…Before anyone should dive into any examination of Catholic beliefs, there needs to be a discussion about what Catholics believe about God and Evil. Hint: God is not a white-haired man in the clouds.
What Is God?
Here is a statement that gets the ball rolling on the Catholic understanding of God:
If you add the entire Universe to God, it does not increase God.
God is the act of being, so is not a “part” of anything, he is the “whole” of everything.
Let’s be clear- There is no “Supreme Being” for Catholics. Thomas Aquinas refers to this as “Ipsum Esse” or “Existence Itself.” He is not the greatest of all beings, or in any classification, we can muster in our heads.
Every modern well-known atheist, or TV personality that hates religion, rails against the “man in the sky” concept of God. Guess what? So do Catholics.
What do Catholics believe in terms of what God is? He is the reason there is something rather than nothing. He is the unconditioned cause of the conditioned universe.
Contingency and God
Going back to Aquinas, we look at his argument for God based on the concept of “contingency.” Look at everything around you… it is all “contingent” or dependent on something before it. You can start at the basics of nature and see how life constantly evolves. Everything is derived from something else. You can backtrack living beings back to elements, go back to when the earth was created, back and back…everything is contingent. Now, it cannot conceivably be doing this forever. That is illogical by every measure. There has to be a start, a non-contingent something. That is the Catholic understanding of God.
If you think this stops at the Big Bang, keep thinking. Even the explanations for that demand the response “yeah, but what created THAT.” Oh, and the person responsible for first proposing the Big Bang Theory? A Catholic priest named Georges Lemaître.
God has absolutely no need for us. Precisely because of this, we know that the world was loved into being, as there was no need for it. “Need” is the ultimate detriment to love. The world was created out of this Divine Love, and God is always conducting this divine love / creation. As we give away grace by acts of love, we join in this action.
God Is Love
Now let’s take this to a higher meaning; one that is far simpler and beautiful than our sort of exterior understanding of God as being itself. The Catholic faith sits affirm in what is stated in John’s first letter.
Beloved, let us love one another, because love is of God; everyone who loves is begotten by God and knows God.
1 John 7-8
Whoever is without love does not know God, for God is love.
God loves. That is all that God does. The “anger” that is attributed to God in ancient Scriptures is simply the author’s best tool (and commonly used in that time and place) to show the separation we have from Him. When we don’t know God, we don’t know love, ergo “anger” and hate. When we know love, we know God.
How is this concept of “God is love” best expressed? In the Trinity. For here, God is the Trinity. God is this “othering” of love between the Father and the Son. We participate in this love when we love Him, and when we love our neighbor. Love requires the other.
Catholics are Not-Gnostic (Anti-Material World)
There is an ongoing heresy to Catholics called Gnosticism that purports basically that we live in a dualistic, competitive universe between the spiritual and the material. While that aspect is not necessarily at all in conflict with Catholic beliefs, the Gnostic essentially believes spiritual=good and material=bad. You can find this sort of belief system going back to the Platonists, and prevalent today with many people identifying as “spiritual.”
Catholics love the spiritual nature in the universe, but we also don’t despise “the world.” We simply don’t worship it, but only worship God. God created everything, how can it all be bad all of a sudden? The sensual pleasures of the world have so much good to offer us, we just have to not objectify or overindulge in it and never adore it as we should with God. God wants us to have joy, and he created a world for us to experience this. Catholics are not Gnostics, Platonists, or Puritans.
Wherever the Catholic sun doth shine,
Hilaire Belloc
There’s always laughter and good red wine.
The Angry God of the Old Testament
Another common topic in the discussion of God is the “angry God” of the Old Testament. For Catholics, this isn’t a problem based on how we read the Bible. While there are many forms of Christianity that read the Bible literally from start to finish, the Catholic Church does not and hasn’t taken this approach. (Although there are Catholics that personally take this approach.) The Bible is not a single book, it is much more like a library that contains books that range from allegorical to historical.
From the start of the Old Testament to the start of the Gospels, God was in an evolving relationship with mankind. Think of how you talk to a child through the years as they grow up. You don’t speak to a 2-year-old the same way as a 7-year-old or the same way to a 17-year-old. God was speaking to specific people at specific times in specific places throughout the Old Testament.
Furthermore, much of what you read in the Old Testament were told in an almost mythical manner, utilizing whatever would be the most effective backdrop (war, for instance) to get across a moral message. God’s voice got wrapped up in that narrative as well. “God’s wrath,” coming across sometimes as cruel and spiteful, was the product of literary devices trying to convey a single theme throughout the whole of the Old Testament – God wants us in “right praise,” which brings us ultimate happiness, and even when we keep failing him, he is always there to restore that relationship.
Jesus and the Trinity
Catholics believe that Jesus is 100% Divine and 100% human. The precursor to this state of being came way back in the Old Testament with the burning bush that Moses encountered. The bush (fully a creature) was fully enflamed by fire (Divinity) but the fire did not destroy it.
The Catholic understanding of Jesus’ Divinity starts with the prologue of John’s Gospel:
In the beginning was the Word,
and the Word was with God,
and the Word was God.
He was in the beginning with God.
All things came to be through him,
and without him nothing came to be.
John 1:1-3
Jesus was there from the beginning. He is the only “begotten” Son of the Father. That means even though we are sons and daughters of God, His relationship is different. The infinite being, God, the Father, came into our finite world through Jesus. Through love. That “othering” of love between God the Father and God the Son is what we call the Holy Spirit. Three “persons,” one essence.
