Why Being Rather Than Nothingness? Part III

Dr Martin continues his series on the mystery of time and its relationship to our Faith, arguing that without the Creation, the Incarnation couldn't take place.

From Crisis

By Regis Martin, STD

Part I is here & Part II is here.

Most Christians, including Paul, would say the Resurrection is the basis of our entire faith, but without creation, there can be no Incarnation or Resurrection.

If you were to randomly ask an average Christian, even one who does not routinely pray, pay, or obey, what is the greatest miracle of all, chances are that the answer would be, almost without exception, the Resurrection. What happened on Easter Sunday morning—the disciples, finding the tomb empty, only to see shortly thereafter the face of the Risen Lord, His glorified flesh before their very eyes—surely, that single event eclipses all else. What other truth of the Faith can there be to compete with that? Indeed, Easter is the event upon which the whole weight of Christian faith depends.

If Christ had not gone through the gate and the grave of death, as the Apostle Paul warns, thereby ascending into Heaven to prepare a place for us, we are the most miserable of men, our lives less than zero, fated to remain hopeless and abject forever. There is simply no other intuition of hope more certain, more consoling, than that. It is the deepest conviction of all, the one which animates not only what we believe but how we behave. “Never was a tale told,” writes J.R.R. Tolkien, “that men would rather find true.”

Nevertheless, Easter is not the greatest miracle of faith.

Nor is it Christmas, however dramatic that horizon-shattering moment when, to recall the exultant language of Gerard Manley Hopkins, “infinity dwindled to infancy,” and so divinity entered fully into the fallen human estate.

Or, pushing the business back further, to that miraculous instant of Incarnation when a young virgin named Mary gave her consent to become, in the words of the poet John Donne,

Thy Maker’s maker, and thy Father’s mother;
Thou hast light in dark, and shut’st in little room
Immensity, cloistered in thy dear womb.

“O figlia del tuo figlio!” to quote the divine Dante, which thus strikes the pivotal note in the whole blooming symphony. Which makes perfect sense, right? If God wishes to wed Himself to the frailty of man, fraught with all that sin and sorrow, how else would He show Himself than by becoming one of us? But for the sheer demonstration of divine love in the human being Jesus, what proof have we got that God sees us as precious enough to justify sending His Son into the world?

But, again, this is not the greatest miracle of all.

No, the greatest miracle wrought by God is the creation of the world because, quite simply, nothing else can happen without it. It is the presupposition for everything that follows. God can neither enter a womb nor can He exit a tomb unless there is a world in place. He cannot very well redeem a world that does not exist. Grace cannot perfect a nature that has yet to be made. He must first give us the grit; only then may we look for the glory.

Creation has simply got to be the catalyzing event, the launchpad, if you will, from which the Son’s mission to rescue a fallen world may then begin. For Christ to march through the whole length and breadth of the human experience, turning it all to grace, there must first be a material world in which to receive Him. Leave out the matter and the meaning will, like a hot air balloon, float off into an ozone of pure ether. Everything, says St. Thomas Aquinas, including the heights of mysticism, begins in a world signed with the five senses.

And where do we find evidence for this miracle but on the very first page of Holy Scripture, indeed, in the opening verses of the Book of Genesis, which showcases in the clearest possible way the sheer primacy of creation: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth”; followed at once by the resounding Voice: “Let there be light!”

And there was light, a great sea of light flooding the world that God had just made. Which God thereupon saw and declared to be good. He does not disown it, in other words; nor will He suffer any of us to disown or demean the work of His hands. And while it has all happened to happen out of pure nothingness, its existence is wholly good; and in saying so, we pay homage to its Creator, who invests all that He has made with a weight and dignity it would be wickedly wrong for any of us either to cheapen or to deny. The world is a holy and good place to be if only because the God who brought it into being is Himself holy and good.

Let us behold the sheer is-ness of created being, then, and see how in every instance it evinces that “dearest freshness deep down things,” of which the poet Hopkins speaks with so exquisite a voice. Imagine God striking that first spark, throwing the switch to ignite into existence a world radiant with beauty. How lovely to watch it all “flame out like shining from shook foil,” sending forth such wonders to ensure that “nature is never spent…

And though the last lights over the black West went
Oh, morning at the brown brink eastward, springs—
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and ah! bright wings.

There is a striking passage in St. Augustine that nicely illumines the business of creation. The birth of a child, he tells us, any child, is an event more miraculous than even the raising of Lazarus. How can this be, we ask? Because, argues Augustine, it is a far easier thing to raise to new life someone who once was than it is to bestow life on someone who never was. What is more stupendous: the fact that Jesus would return a dead man to life, or the fact that the same dead man had, at a precise and predetermined moment in time and space, actually begun to exist? That the creative capacity of God is such that He may deliver out of sheer nothingness whomever He pleases while, at the same time, ensuring that they shall never return to that state of nothingness?

From nothingness to being is an absolute leap—a metaphysical home run—that only God can pull off. And seeing all that nothingness ushered into being by Omnipotence, what other conclusion is there but that God must take huge and endless delight in doing it over and over again. As in that charming Chestertonian conceit in which God may be seen each day instructing the sun to “Do it again!” Thus doth the sun arise fresh each morning as if He had never done it before.

Here is the clearest evidence of divine courtesy, of a God for whom nothing exists out of necessity, as if it had been the world’s idea that it should exist, to which He must then submit; but rather, things are the result of His freedom, the exercise of which gives God no end of pleasure in making things be that have no claim on being. God, in other words, is not constrained to make anything; yet He has gone clean out of His way to make everything. Not, we must remember, as a function of justice but of mercy. How nicely put is the formulation furnished by Fulton Sheen: “God was in love,” he tells us, “but he could not keep the secret. The telling of it was creation.”

In The Religious Sense, a work luminously wise and beautiful, which I have assigned my students more often than I can remember, Luigi Giussani invites the reader to imagine himself at the very moment of his birth. In complete possession, that is, not of the proverbial blank sheet on which nothing has yet been written but of the perfect consciousness of an adult. “What would be the first, absolutely your initial reaction?” he asks. He is not the least bit shy, by the way, in revealing his own reaction: “If I were to open my eyes for the first time in that instant, emerging from my mother’s womb, I would be overpowered by the wonder and awe of things as a ‘presence.’”

Think of it. The sheer stupefying collision with being, with the otherness of a presence I did not myself hallucinate or cause somehow to be but am unspeakably blessed at that moment to receive with gladness and grace. “Becoming aware,” he exclaims, “of an inexorable presence!”

It is the moment, as the poet Cesare Pavese would say, when poetry begins, “born from the moments in which we lift up our heads and discover—with stupor—life.”

“I open my eyes,” continues Giussani, “to this reality that imposes itself upon me, that does not depend upon me, but upon which I depend; it is the great conditioning of my existence.” This sudden realization that I am given, that I am the pure gift of Another, of God, here is the origin of the awe that awakens the ultimate questions that stir the heart most deeply—a wonderment magnetizing the soul.

And thus to say thanks for a gift I could never myself give, that is the only fitting response in the face of being, of creation. “Without this concept,” concludes Giussani, “everything man touches turns to dust.”