Our Life in the Lord Part One: Before Anything Was

Introduction

As we begin the school year, I'd like to set the stage for understanding our live in the Lord. This is certainly the Catholic understanding, but for the most part, it's the overall Christian understanding (if only by inheritance from the time prior to the reformation).

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (Jn 1:1). Before there was a beginning for anything else, God “is.” Before light, before time, before the first angel had its first thought, God was complete in himself: three persons in one substance, needing nothing, lacking nothing, becoming nothing he was not already. The Father is unbegotten. The Son is eternally begotten of the Father, and so is called the Word, the Logos, God’s eternal Wisdom. The Holy Spirit is the love between them, proceeding from them both, and he is no mere force or mood in God but the third person of the Blessed Trinity, as fully God as the Father and the Son. Each person is God whole and entire; the divinity is not divided into shares, for a part of God would be less than God, and there is no such thing.

Entering the Mystery

The Church calls the Trinity a mystery. A mystery in the Catholic sense is not a puzzle awaiting a clever solution, and not a wall past which thought is forbidden. It is a reality that can only be understood by being entered, the way a marriage or a deep friendship is understood: better from inside, and never exhaustively. The persons of the Trinity are distinguished by nothing except the way each stands toward the others; the Father begets, the Son is begotten, the Spirit proceeds. For everything else, power and knowledge and goodness and will, is the one divine life, possessed whole by each. There is no senior member and no junior, no before and no after, nothing the Father keeps back from the Son, and nothing the two withhold from the Spirit, even amidst the use of terms like begetting and begotten - these relationships are eternal not chronological or causal.

And so, before anything was, there was already everything that matters. There was knowing, for the Father eternally utters his Word. There was love, for the love between the Father and the Son is himself a divine person. There was even rest: not the rest of exhaustion, since God does not tire, but the rest of complete communion, the sabbath peace, the shabbat shalom, of an interior life in which nothing is withheld and nothing is wanting. God alone, through his own interior community of Father, Son, and Spirit, has in his own being the rest and abiding that every creature would one day long for.

Delight Before the World

Christians have long overheard something of this described life in the Scriptures. The book of Proverbs gives Wisdom a voice and sets it beside God at the making of all things: “then was I beside him as artisan; I was his delight day by day, playing before him all the while, Playing over the whole of his earth, having my delight with human beings” (Prv 8:30-31). Delight, play, and an artisan’s companionship: this is not the language of machinery. Long before there was a single human being to delight in, delight already filled the life of God. And so, the story that follows is not the story of a lonely power acquiring company but of a delight God chose to share.

Everything as Gift

Because God has everything and needs nothing, there is no advantage to be had within himself in doing anything at all. He cannot be enriched, flattered, threatened, or repaid. From this it follows: everything God does is gift. He acts out of an endless abundance, out of charity, and never out of appetite. A creature might imagine that such a God would be remote and indifferent, since he needs nothing from anyone. It runs the other way. When one has everything yet needs nothing, life is defined by what is given, what is expressed, what proceeds from oneself. That is, God’s completeness is itself the reason his whole life toward anything outside himself can only ever be generosity.

Getting this correct from the start helps us avoid any distortion which might be assumed later. God is not the largest and strongest being inside the universe, competing with the rest of us for room. He is not a thing within the world at all; he is the reason there is a world, holding every creature in existence the way a singer holds a note. The moment he is imagined instead as a very large creature living somewhere, everything downstream goes wrong: prayer becomes negotiation, the commandments look like the arbitrary preferences of a stronger party, and religion becomes a strategy for managing him. But, no creature before its creator can think to pull a power move. There is nothing he wants that we could withhold, and nothing we need that he begrudges.

Mercy and Truth Are Older Than Sin

Even mercy, which looks at first like a response God fashioned once there were sinners to forgive, is older than sin. There is nothing to forgive within God and nothing to reconcile there; yet, the total self-giving of each divine person to the others is already the shape mercy takes when he later turns it toward creatures who cannot repay it. Mercy is, we may say, the internal constitution of his own communion, facing outward.

God is Truth itself, and truth cannot deceive. There is no gap in him between what he is and what he says, no guile, no fine print, no bait and switch. This is why the fashionable phrase about everyone having a personal truth should be translated accurately: it means an opinion, which is a real thing and a much smaller thing. Truth is single and objective because it originates in the one who made everything the truth is about. When, much later in the story, faith is described as taking God at his word, this is the reason such a thing isn’t really a leap and certainly gullibility: the word being taken belongs to the only speaker in existence for whom lying is completely antithetical.

The Angels and the First Refusal

For reasons of that generosity alone, God began to give existence to what was not himself. The first of the creatures were not visible ones.

The Creed professes God the maker of all things visible and invisible. The invisible things include the angels: pure spirits, made by God, endowed with intelligence and will, existing to worship him and to serve his plan. They are like us in the one decisive respect, that they did not have to exist and do not hold themselves in being. They are unlike us in that they have no bodies, so their choosing is not stretched across a lifetime of habits and second thoughts; an angel’s choice is made with the whole of what it is.

Some of them refused. Satan is a fallen angel and nothing more exalted than that: an angel who chose not to serve but to serve himself, and who has been inviting others into a self-directed misery ever since, because misery seems to love company. Scripture names him the liar, the accuser, the adversary, the prince of this world. But, two things must be held together about him from the outset. He is a real agent with a real influence, and he is a creature with no power to absolutely compel anyone. No devil makes anyone do anything. His war was lost the moment it was declared, for there is no winnable war between God and one of his creations.

The Free Choice to Create

Before the world this was all there was: a God whose outward life is gift, a court of spirits serving him, a rebel already fallen, and nothing else at all. What comes next was not necessary. It was not inevitable that God would choose to make us. Nothing compelled him and nothing was lacking. He chose anyway. His choice is the first mercy.

The Church opens her Catechism with this sentence: “God, infinitely perfect and blessed in himself, in a plan of sheer goodness, freely created man to make him share in his own blessed life” (CCC 1). Every word of it was true before the first morning. What follows, through every garden and desert and city to come, is that sentence coming to pass.

Part Two