The Goodness of God
June 5, 2009Psalm 145
1I will extol you, my God and King, and bless your name forever and ever.
2Every day I will bless you, and praise your name forever and ever.
3Great is the Lord, and greatly to be praised; his greatness is unsearchable.
4One generation shall laud your works to another, and shall declare your mighty acts.
5On the glorious splendor of your majesty, and on your wondrous works, I will meditate.
6The might of your awesome deeds shall be proclaimed, and I will declare your greatness.
7They shall celebrate the fame of your abundant goodness, and shall sing aloud of your righteousness.
8The Lord is gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.
9The Lord is good to all, and his compassion is over all that he has made.
10All your works shall give thanks to you, O Lord, and all your faithful shall bless you.
11They shall speak of the glory of your kingdom, and tell of your power,
12to make known to all people your mighty deeds, and the glorious splendor of your kingdom.
13Your kingdom is an everlasting kingdom, and your dominion endures throughout all generations. The Lord is faithful in all his words, and gracious in all his deeds.
14The Lord upholds all who are falling, and raises up all who are bowed down.
15The eyes of all look to you, and you give them their food in due season.
16You open your hand, satisfying the desire of every living thing.
17The Lord is just in all his ways, and kind in all his doings.
18The Lord is near to all who call on him, to all who call on him in truth.
19He fulfills the desire of all who fear him; he also hears their cry, and saves them.
20The Lord watches over all who love him, but all the wicked he will destroy.
21My mouth will speak the praise of the Lord, and all flesh will bless his holy name forever and ever.
Authenticity And Sanctity: Superlative Goodness
Authenticity coincides with sanctity. The saint alone is fully real, honest, faithful, loving, genuine. He alone is immersed in beauty, truth, ecstasy. The classical, theological way of thinking about authenticity was to think of virtue, especially heroic virtue.
What is heroic virtue?
It is goodness to a superlative degree, a degree that far surpasses the mere natural resources of the human person. Over the course of the centuries the Church developed a detailed theology of saintliness, a theology that included definite criteria for determining in canonization processes the eminent perfection to which God calls us (Matthew 5:48). Heroic goodness is a specific human quality (humility, patience, purity, love) that shows itself in actions which are 1.) promptly, easily, joyfully done; 2.) even in difficult circumstances; 3.) habitually, not just occasionally; 4.) present actually, not just potentially; 5.) found mingled with all the virtues. A few examples will make the concept easy to grasp. A person possesses heroic humility when promptly and easily he avoids vanity in dress, domination in conversation, desire to impress. He experiences little difficulty in accepting correction — indeed, he desires it. He is content and at peace with accusation, neglect, blame, rejection. He quite literally finds a joy in all this after the word of Jesus:
“Happy are you when people abuse you and persecute you and speak all kinds of calumny against you on my account. Rejoice and be glad . . . “ (Matthew 5:11-12) This heroic humility is practiced even in difficult circumstances (e.g., when one is alone without human support) and habitually, not just occasionally. It is not merely potential, a being able in one circumstance or another. Rather it is an actually lived reality. It is found with the totality of the virtues: patience, gentleness, frugality and all the others.
Another example: faith. Faith is heroic when one accepts God’s revelation in Scripture and in the teaching of the Church not simply as a cultural heritage but because of his divine knowledge and truth. The acceptance is not selective, but entire, and it is prompt, easy, joyful. One adheres to the divine self-disclosure not only when one’s companions also adhere but even when, for example, the Church’s teaching is widely rejected, when one may be persecuted for fidelity either psychologically and/or physically. The man or woman of heroic faith stands by the biblical word and the teaching Church day by day, not only when he has the human support of his friends. Like Thomas More, he is ready to stand up to kings and bishops who reject the Holy See, and he is so joyful in his confession of truth that he may be able to joke, as Thomas did, with his executioners.
A third illustration: purity. The heroically chaste person is not the little boy or girl who has no idea of what impurity is all about, who has suffered no unchaste allurement or temptation. Rather he or she is the person who even in the midst of sensual advertising and immodest dress readily and easily and joyfully resists the degradation and cheapening of the human body. This is the man or woman who so reverences the divine gift of sexuality that he experiences no great problem in loving others in a pure delight. This chastity has nothing of rigidity or coldness about it, but is easily warm, gentle, strong, joyous. Needless to say, it is rooted in a profound faith, hope, love, humility.