The Problem of Evil
The hardest question to answer for any Catholic is to answer the question of why God allows evil in the world. The short answer, which cannot possibly satisfy someone going through horrible pain, is that God allows evil to produce the greater good. Furthermore, the greatest gift that God gave us is our free will. Without it, we do not have a soul. We have to choose “good”. Without that element of our existence, we are just software programs. Whenever you have free will, you have the possibility of evil.
But again, this is not going to be a satisfying answer for anyone with a friend or family member dying, or explaining the suffering of the innocent, wars, disease, or genocide. The correct response cannot be correct, simply because none of us are God. But we should put things in perspective. Just consider how much more God knows than us. Even in the collection of all of mankind’s intellect and wisdom, we are a drop in the ocean in comparison to God.
Perhaps the best way to see this disparity of wisdom between man and God is to look at the book of Job. Poor Job, under the impression (of the beliefs of the day), that if he did good, his life would be good, only to experience one nightmare situation after another. He then demands that God respond to why He has done this to him. Finally, God responds:
Gird up your loins now, like a man;
I will question you, and you tell me the answers!
Where were you when I founded the earth?
Tell me, if you have understanding.
Who determined its size? Surely you know?
Who stretched out the measuring line for it?
Into what were its pedestals sunk,
and who laid its cornerstone,
while the morning stars sang together
and all the sons of God shouted for joy?
Who shut within doors the sea,
when it burst forth from the womb,
When I made the clouds its garment
and thick darkness its swaddling bands?
When I set limits for it
and fastened the bar of its door,
and said: Thus far shall you come but no farther,
and here shall your proud waves stop?
Have you ever in your lifetime commanded the morning
and shown the dawn its place
for taking hold of the ends of the earth,
till the wicked are shaken from it?
The earth is changed as clay by the seal,
and dyed like a garment;
but from the wicked their light is withheld,
and the arm of pride is shattered.
Have you entered into the sources of the sea,
or walked about on the bottom of the deep?
Have the gates of death been shown to you,
or have you seen the gates of darkness?
Have you comprehended the breadth of the earth?
Tell me, if you know it all.
What is the way to the dwelling of light,
and darkness—where is its place?
That you may take it to its territory
and know the paths to its home?
You know, because you were born then,
and the number of your days is great!
Have you entered the storehouses of the snow,
and seen the storehouses of the hail,
which I have reserved for times of distress,
for a day of war and battle?
What is the way to the parting of the winds,
where the east wind spreads over the earth?
Who has laid out a channel for the downpour
and a path for the thunderstorm,
To bring rain to uninhabited land,
the unpeopled wilderness;
to drench the desolate wasteland
till the desert blooms with verdure?
Has the rain a father?
Who has begotten the drops of dew?
Out of whose womb comes the ice?
And who gives the hoarfrost its birth in the skies,
when the waters lie covered as though with stone
that holds captive the surface of the deep?
Have you tied cords to the Pleiades,
or loosened the bonds of Orion?
Can you bring forth the Mazzaroth in their season,
or guide the Bear with her children?
Do you know the ordinances of the heavens;
can you put into effect their plan on the earth?
Can you raise your voice to the clouds,
for them to cover you with a deluge of waters?
Can you send forth the lightnings on their way,
so that they say to you, “Here we are”?
Who gives wisdom to the ibis,
and gives the rooster understanding?
Who counts the clouds with wisdom?
Who tilts the water jars of heaven
so that the dust of earth is fused into a mass
and its clods stick together?
Do you hunt the prey for the lion
or appease the hunger of young lions,
while they crouch in their dens,
or lie in ambush in the thicket?
Who provides nourishment for the raven
when its young cry out to God,
wandering about without food?
Job 38:3-41
Evil is not an “equal and opposing” force to good, as it is portrayed in many belief systems. It is a lack of something, not something in and of itself. Thomas Aquinas explains: “But what is evil is privation; in this sense, blindness means the privation of sight.”
The problem of evil will always be a difficult discussion. In one last final contemplation of our lives and good and evil, consider this analogy of a fairy tale. We pretty much know it is going to end happily. Is there any joy in jumping to the last page and seeing how it ends? No. The fairy tale’s joy is only experienced by reading it in its entirety.
Next up… So if Jesus is God, what happened after He ascended into heaven? Just what exactly is His and our role in this thing called the Catholic Church?
Next Topic >> The Mystical Body of Christ
Synopsis
To Catholics, God is not a white-haired old man in the clouds. God is the act of being. God created the world out of love. The angry, Old-Testament God is primarily just God speaking to mankind through a writer at a particular time and place, so the tone and tenor is reflective. Jesus is God and part of the Holy Trinity and is fully human and fully divine. The problem of evil rests on our free will, and not understanding the infinite wisdom of God.
Suggested Reading
“My Way of Life : Pocket Edition of St. Thomas: The Summa Simplified for Everyone” by Thomas Aquinas
“On the Incarnation” by St. Athanasuis
Top Image
One of the most well-known works of modern art, The Creation of Adam is arguably the most well-known fresco in the Sistine Chapel.
It can be found in the Sistine Chapel’s ceiling, which is part of the Vatican Museums and was produced by Michelangelo sometime around 1511. It took sixteen days to complete, making it one of the most intricate and challenging paintings ever created. Michelangelo began with the representation of God and the Angels before adding the fresco of Adam.