God is the cause of all beings in the universe,
God is a necessary Being,
He can not not exist.
God is not only supremly intelligent, but infinitely
(without limit) intelligent.
He is the cause of all movement,
but He Himself is without movement,
He is motionless and unchanging.
He gives movement to all things,
but is Himself immovable,
He remains.
He is permanent stability in this world where
everything is in constant movement and change.
He is the end of all things,
He is the objective and the
explanation of all things.
But can we define God?
In the catechism for children God is described
as "an eternal spitit, infinitely perfect, creator and
master of all things."
A spirit is a being, and
everything that exists has "a being".
Saint Thomas Aquinas's definition:
God is the Being, not a being,
He is this Being whose essence is to exist.
He is that which makes everything exist.
God's specificity is that His essence is His existence.
So what is the essence of something?
We have an immediate knowledge of the essence
of a thing; it is that which it is.
The concept comes instantly to us when somebody
mentions a specific thing; e.g. a house, a horse, a car,
an elephant, we know straight away what it is;
we conceptualise things continuously.
Everything has two facets; what they are and
the being; that which makes them exist.
God is necessary,
He can not not exist, in contrast
to any of us, we are not "necessary".
For example the sibling that our parents did not have
has the same essence as us; a human being.
For us, our essence and our existence are two
different things,
in contrast to God's essence and existence,
which is the one and same thing.
God's essence and existence is the same reality.
God is existence itself, and there are no concepts
of existence.
Existence is to be.
God appears mysterious to us because we can not
have a clear concept of His essence, as His essence
is existence itself.
God's essence is to exist, and there is no intellectual
concept for existing like there is for everything else.
The word essence comes from the Latin word
essentia, which means being or existence, and
is itself in turn derived from the Latin esse,
which means to be.
Essence is what is the core, what is underneath
appearances and individual differences.
God has 3 realities;
the Essence, the Substance and the Nature
(His actions), they
are all equal to each other.
All of us have the distinction of being what we are
and what has made us come into being.
A man is not fundamentally "necessary", he might
exist or he might not exist,
whether he exists or whether he
does not exist, he has the same essence.
A man is defined as an individual substance
of a rational nature, composed of matter and soul.
A rational animal.
God is the source of everything,
He has a substance,
He is the substance, through His essence
He sustains everything.
The nature of God is His Divinity.
God is simple;
what He is and what he does is one and the same thing.
Unlike us; what we are and what we do are 2 different
things.
God is at the core, in the depth, of all things.
He is the essence of all things.
Then there is God's definition of Himself, on Mount Sinai,
when God appeared to Moses in the burning bush and gave
him the enormous task of leading the Israelites out of slavery
from Egypt. When Moses asked him who he was, what was his
name, God answered: "I am the One who is"
"I am who I am"
(Yahweh: I am. I am what I am. The others are from me.
I am of me.)
God is the pure state of existence itself.
He is the gushing fountain of Being, including Himself.
What is it that makes God God? It is God.
God's attributes derives from His essence, in an order.
God's 1.st attribute: Omnipotence, All Powerfull.
God continually communicates His Being to all things,
in this very moment, the reason that i am here, is because
God communicates His Being to me,
His Being which is His.
If this was not the case, I would simply cease to exist,
I would disappear.
Same for everything that exists; there is nothing
that is not in His Power.
Whether something exists already or does not exist,
makes no difference to God,
it is just as easy for Him to create new things.
Man can create things in the sense of working on a
material to change it's shape, to transform it, but it is
only God that can create from nothing, Ex nihilo.
God is the one who creates.
Can He do everything? Yes.
Can He make a rectangular circle?
No, because that is opposed to the definition of a circle.
But that is not at all a limitation of God's power, it is
because it is absurd and against His own essence,
His own wisdom or His own Power, it is because
it contradicts His own Being.
Nothing is impossible to God.
Our world is located in time, but God is outside time,
meaning He is the absence of time.
Infinity is the absence of time: time does not exist.
Time is a psychological creation, it only exists in our
heads.
We often say when being absorbed by something
that is really interesting to us, that "time flew",
because our spirit it totally fixed on it,
and in the opposite case, we say that "time was
slow or long" if we are bored.
