Salesian Literature

Chapter 2:  God knows only one activity – that of being god

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We possess a great many different abilities and habits, the source of a large variety of actions; to these actions are due an immeasurable host of achievements.  We have a wide range of abilities – sight, hearing, taste, touch, movement, digestion, intelligence, will; a wide range of habits – speaking, walking, playing, singing, sewing, jumping, swimming.  Vastly different too are the actions, the achievements that result.

 

In God it is not like this.  He is one, utterly simple, infinite perfection; and this perfection is pure, unique actuality.  As the saints would say, in their wisdom, God is a single perfection – supreme in is uniqueness, unique in its supremacy.  This perfection is a single actuality: a being that is utterly, completely simple, free from the basic element of complexity.  Here we have the essence of the godhead, an essence that is enduring, eternal.  Yet we – puny creatures that we are – talk as though God were doing many varied things each day.  We are well aware that the opposite is the case; but poverty of intellect leaves us no option.  Speech, for us, is limited to what we understand: our understanding is limited by the way in which things normally behave around us.

 

Since a variety of achievements in this world usually demands a variety of actions… when we turn to God, to all his many works, to the different creatures of his fashioning, to the countless feats of his almighty power, we immediately imagine them to be the result of a variety of acts.  That is exactly how we describe them, in our human fashion, for it is our normal way of understanding things.  Nor do we transgress the truth by so doing.  There is no complexity of activity where God is concerned, only a single act by which he is God; however, so perfect is this act, it includes everything necessary to produce the various effects which we can see.

 

Picture, if you will, an artist at work on a Nativity scene (I happen to be writing this in Christmas week).  He will give thousands of strokes of his brush, devote days, weeks, months even, to the completion of his portrait – as much effort and time as the content of his picture demands.  Now think of a printer: on a plate engraved with a similar Nativity scene he places a sheet of paper, gives one stroke of the press … and in that single stroke, Theotimus, his work is done.  Off comes the print, there and then – a perfect reproduction of the sacred scene.  From his one action comes a portrait of many different people and things, clearly set out, each of them, in order, rank, position, distance, proportion.  If you did not know how it was done, so complicated a result from one action would certainly surprise you.

 

In the same way, nature – like the artist – requires as many activities as it has work to do; the greater each work, the more time it takes.  God, however – like the printer – gives being to the whole variety of creation, past, present and to come, by a single impulse of his all-powerful will.  From the idea in his mind, as from a well-cut engraver’s plate, God draws the wonderful variety of people and things in seasons, generations, centuries, each in its order as they were meant to be.

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