I had been looking for a copy of Williams Ott’s Fundamentals of Catholic Dogma for quite a while and a couple of years ago finally managed to find a used paperback copy. (It’s available now in hardback at TAN Books.) It being near Lent I decided I’d read the book straight through as my Lenten exercise. Trust me and don’t do this. This is not that kind of book. It is a wonderful resource, not to be read through like a novel.
Not too far into the book I ran across the following quote from St. Gregory Nazianzen’s Oration 45:
God always was and always is, and always will be; or rather, God always Is. For Was and Will Be are fragments of our time, and of changeable nature. But He is Eternal Being; and this is the Name He gives Himself when giving the Oracles to Moses in the Mount. For in Himself He sums up and contains all Being, having neither beginning in the past nor end in the future…like some great Sea of Being, limitless and unbounded, transcending all conception of time and nature…
Reading that quote left me…. well maybe a graphic can get it across..
For the next few days I was left continually pondering God’s being. The fact that He is being itself. As the quote states it is the name He gave us for Himself. The tetragrammaton יְהוָה or I Am Who Am. Indeed He is the only one who can say that as an absolute. If we can make only one statement that we know to be truest about God it is that He is. He is existence and being itself. And our existence individually and creation as a whole relies on God’s existence and does so from the Big Bang until this very moment. As St. Paul said in Athens at the Areopagus ‘In him we live and move and have our being’.
If you’ve ever read the old Baltimore Catechism there is one question and answer that springs immediately to mind:
6. Q. Why did God make you?
A. God made me to know Him, to love Him, and to serve Him in this world, and to be happy with Him for ever in heaven.
If I had to reframe that answer in light of meditating on God’s essential character of being it would be that God made us to participate as fully in His being as we can in this world so that we can participate fully in the next. Your mileage may vary, but this one attribute of God is one I can return to again and again to learn more and be left almost dumbstruck at the awesome magnitude of He Who Is and to ask with the psalmist ‘what is man that thou art mindful of him, and the son of man that thou dost care for him?’
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1 comment
Cynmac
November 22, 2014 at 12:55 pm (UTC -6) Link to this comment
This post make me think about a spicific Metaphysics class at the University of Dallas MANY years ago, taught by Dr. Frederick Wilhelmsen. I was a college student trying to glean – let alone grasp – the concept of “Being” – of the difference between Essence and Existence in the Thomistic tradition. To this day, I remember Dr. Wilhelmsen citing what I call other “heavy thinkers” (philosophers and theologians) and their thought about God’s self identity. As I recall:
He cited the common understanding about God being pure essence, but posited his preferred understanding. He recounted how God revealed Himself to Moses and addressed our translations from the original language. He concluded that “I AM WHO AM” does not ONLY denote ESSENCE (WHAT a thing is) but I AM WHO AM more profoundly, perhaps, also denotes EXISTENCE (THAT a thing is). This name not only sums up an intellectual concept of BEING, but assures His people that God is actively “ISSSSIng.”
In this light, I think that God’s self-identity assures mankind that, not only does He exist, He is dynamically assuring each of us, that given His nature, He is indeed in charge, He is indeed totally available and inviting relationship with rational being.
Also, Dr. Wilhelmsen’s dramatic “isssing” in that class, always makes me smile when considering the scripture and hymn and prayer references to wind or breath or breeze when speaking about God the Holy Spirit.