overflow by creating out of nothing many more personal objects of that same self-giving. God, necessarily and blissfully his own end, is humanity’s origin and destiny. Unlike humans, who only love what they perceive to be good, the Creator both makes to be and makes to be good that which he freely chooses to love; and since divine love is not conditioned by any human qualities or response, it is ever-faithful, irrevocable. (Indeed, for God, to create, to conserve, and to love are but one indivisible, timeless action.) Thus God lovingly maintains humans in existence, so that he might keep pouring love out on them, both here and hereafter. God and Human Freedom • God cannot force himself on humanity; besides doing no good, that would be the antithesis of love. If he had wanted robots, robots he would have made. But by fashioning human nature so as to make men and women capable of the self-knowledge, self-possession, and self-giving that allow them to function as independent persons, the Creator has placed himself, so to speak, at his creatures’ mercy. He can only do to, with, and for them what they allow him to do. Lest he compromise their freedom, God must remain invisible, leaving humans to work out their fates. Unlike the angels – whose comprehensive, intuitive grasp of reality makes single and unalterable their choice or rejection of God – humans, with their embodied spiritual nature, must work with the partial evidence their discursive intellect can gather, an ongoing process that leaves their choices tentative, provisional, but remediable. If God cannot overwhelm humanity, neither can he underwhelm it. For his loving plan, accommodated to the step-by-step workings of human nature and freedom, to meet with success, it must be universally viable. God cannot be so hidden that only a handful of spiritual adepts can find him. His existence and character must be luminous enough that all who wish to find him can do so (even if obscure enough that those who do not seek are not obliged to find him). St. Paul shows the way: “Ever since the creation of the world his invisible nature, namely, his eternal power and deity, has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made” (Rom 1:20). Human persons can ascend from created realities to their divine cause in a virtuous upward spiral that need never end – incremental knowledge of, and love for, God growing, as they progress upward. That was the divine plan, and still is. No human sinning or even wholesale mutiny can invalidate God’s will. While absolutely free to create or not, once God has willed humans into existence, he cannot stop loving them, however fickle, mutable, and myopic they might be. If they go astray, before death there is always time and incentive enough, along with God’s superabundant, invisible help, for them to retrace their steps and begin to right themselves. How effective was God’s plan after original sin and before Christ’s coming (or after it, for all those unreached by his Good News)? We cannot know who ultimately has opted for God or spurned his gracious, invisible advances. But of those unexposed to Christianity, most would seem to fall short either because they have not submitted themselves to the self-discipline of virtue or because they fall into pride. In any case, the Epistle to the Romans says that, considering the plain clues, ignorance of God is voluntary and therefore culpable. “So they are without excuse; for although they knew God they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking and their senseless minds were darkened” (1:20-21). Basing itself on the same Pauline text, the First Vatican Council declared that a supernatural Revelation wrought by the Incarnation of God’s word was not absolutely necessary but relatively so, given the generally sorry state of humanity. Lest humans on their own not attain to essential truths regarding God and themselves, a supernatural mode of communication assured that these truths “can be known by all with ease, with firm certainty and with no admixture of error” (Vatican Council I, Dogmatic Constitution on the Catholic Faith, Dei Filius, 2). Whatever God does, however, each person, in the austere loneliness of his or her heart of hearts, must still decide whether or not to recognize and accept the gift of God. Before humans can fully and definitively accept the Good News, they must, as it were, admit and renounce all the bad news they have generated. At the point, when God is seen as their best friend, God’s whole creative project will have successfully come full circle. See: Angels; Creation; Divine Revelation; Freedom, Human; Human Person; Knowledge of God; Original Sin; Providence; Redemption.
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