What Is Faith?… God In Himself, His Essence And Attributes

By RAYMOND DE SOUZA

Part 6

“Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with thy whole heart, and with thy whole soul, and with thy whole mind. This is the greatest and the first commandment. And the second is like to this: Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. On these two commandments depend the whole law and the prophets” (Matt. 22:37-40).
This being the case, it is of the essence to know God’s essence and attributes — no pun intended — so that we may love Him with our whole heart, soul, and mind. And the Holy, Catholic, Apostolic, and Roman Church believes and confesses that there is one, true and living God, the Creator and Lord of Heaven and Earth, omnipotent, eternal, immeasurable, incomprehensible, infinite in understanding and will and every perfection. He is a spiritual substance, one, absolutely simple and immutable, really and essentially distinct from the world, in Himself and of Himself supremely happy, and unspeakably above all things that are, or can be conceived outside Himself.
I wish I could take the credit for this beautiful definition of God’s nature, but I cannot. It was taught by the Vatican Council I, well over a century ago (1870). If you read it again, slowly, you must experience a sense of grandeur and beauty as it describes something of what is indescribable in itself.
God, being all-knowing, knows all things: past, present, and future, including the future free actions of His creatures. For instance, when He created the billions of galaxies across the universe, He knew that you would be reading these words of mine — and if you smiled a little with the comparison, He knew your smile as well. We are always in His Mind.
There is another thing that we must always have in mind when we speak about God: His existence is not a matter of pure faith, as in the case of believing in the Holy Trinity or in the Incarnation, not at all. God’s existence is a matter of scientific knowledge, that is, we can know there is a God by using our senses in an unbiased way and reasoning about what our senses convey to us. Yes, the one true God, our Creator and Lord, can be known with certainty by the natural light of human reason from created things.
So, strictly speaking, a well-formed and informed Catholic can say, I do not just believe in God — I know there is a God.
Let us proceed. When superficial people — or convinced atheists — say, “If God created everything, who created God?” Those simpletons do not realize than when you say, “Who created God,” you are assuming that God is a creature, and therefore, could not be God. It is irrational, but superficial minds enjoy contradiction. The fact is that God is a necessary, self-existent being. And this for the simple reason that, if there were no self-existent, necessary being in the universe, there would never be anything at all, because nothing can come out of nothing all by itself!
How could there be creatures if there were no Creator? How can there be a painting if there were no painter? So, it is a fundamental reality discoverable by reason — and confirmed by divine Revelation — that God owes His existence to no other; that He is the only being who has within Himself the source and font of His own existence.
Let us define our terms a little more clearly: What is the essence of a thing? The essence of a thing is that which makes it be what it is, and marks it off from all other things. For instance, the essence of a line is a length without breadth; the essence of a man is a rational soul united to a physical body. We know something about the Essence of God, but so little that we justly describe His Essence as incomprehensible.
Why? Because a finite, puny mind like ours cannot comprehend an infinite reality, just as a thimble cannot contain the Pacific Ocean, to make a simple comparison. St. Thomas Aquinas has an interesting way of putting it: “It is easier to say what God is not, than to say what He is”; and St. Augustine says, “If you can understand it, it is not God.”
Although we can never understand God and can never grasp the infinity of His perfection, we can learn something about Him, and we can deepen our knowledge by pondering what He has told us of His perfections. I could not find any specific noun in our vocabulary to fitly describe a being that is self-existing. So, a verb is used — the verb To Be. This basic verb in every language relates to what the being is — so we say, this is a chair, this is not a pen, this man is a doctor, this other one not an honest politician. Hence God used the verb “to be” to indicate that He is the only being that is — that possesses His own nature, His own Being.
Though God is incomprehensible, we can name one of the divine attributes or perfections, which is the root of all the others, and is, therefore, the divine essence. That attribute is Self-existence. It marks off God clearly from all creatures.
God’s words to Moses declare that self-existence belongs to Him alone. Moses had asked God to tell him His name. God answered: “I Am who I Am,” and He added: “Say this to the people of Israel: ‘I Am has sent me to you’.” It is because of God’s self existence that Scripture so often declares that He is the “the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last,” and that all creatures “are accounted by Him as less than nothing and emptiness” (Isaiah 40:17). God alone exists in the fullest, truest sense, deriving His existence from no one else. He is existence itself. All other beings derive their existence from Him.
Here are a few more of the divine attributes: His immensity means that God from all eternity has the power of being everywhere. Omnipresence means that in the created world God actually is everywhere. God possessed immensity before the world began. He did not possess omnipresence until the world was created; His omnipresence flows from His immensity. God is present in the created world in a threefold sense: in His knowledge, His power, and His essence. In His knowledge, since He knows all things: “before Him no creature is hidden, but all are open and laid bare to the eyes of Him” (Heb. 4:13).
In His power, since He maintains all things in existence: He upholds “the universe by His word of power” (Heb. 1:3). In His essence, since He is in every part of the universe, in every part of every creature, far more perfectly than the soul is in every part of the body: “In Him we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28).
But there is more: God is unchangeable, immutable. In virtue of His eternity, His being outside time, God is immutable, unchangeable. This is so because every change involves a loss and a gain: Something is renounced and something is acquired. But God, who enjoys every perfection to fullness, cannot lose anything or gain anything that He does not already have. Therefore, He cannot change. He is the same marvelous reality to be contemplated throughout eternity by the saints in Heaven.
OK, I agree, yes, this lesson was a bit different, and did require a mental effort to follow, more than the others. But if you are still here, and did survive the lesson, take a breath and get ready for the next one, when we will delve into the understanding (inasmuch as we are able to) of God, His Knowledge and Love, so that we may better love Him above all things.
Next article: God’s knowledge and love.

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(Raymond de Souza is an EWTN program host; regional coordinator for Portuguese-speaking countries for Human Life International [HLI]; president of the Sacred Heart Institute, and a member of the Sovereign, Military, and Hospitaller Order of the Knights of Malta. His website is: www.RaymonddeSouza.com.)