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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. Suggested Readings: CCC 355-379,
1707-1709, 1718-1724, 2292-2301. Vatican Council II, Pastoral Constitution
on the Church in the Modern World, Gaudium et Spes, 12-22. J. Pieper, The
Four Cardinal Virtues. F. Wilhelmsen, The Metaphysics of Love. Dennis Helming Russell Shaw. Our Sunday Visitor's
Encyclopedia of Catholic Doctrine. Copyright © 1997, Our Sunday Visitor.
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