A fourth example: obedience. Heroic obedience is neither reluctant nor selective. One happily carries out all the directives of his superior because he sees the divine hand in them. The execution of a command is prompt, not delayed. The task is easily, joyfully done, habitually done. He makes it a joy for the superior to be in charge (Heb 13:17), and he obeys even when the director is unworthy to be in a leadership position (Matthew 23:1-7). This submission is humble, gentle, trusting, loving.
A final example: patience. The average individual can on rare occasions bite his tongue in annoying circumstances and perhaps barely restrain a sharp word if not a disapproving glance. The heroically patient person is habitually calm in aggravating situations and he readily, even joyfully responds to the unkind remark or gaze or action. He knows how to turn the cheek and he does it easily. He is joyful with those who rejoice and is sad with those in sorrow. He treats all, friends and enemies alike, with equal kindness (Romans 12:15-16) even though he may be closer to some persons than to others.
And so it goes with all the theological and moral virtues. It takes little imagination to see that the Church’s age-old criteria for determining who is a saint and who is not are so many indicators of authenticity. The picture is demanding but it is beautiful. A close analysis of St. John of the Cross’ teaching on the transforming union discloses the almost incredible beauty of a person who has been transformed by an entire immersion in God. Advancing prayer brings about what St. Paul speaks of as a growth from one glory to another as we are transformed by the indwelling Spirit into his own image (2 Corinthians 3:18).
Authenticity – Fr. Thomas Dubay S.M.
The Ground Of Being And The Good: The Ultimate Cause Of Creation
God does not produce the world naturally because he is God, which would then mean that the world would be in the same measure divine and necessary as God himself; rather it is an absolute freedom which is the ground of the self-effusion of the ultimate good. This in turn has two consequences: that God in himself and independently of his relationship to the world is the good, or in Christian terms is love, and that the ultimate cause of the creation of a world can only be the free, loving communication of divine goodness to created beings. If one thinks this through, then one will have to say, over and above this, that precisely in the freedom of the love of the divine ground of being lies the possibility of there being such a thing as a world (which is not God, not the infinite and the all) at all. Indeed the final point may emerge dimly as a kind of limiting concept which will find its confirmation in the central assertions of the Christian faith: The ground of being can be called the good as free love only if it possesses in itself a spiritual life of love; that is to say, if there is within it a self-giving, a communing, a communality that does not impugn the identity of the absolute but indeed is the necessary condition of its truly being the absolute good.
The Intentions Of A Free Divine Good
If (a man) encounters the idea that he …is the image of the freely loving God who consequently also wills him of his freedom, then a strange and remarkable light will be shed on his existence. On the one hand, it will become clear to him that the free divine good has intended him to be this particular person, this unmistakable person, and has consequently freely given to him his freedom insight and responsibility; but that this, on the other hand, cannot be simply a matter of dismissing him, of sending him off without further interest into an estrangement from God. Rather he must realize his being as a man with free, rational responsibility precisely by relating the image to the original, not by turning away, but by turning to God. Here a realm of intimate inwardness is opened up which may take many forms and names: contact with the primal image, cherishing an d contemplating memories and recollections, prayer, the attempt to make human insight and freedom in every situation transparent to absolute insight and freedom. It is an openness, ready to be formed and fulfilled; it is making room for the one who may come to dwell, a readiness to the be the womb which shall bear fruit each in one’s own particular human world activity and efforts.
Elucidations – Hans Urs Von Balthasar
The Fundamental Schism Of Man
We all share in a shattering duality – and by this I don’t mean that soggy, superficial split that one so often sees: the kind of thing, for example, where the gangster sobs uncontrollably at an old Shirley Temple movie. I mean the fundamental schism that Newman referred to when he spoke of man being forever involved in the consequences of some “terrible aboriginal calamity;” every day in everyman there is this warfare of the parts. And while all this results in meanness and bitterness and savagery enough, God knows, and while only a fool can look around him and smile serenely in unwatered optimism, nevertheless the wonder of it all is to me the frequency with which kindness, the essential goodness of man does break through, and as one who has received his full measure of that goodness, I can say that for me, at least, it is in the long succession of these small, redemptive instants, just as much as in the magnificence of heroes, that the meaning and the glory of man is revealed…
The Edge of Sadness – Edwin O’Connor
An Insight Into God’s Playfulness
Dionysius, a theologian to whom Thomas Aquinas is deeply in debt, described God as “the good which is diffusive of itself.” For the great mystic Dionysius, goodness is like a fountain, constantly overflowing, or like the sun, naturally radiating out, communicating almost in spite of itself. Or in more psychological terms, it is like a joyful person who simply cannot keep his good cheer to himself. The good spills over speaks itself, shines forth …For Thomas it is precisely this insight into God’s playfulness and capacity for self-offering that convinces Christians of the unspeakable goodness of the divine power. It is this self-forgetfulness of God, made visible in Jesus, that persuades us finally of God’s superabundant generosity. If God had not joined us in our creatureliness, God would remain a limited, finite good, still to some degree restricted in love. In a word, the Christian discovers in Jesus Christ that God’s being is fully ecstatic. God’s nature is to go beyond himself, to step outside of himself, to forget himself in love….For Thomas, Jesus Christ, God made human, is the light by which the goodness, the power, the strangeness, and especially the ecstasy of God are revealed. In his great leap out of himself, God discloses, superabundantly and overwhelmingly, who he is. In this ecstatic leap, God opens up the human mind and heart, illumines and heals the eyes of the human spirit, and thereby sets us on the path that leads to him.
