Lesson 2 ON GOD AND HIS PERFECTIONS

A "perfection" means a good quality. We say a thing is perfect when it has all the good qualities it should have.

Nobody’s Perfect?

Imagine an ideal human person. Whatever we are supposed to be, and whatever God made us to be, the Virgin Mary was from her beginning, and is. She is perfect, insofar as she can be, as a limited creature. In theology, we often consider sin not as a thing in itself, but as the absence of some good that should be there. She is truly, “full of grace.” She is not 99.94% pure, like some products claim to be, but actually pure, that is, without spiritual blemish. She is not infinitely good, as that would make her God. As a creature she lacks those perfections of the good that are found only in God, but she is as good as she can be.

We have a difficult time picturing this, I believe, because we have yet to observe such a creature in our daily experience. Certainly don’t look at me! Even our own mothers, though we may be loathe to admit it, are not perfect — only the Blessed Mother is. In those occasions when we converse with a living saint or experience someone who is seemingly close to this spiritual perfection, and thus close to God in some way, we are naturally drawn to them and the goodness they show, or perhaps repulsed by fear, by fear of knowing that this is also our calling, our calling that we fail to live up to at times.

So this is not totally beyond our capacity to at least imagine or experience in a human person.

A Finite Number of Ways to Get Confused About Infinity

I have spoken before about the perfections of God, but in summary, the perfections of God can be thought in terms of the infinite, that is, where there is no limit or end to something. There are several famous thought experiments that deal with the infinite in our world. One of the most famous is perhaps the ancient Zeno’s Arrow Paradox, where a flying arrow, at any one instant, frozen in time, cannot be said to be moving. This is because, according to Zeno, the arrow “appears” to be flying through an infinite number of timeless points. Zeno, never being content with just one way of disturbing young students’ minds, also gives us the Paradox of Place, where he says that if everything that exists must have a place, and place is a thing, then place will have a place, and so forth, to infinity.

Now, these have a solution in the mathematical world, namely calculus, and Zeno’s assertions can be observed to not work in the real world, as Diogenes the Critic (there’s always a critic), demonstrated the ridiculousness of the concept by getting up and walking. But it does show the mind-bending problems and possibilities that occur with infinity, as pictured in our imaginations. Mathematics as an abstract deals, in great part, with the infinite. Hermann Weyl, a 20th century mathematician, among many things, once wrote that “Mathematics has been called the science of the infinite. Indeed, the mathematician invents finite constructions by which questions are decided that by their very nature refer to the infinite. This is his glory.” Advanced mathematics and much of physical science fall apart if you do not deal with the infinite. Theology, even practical, “pastoral” theology, does likewise.

Let’s return to the infinite, which is easy, since there is always room for more. David Hilbert in 1925 attempted to explain it thus:

If this boggles the mind too much, don’t sweat it. It’s his way of showing a way of how we can always “squeeze one more in,” or even, how we can “squeeze infinitely more in,” in infinity. Ok, but if God is infinite, then how does this affect us?

How Big is Big? Even Bigger.

One of the ways is by answering those who marvel at the incredible, almost unimaginable, size of our physical universe — the cosmos. Sceptics might say, “HA! See? How can you have a god that cares about you, when you’re not even a speck in the universe.” The Psalmist had already meditated on this, singing, “For I will behold your heavens, the works of your fingers: the moon and the stars, which you have founded. What is man, that you are mindful of him, or the son of man, that you visit him? You reduced him to a little less than the Angels; you have crowned him with glory and honor, and you have set him over the works of your hands” (Ps 8:3-6).

First, if God is infinite, it really does not matter how big the universe is. That it IS big, we already knew that. Maybe we didn’t always realize just how big, but we knew it was BIG. The universe can be infinitely big, and you can squeeze in other infinitely big universes in with ours, and still God can more than handle it.

Second, while yes, physically speaking, we are almost infinitely small in relation to the cosmos, (ridiculously so, with respect to God) we are also, then, essentially infinitely important. Yes, we are but dust, as we hear on Ash Wednesday; we knew that from Scripture, but even so, God made us from that same dust, and infused it with His own spirit. Physically speaking, we are as nothing. Spiritually speaking, we outshine every created thing, and you can squeeze an infinite number of galaxies together, they would still not outweigh the importance we have in God’s eyes. Sure, we are but specks, but everything is a speck to God in relation.

Physically speaking, our good in itself is rather limited. We participate spiritually and physically in the goodness and being of God. Fr. W. Norris Clarke, SJ, a famous American philosopher, taught that participation, according to St. Thomas Aquinas, has a kind of structure:
(1) a source which possesses the perfection in question in a total and unrestricted manner; (2) a participant subject which possesses the same perfection in some partial or restricted way; and (3) which has received this perfection in some way from, or in dependence on, the higher source. (W. Norris Clarke, SJ, “The Meaning of Participation in St. Thomas Aquinas,” 1952, reprinted in “Explorations in Theology: Being – God – Person,” 1994.)

