Why Being Rather Than Nothingness? Part VII

Dr Martin continues his series on time and reality, examining the difference between the Omnipotence of God and the impotence of man.

From Crisis

By Regis Martin, STD

Between the omnipotence of God, who holds all creation in being, and the impotence of men, who possess no claim whatsoever on being, there remains an impassible barrier which no creature may presume to breach.

Between the omnipotence of God, who holds all creation in being, and the impotence of men, who possess no claim whatsoever on being, there remains an impassible barrier which no creature may presume to breach. Even the best and the brightest among us are forced to submit to that exigent fact. So utterly ill-equipped are we that there is simply nothing in our nature to enable us to smash through the wall separating us from the Absolute. The disparities are simply too vast, too incommensurable, for any sort of rapprochement between the two.

God is Wholly Other, and so the differences between us are necessarily “infinite and qualitative,” to quote Kierkegaard, who was not the first to remind us of our complete ontological poverty.

Given so great a metaphysical divide between the two orders—that of Creator and creature, contingent and necessary being—only grace, and the willingness of God to give it, can cross the sea of Absolute Being. In the absence of that grace, what then have we got? A nothingness we cannot surmount on our own. 

Behold the cry of pagan man before the coming of Christ. Whose most powerful voice had doubtless been that of Plato, who, in the Phaedo, will sadly acknowledge that while we may intuit the existence of the Great Beyond, we cannot reach it without intervention from that very realm. In the circumstance, he advises, “One should adopt the best and most irrefutable of men’s theories, and, borne upon this, sail through the dangers of life as upon a raft, unless,” he adds, sounding the depths of a hope for which pagan man can provide no evidence, “someone should make that journey safer and less risky upon a firmer vessel of some divine doctrine.”

In a word, only a God able to cross that great sea can save us from ourselves. Thus, it is not merely sin that keeps God at bay, forcing us to reach for that which we do not have. And while sin will most certainly complicate things, driving ever deeper the wedge between the Absolute and ourselves, it is neither the first nor the only impediment that stands in the way. The chief and, indeed, the simplest explanation to account for so profound and persisting an abyss between ourselves and God is the fact that we are not God, nor are we ever likely to become God.

However humbling the admission may be, the truth is we simply haven’t got much to commend on the matter of strict resemblance to God. We lack the necessary throw weight, as it were, to compete in that particular race. What is God’s defining condition, after all, the distinguishing mark of His nature? It is the fact that only God can be God. Nature is not God, nor may nature aspire to be like God without grace. God alone, therefore, to quote the succinct description found in St. John of Damascus, last of the Church Fathers, “is this infinite and boundless ocean of being.”

Sound like anyone you know? No, of course not.

Suppose we push the envelope here to the very edge, then, and call God that being whose essence or substance is to be, to exist. Ipsum esse subsistens, to cite the ancient canonical formula: Being subsisting in itself. The description could scarcely be framed in a starker or more startling way. God’s very essence, which is absolute and unchanging, is nothing other than the pure act of existence itself. 

This is why, among all the possible names men have given to God, the best possible, the most proper of all, is simply to call God, “He Who Is.” So says the Common Doctor, St. Thomas Aquinas, who wrestled mightily with the text taken from Exodus 3, the great and enduring Theophany of God, in order to tease out of it the deepest possible meaning, which is the Name God Himself declares before Moses: I AM WHO AM.

Time and again, God had shown unto Israel the graciousness of His heart, looking after His people with the warmth and constancy of an ardent lover—the Supreme Someone, on whose word they may depend. “I will be with you,” He assures Moses again and again in his struggle against the powers of Egypt, the awful oppressions of Pharaoh. His very words will be weaponized in order to wrest freedom for His people. “Now therefore go,” God tells Moses from out of the burning bush, the bush that burns but may not be consumed, “and I will be with your mouth and teach you what you shall speak” (Exodus 4:12).

Yet, that will not be enough, not for Moses and certainly not for the Jews whom destiny has determined on whose behalf he will speak. God’s promise to be present to His people in bondage, the assurance that He will break the chains that bind them, will not be enough if God refuses to give them His name. Everything turns on the mystery of the name, the truth and invocability of which will alone assure the Israelites of their freedom to trust in the goodness of the Lord their God.

Then Moses said to God, “If I come to the people of Israel and say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ what shall I tell them?” God said to Moses, “I AM WHO AM.” And he said, “Say this to the people of Israel, The Lord, the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, has sent me to you: this is my name forever, and thus I am to be remembered throughout all generations.” (Exodus 3:13-15)

To what then are we to ascribe the uniqueness of Israel but that she, alone among all nations and peoples, will be the recipient of a promise assuring her of God’s continuing presence in her life and the destiny toward which He intended her to move. He would be their God, in other words, intimately and indissolubly joined to His people, most fearfully powerful on their behalf. Having forged forever a bond after His own heart, He would never forsake the people in whom the promise had been made.

For her part, however, the people of Israel were not at all interested in the metaphysics of the business. Parsing the deepest possible meaning of a name bespeaking the mystery of God’s existence did not engage their attention in the least. They were a pastoral people, indifferent to philosophy and the abstract speculations on which it fed. What held their attention was the sheer relational reality of a God who had freely chosen them from among all the other desert tribes to be the singular vessel of His love and protection. That became the flash point. 

Thus, the only thing odder than God choosing the Jew was the fact that, having made so scandalously particular a selection, He would remain forever steadfast in keeping to it.

And the uniqueness of the Christian inheritance from all this? What could that have been? Nothing less than the metaphysical meaning of the name itself, which, in the achievement of Aquinas, remains unsurpassed to this day in the entire history of human thought. It was Aquinas who so deepened the understanding of the name that in order for God to be—esse in the Latin—something far more than a mere noun would be needed. Being as a substantive would not carry the freight. That was merely an essentialist reading of the being of God. 

Instead, the very act of be-ing, or is-ing itself—which is to say, the verb—would have to be given pride of place in the definition of who God is, who is pure is-ing in Himself. The metaphysical chord would need to be struck: “Dictur esse ipse actus essentiae.” That to be is itself the very act whereby a nature or essence is.

In a beautiful and incisive commentary on this very point, Etienne Gilson, whose mastery of the metaphysics of the Common Doctor has placed the bar as high as it will ever go, puts it as follows: 

A world where “to be” is the act par excellence, the act of all acts, is also a world wherein, for each and every thing, existence is the original energy whence flows all that which deserves the name of being. Such an existential world can be accounted for by no other cause than a supremely existential God.

And so we really have no choice but to remain with St. Thomas on the matter. “We must,” says Gilson, “with St. Thomas, pass beyond the identification of God’s substance with his essence and posit the identity of his essence with his very act-of-being.” To do so is not to steal a base, or to leave God more complicated than before, but rather to leave intact and thus quite perfect that very simplicity—a simplicity consisting of pure act.

We shan’t be able to conceptualize or define it one bit, of course. But by an exercise of judgment, rendered in the clearest and most emphatic way, we shall surely be able to affirm it—and, thus, draw no end of comfort and joy from it.