It must be from an ultimate Being that is itself Personal. Where does my moral sense come from, my capacity for indignation at wrongdoing, my attraction towards the unselfish act? I cannot be morally superior to the Source and Explanation of my own being. All that is in an effect must be in its cause.
Moment by moment, all that is flows from a Personal Source who contains all Beauty and Goodness. As the Catechism rightly insists, any reflection on the world and ourselves must take us in this direction. How, in each concrete instance, this conviction of a personal God takes root in each of our lives the Catechism sees as emerging through a series of “converging and convincing arguments,” a phrase from Cardinal John Henry Newman. A reading of a Gospel, the witness of Saint Teresa of Calcutta, a stunning sunset, the moment one knows the beloved must be immortal, a Church vibrating with the Real Presence in the reserved Host — all of these can make up, in a single life, the converging arguments that finally bring a person to “attain certainty” about this truth of God’s existence. The evidence lies all around us, its configuration in each life unique.
Day 13
CCC 36-38
The Knowledge of God According to the Church
Today’s reading makes two complementary points. First, God gives to each person the capacity to know of his existence and to know how to act well. The Catechism emphasizes that we can come by our own understanding, by the “natural light of human reason” (36), to a certain knowledge of the existence of a personal God and, together with this, to the understanding of fundamental principles of what is good and of how to act (the “natural law”). It is this natural capacity that makes it possible for us to “welcome God’s revelation” (36) — to look for his revealing of himself. God’s revelation is a crowning of our natural capacities. If our nature did not have this capacity, how could God reveal himself to us?
Second, the need for God’s revelation of himself to us is made clear. Revelation is needed because although we have this capacity, it is nonetheless challenging for us to reach this knowledge and to attain this certainty. In part, this is because we have to go beyond sensory knowledge to attain such truths, since God is spirit. We are capable of this, but it demands effort. The challenges in reaching these truths also lie in our disinclination to discover them: God’s existence complicates my desire to govern my own life, to live as I wish, to pattern my life after my immediate desires. If God exists, if there are objective truths, then I must give up control. These truths call for “self-surrender.” I must relinquish my kingdom.
God’s revelation is of things beyond our natural understanding, of course, truths about himself that we would not have been able to attain without him revealing them to us; but he also, alongside such truths, confirms those things of which our natural understanding is capable — for example, in giving us the Ten Commandments. He strengthens our natural understanding so that we can know these truths “with ease, with firm certainty and with no admixture of error” (38).
Day 14
CCC 39-43
How Can We Speak about God?
These paragraphs are intimately connected to those we read yesterday. Then we examined what we can know of God; today we review how we can speak of God. The Catechism emphasizes the unity of the acts of knowing and speaking: “In defending the ability of human reason to know God, the Church is expressing her confidence in the possibility of speaking about him” (39). We speak as we know.
The Catechism emphasizes that our ability to speak of God is real, but very limited. “Since our knowledge of God is limited, our language about him is equally so” (40). The foundation of this limited, but nonetheless real, knowledge and ability to speak of God lies in his creation. Created things are the work of his hands. We can reflect on all that lies around us, on his creatures, and reach up from them to their Creator, who must be more than his creatures. Since we know creatures exhibit beauty, for example, we can speak of God as the All-Beautiful.
What we mean by “the All-Beautiful God” lies beyond our full comprehension; there is always more to know about God. The meaning of the words we use of God lies in proportion to the reality of who he is. God is the perfection of all beauty, and this perfection corresponds to his being which is infinite. Thus we are speaking of an infinite, unlimited, unbounded Beauty. We can be confident that we have said something true here, that we are indeed speaking of his reality; yet we hardly know what we are saying.
It is no coincidence that the Catechism, having begun this chapter with the definition of the human person as a “religious being” (28), turns at the end of the first chapter to the language of worship, with a quotation from the Liturgy of Saint John Chrysostom. In the Liturgy we stand before the mystery and beauty of God, worshiping “the inexpressible, the incomprehensible, the invisible, the ungraspable” (42).
Day 15
CCC 50-53
God Reveals His “Plan of Loving Goodness”
CCC 50 deserves special attention, for it introduces the whole of Chapter Two. If you leaf through this wonderful chapter you will see that it contains three articles: “The Revelation of God,” “The Transmission of Divine Revelation,” and “Sacred Scripture.” CCC 50 explains that the whole chapter describes “another order of knowledge.” Chapter One was concerned with the natural order of knowledge, with what we can know by using our senses, our imagination, and our powers of reasoning. Beyond this is the supernatural order, the “order of divine Revelation.”
The order of revelation cannot be grasped by our natural powers, for it lies far beyond them. Revelation exists because of God’s free and loving decision to give himself to us, introducing us to his mystery. In the case of human persons, we can only truly know others if they choose to reveal themselves; how much more this must be true in the case of divine Persons! God lies infinitely beyond us, yet he wants to introduce us into his own life. The Catechism employs the New Testament image of adoption here to remind us that this is an act of love lying far beyond what is natural (see 52).
The Catechism uses a beautiful word to describe this process of our introduction into his own divine life — “pedagogy,” which literally means leading the child. As children are gradually introduced to the adult world, so we are introduced to the world of the divine Persons, with the capacity to take the steps being given to us at each new stage (53). God lovingly prepares us for this new life through what he does and says in the history of mankind, a history which culminates in the full gift of himself in the Person of Christ. In each of our lives, today, God follows this same path, leading us through his actions in our lives and speaking to us, so that we can share in the life of his Son.
Day 16
CCC 54-64
The Stages of Revelation
As God the Father leads each one of us, gradually and in stages, by his “divine pedagogy” (53), so he leads all the peoples on the great platform of the world’s history. Today’s reading traces the major “stages” through which God leads human beings, as he prepares them to receive his full revelation of himself and the definitive act by which our salvation is won.
The ultimate purpose of God’s acts in history is to bring all peoples together into the unity of his kingdom. The self-exile from God’s care and solicitude at the beginning led to the shattering of human relationships, to disunity and mutual antagonism. Just as God calls each individual person to a life of integrity and wholeness under
