Month: December 2025

Thoughts on God as Pure Act of Being and Atheism

Deacon D. McManaman

God is pure act of existence. But what does this mean?  I can look at you and form a concept, an idea of what you are. In other words, I grasp something of your nature, i.e., you are a human kind of being, you have size and affective qualities, you have certain abilities and potentialities very similar and different from other kinds of beings. But I also apprehend that you exist, which is a different apprehension than the first (the apprehension of the kind of being you are). Your existence is intelligible, but I cannot form a concept of it–as I can form a concept of your nature, the kind of person you are. You are a certain kind of being that “has an act of existence”, but existence does not belong to your nature. Existence is an “act” that you have, while “human”, for example, is “what” you are (not what you have). The key point here is that your existence is not a concept; it is, nonetheless, intelligible. 

God is not a composite of essence and existence (as are you), rather, his essence is to exist. He does not “have” existence; rather, he is his own act of existing. And so God is intelligible, but we cannot form a concept or idea of God. And because God is pure act of existence, he is pure goodness and beauty, because goodness and beauty are properties of being. 

And so we need to be careful with confusing the worship of God with the worship of a conceptual framework. As pure act of being, God is intimately present to whatever has existence; God is more intimately present to you than you are to you. Being is the most interior aspect of a thing, and so God, who is the first existential and preservative cause of your being, is, of all that is within you, the most interior. How you relate to God, who is goodness itself and beauty itself, is not always clear to you, certainly not immediately clear. It becomes increasingly manifest in your dealings with other goods, such as human goods or human persons. 

The atheist typically rejects a conceptual framework, as opposed to God himself. Even the use of “himself” is dangerous because it brings God into a conceptual circle. This is not to say that it is false, but it can be misleading. God is in many ways “himself” and “herself” and infinitely more, while at the same time God is absolutely simple, for there is nothing simpler than “being itself”. 

And so when someone says he or she is an “atheist”, we have to ask what that means precisely. It very often does not mean that God is rejected–especially if the atheist has a degree of wisdom. It is usually a conceptual framework that is rejected, for a variety of reasons. The good news is that God is not a concept. God is intelligible, infinitely knowable, and incomprehensible. We believe he revealed himself in history, and this is where the construction of an elaborate conceptual framework begins, but this religious conceptual frame of mind, although not necessarily false, is always subject to reform and constant editing. God, however, is always infinitely larger than this religious conceptual framework. That is why openness to and dialogue with other religions and denominations is of the utmost importance. 

Fear and Primitive Reasoning

Deacon Douglas McManaman

Be strong, do not fear! Here is your God (Is 35, 4)

So much of what goes wrong in the world has its roots in fear. And there is so much about this world today that gives rise to fear; but this life is really about learning to depend upon God, that is, learning to fear less (fearless), and the way to do that is first to become increasingly aware that independence is relative and ultimately an illusion, and that we depend on God ultimately, and second to actually begin to rely on God. We certainly depend on one another, but ultimately everyone depends on God. And the more we surrender our lives to God, the more we learn through our own experience that God really is intimately involved in everything that happens to us and that nothing happens outside of his providential control. However, although human beings really do make a mess out of their lives when they take matters into their own hands instead of relying on God, they are still wrapped up and surrounded by God’s providence.  

My spiritual director would always say to me: “Fear is useless, what is needed is trust”. And fear is useless, at least fear without trust, because we all experience our radical limitations, but without trust we are tempted to cross those limits, that is, moral limits, and then we do things that we know to be wrong, like lying under oath, or stealing, or undermining the reputation of another, plotting to bring others down, etc. We make every effort to create an environment that is safe for ourselves, and this soon becomes a machination process in which we are willing to sideline those who get in our way. That injustice generates resentment in others, and such wounds can stay with a person all throughout his or her life. And soon everybody is carrying around a soul riddled with bullet holes, and the result is that we only think of ourselves, sort of like having a toothache–you can’t think of anything other than your own pain. 

But God does allow suffering into our lives. He does not impose it on us, but He does allow it; for suffering is the opportunity God gives us to depend on Him, to trust Him more fully, to place ourselves in His hands. When we do, we can be assured that he will act, but God does tend to “take his time”, not our time. And so, we have to be patient. That’s the problem with living in a fast-paced society–we are disposed to want things done quickly, and that just does not happen with God. The reason is that love is patient, and God is love, and he calls us to be patient: “Be patient, therefore, brothers, until the coming of the Lord. See how the farmer waits for the precious fruit of the earth, being patient with it until it receives the early and the late rains” (Jm 5, 7).  Suffering and moments of darkness are symbolized here by the image of early and late rains–there is no “precious fruit of the earth” without that suffering. 

