By DONALD DeMARCO
Genesis tells us that God created the universe in six days and then rested on the seventh. The seventh day is an appropriate time to worship God and thank Him for the creation He has made. At the same time, it is a day that contrasts with the six days of creation.
God created the universe by Himself. He did not need help from any other agency. The symbolic meaning of His resting on the seventh day does not suggest that God was exhausted after His labors and needed a rest. It means that God wants us to complete His work. God worked while we slept. Then, the baton is given to us to work while God watched.
The seventh day, traditionally, Sunday, is properly a day of worship and rest from the toil of the previous six days. Nonetheless, the symbolism of the seventh day is broad and rich. The seventh day belongs to us as completing God’s work. The seventh day is our time to be co-creators in God’s eternal plan. This may seem to be a daunting task, but it is, upon analysis, well within our reach.
“Let there be light” has a double meaning. It refers to the light which impacts creation. But it also, as St. Bonaventure points out, refers to the light which enlightens us and allows us to continue what God has already started. The light that enlightens us illuminates the work we must day while God “rested.”
There are many things we must do. Our first task is reduced to just two things: love God and love one’s neighbor. This dual responsibility seems slight in comparison with the elaborate stage upon which God has placed us. In this article, I want to speak about another responsibility that is also a continuation and completion of God’s work.
God has endowed us with a defense system that protects us against invading and hostile substances. It is called the “autoimmune system.” It consists of 100 billion immunological receptors that protect the self from the non-self. God established this highly complex system without our assistance and certainly not with the assistance of chance. Our autoimmune system could not possibly have evolved. Darwinian evolution is based on the notion that the parts of a particular organism change one element at a time. The appearance of 100 billion of something at the same time, all perfectly coordinated to defend and protect the self from the non-self, cannot be viewed as the product of chance.
In comparison with the magnitude of God’s six day of creation, our obligation to love Him and our neighbors seems to be quite small. In comparison with the elaborate autoimmune system that God has given us, our responsibility to establish a complementary and correlative intellectual immune system seems a trifle. The comparison would be something like Leo Tolstoy writing War and Peace and asking the editor to place the dot after the final word. Tolstoy would have done most of the work. Likewise, God has done most of the work before He asks us to inscribe the final period.
What is meant here concerning an intellectual immune system is a system of ideas that defend and protect us against bad ideas that could set us off in the wrong direction. We need light to see where we are going. Good ideas serve this purpose. An automobile cannot run without an engine. Good ideas that make up our intellectual immune system is our engine, so to speak, that gets us going and advances us to our proper destiny.
What are these good ideas? They are ideas that held a particular fascination for Mortimer Adler, perhaps America’s most knowledgeable philosophical educators. In his book, Six Great Ideas, he enumerates and explains the values of Truth, Beauty, and Goodness (ideas we judge by), and Liberty, Equality, and Justice (ideas we act on).
It is good to have an open mind, said, G.K. Chesterton, as long as it is not open at both ends. We want to keep the good ideas and reject the bad ones. Consider the idea of Truth, for example. It seems self-evident that if you know the truth of something you are protected from its correlative errors. If you know that the whole is greater than any of its parts, you also know that a particular part cannot be greater than the whole. On the one hand, Truth connects us to reality; on the other hand, it rejects what is untrue.
Beauty is a special integration of truth and goodness. It shines, so to speak (St. Thomas uses the word claritas, while Adler uses the term “effulgence”). Beauty appeals to both the mind and the heart. When we cultivate our appreciation for the idea of beauty, we reject ideas that are ugly, deformed, or seductive.
Thirdly, Goodness is perfective of the person. God is supremely Good. By loving God, we share in His goodness. Evil is essentially alien to us, something that is not perfective of our being. By choosing what is good we are at the same time rejecting what is evil.
The great ideas we need in order to establish our intellectual immune system are very few, surely in comparison with the 100 billion immunological receptors that comprise our autoimmune system. God has done much for us and asks relatively little of us in return. It is like a benevolent father who invites you to stay at his manor and asks only that you turn out the light when you retire. It is like God placing our primal patents in paradise and asking only that they not eat from a particular tree. It does not hurt to be obedient or to be thankful.
One way of saying thank you to God for His immense gifts is to acquire good ideas that allow us to continue His work and at the same time help us to advance toward our beatitude.
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(Dr. Donald DeMarco is professor emeritus of St. Jerome’s University and an adjunct professor at Holy Apostles College. He is a regular columnist for St. Austin Review. His latest two books, How to Navigate Through Life and Apostles of the Culture of Life, are posted on amazon.com.)
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