This is a way of explaining, philosophically, those relations we have with God, not just personally speaking, but in the way we exist. We participate in some small part in the infinite being-ness of God, as part of the infinite goodness of God. Likewise, as souls, spiritual beings, we participate in the good that comes from God. This kind of participation is not the active sort we usually imagine, but as we see from the lives of the saints, the more we actively participate, mind, body and soul, in the life of the Trinity, in the life of God, the greater our metaphysical relationship with God “grows”; for we become more like Him who is infinite, even if so but in a finite way. This is why the Shema, from the Old Testament, is the greatest commandment: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength” (Dt 6:5). Simply sharing in the goodness of God passively is not enough -- even cockroaches can participate in some way in the goodness of God simply by being, by existing.

As Our Lord tells those opposed to Him, “And do not choose to say within yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our father.’ For I tell you that God has the power to raise up sons to Abraham from these stones” (Mt 3:9). So when God says, “Be holy for I am holy” (cf. Lv 20, 21, Ex 19:6, 1 Pt 1:16), He is commanding us, as His special, chosen people, to truly participate more fully in His life. Stones participate in the goodness of God in some way, sharing in the act of being from God, but God did not create His saints to just sit around, but to be true children of Abraham, children of our Heavenly Father. Our Lord, in one of His prophetic signs, curses the fig tree, not because it is a fig tree, but because it did not produce fruit, that is, it did not do what fig trees were made to do (cf. Mt 21:18- 22; Mk 11:12-25, Lk 13:6-9). It should humble us that the source of every goodness, then, is from God. Our charity, our kindness, our wisdom, whatever we can call good in some way, is always from God. It should inspire us that when we participate in the goodness of God, we are truly participating in that which is divine and infinitely beyond ourselves.

The Vacancy Sign is Always Left On for You

Let’s go back for a minute to Zeno’s arrow for a second. Zeno’s problem is that he takes the arrow at any one timeless instant, and from that instant, cannot claim to be able to say anything about neither the source nor the destiny of that arrow. We see how foolish this is in real life, but then why do we live as if this were the case? We do know that we are from God, and that we are to return to God. We do not live merely as some series of separate instances, but as continuum, hopefully always headed upward and onward. Yes, sin pushes us off-track, perhaps even mortally so, but we are still made to have that final destination in God, in the life to come. A life of prayer and the Sacraments helps us, draws us ever closer to our Heavenly target. Living always in the “now” alone means we really don’t have any kind of meaningful direction. We pass through the now, but toward God.

And what about Hilbert’s Grand Hotel? Heaven is the perfect example of this thought experiment in action. The problem is not the lack of capacity or available rooms in Heaven – God can always squeeze more in; the problem, rather, is that so many look at Heaven, and figure, “Well, that place is not for me,” which is easy to do if we only remain in the mundane and worldly. Heaven has room for all of us, even more than all of us; it can squeeze in our infinite God without a problem — and His infinite goodness. We might look at even the most luxurious hotel in our world and think, “I couldn’t live there forever. I’d just get bored.” Heaven is not a harp recital. Heaven is never exhausting the good – but experiencing the abyss of the infinite goodness of God, and sharing in the joy of all His creation. Boredom, jealousy, pettiness… all these are obliterated by infinite joy and goodness in God.

This infinity, like calculus, has some good practical applications in real life, though like calculus, we don’t always understand it.

First, what is sin? Sin is a turning away from God, sure. It is participating less in the life of God. It is “less” God. But just as in the Grand Hotel there was always room for one, or even infinitely more, removing one or even infinitely more guests does not really make a difference, at least not to the hotel (although the guests who were kicked out might be disappointed). The hotel itself (God) is infinite, and there’s always more where that came from, as far as the hotel is concerned.

In a similar way, think of your sin. Think of your worst, most horrifying sin. The greatest evil cannot possibly compete with an infinite good. The evil of the Passion of Our Lord, the crucifixion of the Infinitely Just and Innocent One, can be lost in the face of the infinite goodness of God.

Evil is always limited, for it is limitation itself, a withdrawal from the infinite goodness of God. Now, throw that into the infinite hotel that is God’s mercy. There is still infinite God, infinite goodness, and infinite mercy. Sin thus cannot “hurt” God – you can never take anything away from God anything that would make a difference in God Himself. What you can do is hurt yourself infinitely by pulling away from participating in that infinite goodness that is God. No one is forced to check in to Hotel Heaven. The Evil One might try to book as many souls as he can into Motel 666, but in the end, he can never compete.

Is all this a bit much? Well, yes, it is. I am reminded of the story of Saint Augustine, who was walking by the sea, meditating on the mysteries of the Holy Trinity. He happened upon a child trying to fill a hole in the sand with the waters of the sea. Saint Augustine asked the child what he was doing, to which the child replied that he was trying to put all the sea into that little hole. Of course, the saint told the child this was impossible. Exactly, the child replies, like trying to fit the infinite mysteries of an infinite God into our little human minds.

In the next issue, we’ll skip to the questions of the omnipresence and how we see God and God sees us.