In my experience, most people, even religious people, believe that suffering, hardship, and struggles are anomalies. Religious people in particular often assume that if we have a relationship with God, all will be smooth and relatively easy, so that if suffering enters our life, that must mean that our relationship with God has somehow been broken by something we did, some sin that we committed. This is how Israel interpreted her own suffering and hardship on a national level; on an individual level, it was assumed that those who were poor, lame, deaf or blind, etc., were forsaken by God by virtue of some ancestral or personal sin. This is a primitive way of trying to make sense out of suffering. Jesus, however, challenged this in the gospel of John: “As he passed by he saw a man blind from birth. His disciples asked him, ‘Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?’ Jesus answered, ‘Neither he nor his parents sinned; it is so that the works of God might be made visible through him’” (Jn 9, 1-3).

Unfortunately, many people still tend to think this way, because they want to make sense out of suffering, and if I can convince myself that a person is suffering because of something sinful he has done, well then I don’t feel so bad–on some level I convince myself that he deserves it. If we carefully read the book of Job, we see that Job’s friends were reasoning precisely along these lines, which is why in the end God rebuked them for this (See Jb 42, 7-9).  

We have to be very careful with this kind of reasoning, which is still rather prevalent. Some people take many sections of the Old Testament literally and believe that God does in fact destroy otherwise innocent people (i.e., Amalekite children, David’s infant son, etc.) as a punishment for the sins committed by others. We have to keep in mind that Israel, in her infancy, thought as a child does, namely, egocentrically: if something bad is happening to a child, for example, if the child is being abused by a parent, or the child’s parents are going through a separation and divorce, that child believes this is all happening because “I am bad”. It takes years for a person to escape from this mythology–and he or she may need help (a trained therapist) to overcome such harmful and subconscious beliefs, otherwise they may carry that conviction into their adult lives, feeling and believing on some level that they are deeply flawed, and without knowing why. Such people typically carry around a great deal of anger. We see precisely this kind of thinking on a national level in the Hebrew Scriptures, but Israel is a nation in history, a nation that through time grew in her understanding of God as a result of that historical relationship. The way Israel thinks about herself and God later in her history is very different from the way she thought earlier.

However, God reveals his true face in the Incarnation of the Son, that is, in the Person of Christ. God’s response to human sin was pure grace. He does not impose suffering but enters into human suffering, for he joined a human nature to himself and entered into our darkness, so that when we suffer, we may find him in the midst of that suffering. He came to sanctify our suffering and death, to inject it with his life. That is why the Old Testament must always be read in the light of the New, that is, in the light of Christ’s life, death, and resurrection. 

Finally, John the Baptist, the greatest of those born of women, is suffering in the darkness of a prison cell, awaiting his execution. He does not suffer by virtue of some sin; rather, he is suffering because of his heroic virtue, that is, his decision to speak out against Herod, who after visiting his brother in Rome, seduced his wife and married her after dismissing his own wife. John rebuked Herod for this, and Herod responded by throwing him into the dungeons of the fortress of Machaerus, near the Dead Sea. In that darkness, John was tempted to doubt. Initially, he pointed out rather definitively that Jesus was the lamb of God, but in this dark and final period in prison, he sent his disciples to ask Jesus: “Are you the One who is to come, or, must we go on expecting another?” Jesus sent John’s disciples back with the evidence: the blind are given their sight, the lame are walking, lepers are being cleansed, the deaf are hearing, and the dead are being raised and the poor are receiving the good news. What Isaiah prophesied in the first reading is being fulfilled in the Person of Christ himself. And if the lame, the poor, the sick, the deaf, etc., were thought to be forsaken, abandoned, and rejected by God, then what is happening here can only be interpreted as a vindication of the poor, that the kingdom of God has come upon them in the Person of Christ. He overthrows the kingdom of darkness, and the true face of God is being revealed not a God who punishes retributively, but a God who forgives and loves, who loves us so much that he will take on our sufferings, join us in our deepest darkness so that we may not suffer alone. He enters into the worst possible darkness that a person can experience: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me”. He tastes the furthest extremity of God forsakenness, the depths of hell, in order to fill it with his light and love. That is the good news of our salvation.