religion

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. 

A Brief Response to the Manufactured Outrage Over Pope Francis’ Latest Comments that All Religions are Paths to God

Deacon Doug McManaman

Christ has always been the center of Pope Francis’ life and writing. Furthermore, Christ is everything that the religions of the world are searching for. As G. Studdert Kennedy points out, the Messianic passion is not limited to the Jews; we find it in all the great religions of the world. Having said that, let’s not forget that the Pope is a guest in someone else’s home. They invited him there, they received him with great joy and great love. Now, if Francis believes what St. Paul wrote in his letter to the Galatians, namely that “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me”, then in receiving Pope Francis into their home with great joy and love, they received Christ with joy and love, whether they knew that explicitly or not. When you are a guest in another’s home, you do not say things like “Our religion is better than yours”, or “You have only a sliver of the Eiffel Tower, whereas we have the whole Tower”, etc. That’s just bad manners. Evangelization is not the same as apologetics. A pope is not a traveling academic, but a father, and his life is less about abstract theological problems than it is about relationships. As Christ said: “Whoever receives you receives me, and whoever receives me receives the one who sent me.” 

Here’s something that Studdert Kennedy wrote in 1920, 40 years before Vatican II will begin to move in this direction:

“I do not think there is any doubt that we have grossly underrated the moral and spiritual worth of other religions, and have allowed prejudice to blind our eyes to their beauty, and to the foreshadowing of Christ which they contain. It is a tragedy that we should have allowed a spirit of almost savage exclusiveness to have blotted out for us the revelation of God contained in earth’s million myths and legends, so that Christians have regarded them almost as though they were the inventions of the evil one. It is a disaster that we should have lumped all other faiths together and called them “pagan”—dismissing them as worthless. It is disastrous because it has distorted our missionary methods and delayed the development of the world religion. It has made us seek to convert the East not merely to Christ, but to our peculiarly Western Christ, and to force upon other peoples not merely our experience of Him, but our ways of expressing the experience. It is disastrous, too, because it has bred in us the spirit of intolerance and contempt for others which is one of the chieftest obstacles to the union of the world”.