The Purpose of Creation | Fr. James V. Schall, S.J. | Ignatius Insight | May 14, 2011
The Purpose of Creation | Fr. James V. Schall, S.J. | Ignatius Insight | May 14, 2011
http://www.ignatiusinsight.com/features2011/schall_creation_may2011.asp
"God made the world so that there could be a space where he might
communicate his love and from which the response of love might come back to
him."
— Pope Benedict XVI, "The Day
of the New Creation" (Homily at the Easter Vigil, 23 April 2011, L'Osservatore Romano, English, April 27, 2011)
"It is not the case that in the expanding universe, at a late stage, in
some tiny corner of the cosmos, there evolved randomly some species of living
being capable of reasoning and of trying to find rationality within creation,
or to bring rationality into it."
— Pope Benedict XVI, "The
Day of the New Creation."
I.
After the blessing of the new fire at the Easter Vigil, we heard the reading
of the creation from Genesis. In the beginning, God created the heavens and
the earth. Leo Strauss pointed out that
this account has its own internal order according to the nature of the motion
of the creatures on each day of creation. The account of Genesis is not, as it
sometimes seems, "irrational." The heavens and the earth were not God. He is
before they were; they came to be from nothing. God is not part of the
universe; He is complete in His inner being without the universe. It was not
created to supply a deficiency in God, as some of the ancient writers thought.
In other words, before the cosmos was, God is. The tense of the latter
verb is correct, not "was" but "is."
In his homily for the Easter Vigil, Benedict XVI asked whether, as some
say, it would not be better to omit this supposedly outmoded cosmological
reading: just proceed immediately to things more pertinent to us. The fathers
of the Church, Benedict told us, never understood the days of creation
cosmologically. But they did understand that the Genesis account provided the
foundation for thinking of what this creation means in its very essence. Why
did God not leave the void alone? Why did He cause what is to be?
"The Church wishes to offer us a panoramic view of whole trajectory of
salvation history, starting with creation, passing through the election and
liberation of Israel to the testimony of the prophets by which this entire
history is directed ever more clearly towards Jesus Christ." The Scriptures do
not offer a "scientific" description of sidereal events. They do present an
overall understanding of why these events happened. The overall understanding
of the cosmos is shot through with intelligence, from beginning to end.
In other words, revelation gives intelligibility to history. History is
the accurate explanation of what happened, including divine events in the
world. We can eventually find out the scientific details of cosmic events by
ourselves. Revelation was not needed for what men could eventually discover by
themselves. In fact, the general principles of the scriptural account of
creation and the scientific knowledge of what happened are becoming in our time
more and more in agreement. If we look at what Scripture intends and what we
can judge to have happened, we find remarkable agreement. Revelation and
science are not as opposed as was once claimed.
The cosmos seems to be about 13.7 billion years old. It has a structure
of inner constants that indicates it began in an instant, before which there
was nothing. Within its working-out an orientation to the possibility of human,
rational life is found. The cosmos seems to be intelligible in the sense that
its order can be understood as being already present within it. It is something
that the human mind can grasp with considerable effort and insight. This order
cannot be the result of randomness or chance or projection of human ideas. The
whole order implies that at its origin we find a first cause that is outside
the universe itself and is responsible for its manifest order.
"They (the Prophets) show us the inner foundation and orientation of
history. They cause creation and history to become transparent to what is
essential." The creation account is also cast in a liturgical format. That is,
it is intended as an act of praise. "This is the liturgy's way of telling us
the creation story is itself a prophecy. It is not information about the
external process by which the cosmos and man himself came into being."
The Fathers of the Church saw the creation story "as a pointer towards
the essential, toward the true beginning and end of our being." The beginning
and end of our being have to do with why the cosmos exists in the first place.
If we omit these creation passages, we would miss "the very history of God with
men." God did interact with men through creation. We would lose sight of its
"order of greatness" if we neglected to consider the meaning of creation, of
the fact that it could not and did not cause itself.
II.
The Holy Father recalled the beginning of the Creed. Our first
affirmation is that "We believe in God, the Father Almighty, Creator of heaven
and earth." In other words, nothing in the universe stands outside of God's
salvific plan. The Church is not concerned just with man's "religious" needs.
Rather, and this is a point that Benedict makes again and again about what
revelation and Scripture are about, "the Church brings into contact with God
and thus with the source of all things." We do not just "speculate." The Church
is not a series of beliefs or doctrines, though these are important; she is the
point wherein we actually meet God. That is the point of the Eucharist. This is
what holiness is about. Catholicism is directed to intelligence. But
intelligence, because of what it discovers, in turn is directed to worship.
We have responsibility for creation because we can understand.
Moreover, "because God created everything, he can give us life and direct our
lives." Already here we see the fact that the intelligibility of the universe
is related to our own end which we need to understand. The "central message of
the creation" is found by reading together the beginning of Genesis and the
beginning of the Prologue of John's Gospel. The world, the heavens and the
earth, find their origin in the Logos
within the Godhead. This Logos is
not just abstract reason but "Reason that both is and creates sense. The
creation account tells us, then, that the world is a product of creative
Reason." When we examine creation and all in it, we find order already there.
If we are told that no reason exists in things, no order, we know that
this view is contrary to evidence, logic, and revelation. What we ultimately
find behind all creation is freedom, reason, and love, not necessity and
chance. That is to say, such realities are already found within the Godhead and
are placed within the world in due order. "In the beginning is freedom. Hence
it is good to be a human person." These sentences mean that God did not have to create anything. He does not "change" if the
world exists or does not exist. But if something does exist, as it does, it
flows from God's own inner life. Creation will be marked by intelligence and
love once we come to see its overall scope. Deus Caritas Est. Deus
Logos Est.