Thomas Aquinas, Spiritual Master – Fr. Robert Barron
Discrediting The Goodness Of God
One of the tendencies of our age is to use the suffering of children to discredit the goodness of God, and as soon as you have discredited his goodness, you are done with him…Ivan Karamazov cannot believe, as long as one child is in torment; Camus’ hero cannot accept the divinity of Christ, because of the massacre of the innocents. In this popular pity, we mark our gain in sensibility and our loss in vision. If other ages felt less, they saw more, even though they saw with the blind, prophetical, unsentimental eye of acceptance, which is to say, of faith. In the absence of this faith now, we govern by tenderness. It is tenderness which, long since cut off from the person of Christ, is wrapped in theory. When tenderness is detached from the source of tenderness, its logical outcome is terror, It ends in forced-labor camps and in the fumes of the gas chambers…
Flannery O’Connor — Collected Spiritual Writings
Man Is Held To Goodness
The meaning of the law has been transfigured: they no longer command bad men to be good and to grow into something which they are not; rather do they command good men not be bad and not to fail in that which they already are, not to fall back into that state of slavery from whence they have been freed. Justification is received through faith, quite apart from works. But once justified man is more than ever held to do good works…And this is not because the works of man would have power to save man by themselves, but because good works proceed from the charity which has been given to man and which is his life – his new and eternal life – and which is joined to faith when faith is living: “faith working through charity.” And also because the works of charity, serving of life, to the extent that man, acting freely under the inflowing of grace, receives from God’s mercy the dignity of being a cause – secondary and instrumental – the matter of his own salvation.
Do you not know that the wicked will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: Neither the sexually immoral nor idolaters nor adulterers nor male prostitutes nor homosexual offenders nor thieves nor the greedy nor drunkards nor slanderers nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God. And that is what some of you were. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God.
“Everything is permissible for me”—but not everything is beneficial. “Everything is permissible for me”—but I will not be mastered by anything. “Food for the stomach and the stomach for food”—but God will destroy them both. The body is not meant for sexual immorality, but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body. By his power God raised the Lord from the dead, and he will raise us also. Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ himself? Shall I then take the members of Christ and unite them with a prostitute? Never! Do you not know that he who unites himself with a prostitute is one with her in body? For it is said, “The two will become one flesh.” But he who unites himself with the Lord is one with him in spirit.
All other sins a man commits are outside his body, but he who sins sexually sins against his own body. Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own; you were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your body. . [1 Corinthians 6:9-12; 15-20]
And in like fashion, Paul writes:
Shall we go on sinning so that grace may increase? By no means! We died to sin; how can we live in it any longer? Or don’t you know that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were therefore buried with him through baptism into death in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may live a new life.
If we have been united with him like this in his death, we will certainly also be united with him in his resurrection. 6For we know that our old self was crucified with him so that the body of sin might be done away with that we should no longer be slaves to sin—because anyone who has died has been freed from sin.
Now if we died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him. For we know that since Christ was raised from the dead, he cannot die again; death no longer has mastery over him. The death he died, he died to sin once for all; but the life he lives, he lives to God.
In the same way, count yourselves dead to sin but alive to God in Christ Jesus. Therefore do not let sin reign in your mortal body so that you obey its evil desires. Do not offer the parts of your body to sin, as instruments of wickedness, but rather offer yourselves to God, as those who have been brought from death to life; and offer the parts of your body to him as instruments of righteousness. For sin shall not be your master, because you are not under law, but under grace. [Romans 6:2-14]
Saint Paul – Jacques Maritain