The clock simply signals movement: the measure of
movement from before to after.
I reality time does not exist.
God's spirit is completly fixed on his being.
When we die movement stops, our spirit stops,
it will be fixed, in God, or as the case might be;
not in God.
Time does not exist in God;
the middle ages, the stone age,
the creation of the world, the end of the world,
this present moment,
for God they are all the present moment.
Our birth and our death is to God one view.
He sees everything simultanously, He does not
ask us where we were, or where we are going to be,
He asks us to be in His Presence.
God's 2.nd attribute: Omnipresence
God is everywhere, in everything, all the time.
It is He who creates the being of everything,
He has an efficiency, an action, on all things.
Without this action, the thing would not exist,
could not exist, without His action, His Presence,
His Substance.
It is therefore impossible and completely wrong
to believe that God is far from us, that He has
abandonned us, that He does not care about us.
It is IN God that we have being, life and movement.
For God being and action is the same thing.
We are living the life of God.
How can anybody not think about God?
We receive permanently God's being, we can not
possibly be estranged from God.
It is the world that is in God,
not God who is in the world.
It is always the smallest being who is contained
in the bigger one.
"For the spirit of the Lord filled the whole world,
and that which containeth all things hath knowledge
of the voice"
Wisdom 1:7
His spirit contains all things, that is why He has the last
word on all things. He is just in all things.
The world is in God like the content is in the container,
not the other way around.
God's 3.rd attribute: Simplicity
God is simple and uncomplicated.
He is straight forward.
Not like us, who always complicate things.
In God there is no distinction between matter
and form, no distinction between essence and
existence, no distinction between soul and body,
no distinction between being and action.
God is extremly simple, this can be difficult for us
to perceive.
It is the reason why the closer a person comes to God,
the more clear and simple he will be.
Not simple in the sense of being stupid or
simplistic or simple-minded, which would be a lack
of intelligence, but a person who approach himself
to God; otherwise meaning he sanctifies himself, he
becomes a better person, more simple, more like God.
Some believe that in order to be intelligent
we have to complicate everything, as some kind of
proof of intelligence. No,
God is infinitely intelligent and totally simple.
God's 4th attribute: Eternal, Infinite
God is infinite because He is simple.
What is it that limits a being?
It is his essence, the fact that we are one thing
we are not the other things.
It is not the existence that limits a being, it is his
essence.
Because a dog is a dog, he is not a cat or an elephant.
If I am this thing well defined, it means that I can not
be other things.
I am confined and limited to the form determined by
my particular essence.
This is not the case with God. God is not this or that,
His essence is to be.
He is not determined by a form, that is why he has no
limits, He is unlimited.
There is no limit in Him whose essence is to exist.
He is therefore infinite.
That means that all His aforementioned attributes
are without limits. His Power is without limit.
His intelligence is without limit.
God's 5th attribute: Providence
The word providence comes from the latin
word providere, pro: ahead, videre: to see,
together it means to see beforehand.
God sees everything at the same time, He sees
where we were, where we are, and where we
are going, simultanously.
God is the efficient cause of everything, He is
behind man, He is in man, and He is at the end
of man.
He gives the being to man, He is in eternity,
He is in the ultimate cause of man,
He is all powerful.
He leads every human being, since humans have
their autonomy from God, He brings man from
his cause who is God, to his ultimate cause,
who is God.
Man is completly in God's hand from the beginning
of his life to the end of his life. We cannot do a single
thing without God,
We are directed by an infinite powerful, an infinite
good God, who is infinite farseeing, from the beginning
to the very end of our lives.
We are asked to recognise this fact and to live in His
Presence.
He is at the origin of what we are, and He leads us
back to Him.
God's 6th attribute: Love
God is Love, Infinite Love.
God is Love because He is good.
He extends His love to us because He is
goodness itself, contrary to human love
which only goes towards something that
they themselves find good.
(e.g. I love ice cream, I go and get one,
because I love it)
God's love is called Charity, because real love,
is to give oneself.
God is Love, because He is not alone,
He is three.