We are not accidents thrown up by chance in some obscure corner of the
cosmos. Rather, the cosmos exists that we might exist. We exist to carry out
the purpose for which we are created. The cosmos is a consequence, in the
divine intention, of our eventual creation. In the plan of God, we are intended
before the cosmos it intended. The universe is the arena of our freely
achieving (or rejecting) the purpose of our creation. God's original intention
was to associate other free and intelligent being within His inner life after
the manner of their freedom and intelligence in response to His. "Reason is
there at the beginning." We also can refuse to accept what we are offered.
"And because it is Reason, it is also created freedom; and because freedom can
be abused, there also exist forces harmful to creation." That is the history of
the Fall in Genesis.
God, in creating free beings who could reject Him, understood that some
would reject Him. Thus, He had to respond to their freedom to reject Him with
His offer of mercy and forgiveness. Basically, this is what the Incarnation as
we know it is about. But we ourselves must "place ourselves on the side of
reason, freedom, and love—on the side of God who loves us, so much that
he suffered for us, that from his death there might emerge a new definitive and
healed life." The one thing that God never does is to make a free being not to
be free. This is why history is filled with those also who freely reject the
efforts and examples of God to lead us back to the original purpose of
creation.
The Old Testament presents "an order of realities." Benedict then shows
that the rest on the last day of creation was itself ordered to a
transformation whereby the new day of creation began with the Resurrection.
But this divine response was not merely an afterthought. "The Covenant is the
inner ground of creation, just as creation is the external presupposition of
the Covenant." This inner ground of creation indicates the drama that was
intended to occur within history. For this to happen, a world had to exist and
be prepared to receive human lives that could sustain themselves in the world.
The "anthropological principle" that we hear scientists refer to in cosmology
is the counterpart of the initial divine intention.
III.
What then is it all about? In a brilliant sentence, Benedict carefully
explained the broad sweep of our being to us: "God made the world so that
there could be a space where he might communicate his love, and from which the
response of love might come back to him."
This passage emphasizes the central purpose of creation. For God to communicate
His love, some beings capable of loving in return had to exist. Since such
beings could not themselves be gods, they needed a place in which they could
live. There, they were invited to "respond." They could choose not to do
respond, otherwise there could be no true and free love. What Augustine called
the City of God and the City of Man are involved in this drama.
Benedict added a further astounding fact. From God's perspective,
the heart of the man who responds to him is greater and more important than the
whole immense material cosmos." Such a
sentence puts things in proper perspective from considerations of abortion, to
sinners, to the evils we experience in history. Each person is thus made in the
"image" of God, with intelligence, will, and a space in which to decide what he
will be. The parable of the lost sheep in the Gospels comes to mind. God
searches for what is lost, but He cannot "force" men to choose Him. They have
to love him because He is loveable. The playing out of these human responses
is, as Benedict stated in Spe Salvi,
what constitutes the judgment of the living and the dead, as we see also in the
Creed
The Resurrection is the beginning of the new age. "It sets out from the
first day as the day of encounter with the Risen Lord." We are in this age of
redemption in which the Savior has already dwelt amongst us. The Church exists
to keep among us the living presence of the actual fact that the Logos did exist among us. This fact changes everything. We
sometimes do everything we can not to see this truth.
"The revolutionary development that occurred at the very beginning of
the Church's history can be explained only by the fact that something utterly
new happened on that (Resurrection) day." But this new event was not outside of
God's original intention in creating the cosmos and finite men in it. "In
truth, this encounter (of the apostles with the risen Lord) had something
unsettling about it."
We still experience this unsettlement because of what it implies about
the meaning of our own lives. We are created to achieve the end of creation. We
can, in our place, in our living, still reject the love with which we and the
cosmos were created. "We celebrate this day as the origin and goal of our
existence. We celebrate it because now, thanks to the Risen Lord, it is
definitively established that reason is stronger than unreason, truth stronger
than lies, love stronger than death."
The purpose of creation is nothing less than in our choosing, in the
arena of our own lives in whatever time or place we find ourselves, to
understand and love these things whereby we reach the inner Trinitarian life of
the Godhead as our own end also. Aside from this, all else is what? A
distraction, perhaps, that prevents us from embracing what we are created to
be.
Related Ignatius Insight Articles and Excerpts:
• Creation | Adrienne von Speyr
• Creation, Salvation, and the Mass | Fr. James V. Schall, S.J.
• The Church Is the Goal of All Things | Christoph Cardinal Schšnborn
• On Being Amazed In The Cosmos: Christoph Cardinal Schšnborn and "The Purpose of
the Path" | Fr. James V. Schall, S.J.
• The Gift of God | Fr. James V. Schall, S.J.
• The Creed and the Trinity | Henri de Lubac
• What's the Point of Creeds? | Peter Kreeft
Fr.
James V. Schall, S.J., is Professor of Political Philosophy at Georgetown
University.
He is the author of numerous books on social issues, spirituality, culture,
and literature including Another
Sort of Learning, Idylls and Rambles, A Student's Guide to Liberal Learning,
The Life of the Mind (ISI, 2006),
The Sum Total of Human
Happiness (St. Augustine's Press, 2007), The Regensburg Lecture (St. Augustine's Press, 2007),
and The Mind That Is Catholic: Philosophical and Political Essays (CUA, 2008).
His most recent book from Ignatius Press is
The Order of Things (Ignatius Press, 2007). His new book, The Modern Age,
is available from St. Augustine's Press. Read more of his essays on his
website.
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