Father John A. Hardon, S.J.[i]
Historians of religion commonly trace the beginnings of modern atheism to the eighteenth century and identify its original form as essentially “political.” In their fight against the social and political institutions of their day, the materialist philosophers and encyclopedists came up against a Church which, in their mind, was an aspect of the State and that “sanctioned despotism by divine right.” Their labor was described to the people as a struggle to win freedom from tyranny.
The masses were told in scores of books and pamphlets, “It is perfectly clear that the Christian religion runs counter to the political health and well-being of nations.” Christianity, therefore, is “the art of making men drunk with ecstasy in order to divert their attention from the evils heaped upon them below by those who govern them.”
Apart from Marxism, nineteenth-century atheism was on the whole “scientist.” It opposed religion, notably Christianity, as being a prescientific or nonscientific explanation of the world. Its role was to drive from the field all the attempts to contain God in the provisional insufficiencies of knowledge, all the superstitions that nourish the appetite for mystery, the readiness to accept man’s impotence and welcome the miraculous.
Marxism, born in the nineteenth century, was (and remains) substantially “humanist.” Its learned defenders contend that it starts, not from negation, but from an affirmation. It affirms the autonomy o f man and therefore involves the rejection of every attempt to rob man of his creative and, in fact, self-creative power.[ii]
Karl Marx denied the Christian interpretation of history as the working out of divine providence. The main difficulty with the Christian view of history, according to Marx, is that it postulates the existence of God who created the world and on whom therefore all of man’s development finally depends. More reasonable was the Marxian interpretation, which is economic. The production of the goods and services that support human life, and the exchange of these goods and services. are the real bases of society. Economics is in man’s power to control. He does not need to look to any deity beyond his own collective genius to achieve the happiness he desires.[iii]
Confronted with the growing tide of atheism, whether overt or disguised as humanism, Vatican I issued a unique profession of faith in God. Unlike former credos, which faced the more subtle questions of the trinitarian life of God, this one addressed itself specifically to God’s existence and nature. At stake was the faith of all believers and not only of Catholics or Christians, since the opposition denied the validity of the very concept of a supramundane being, whether he is called God or Yahweh or Allah.
The holy, Catholic, apostolic Roman Church believes and professes that there is one true and living God, the Creator and Lord of heaven and earth. He is almighty, eternal, beyond measure, incomprehensible, and infinite in intellect, will and in every perfection.
Since he is one unique spiritual substance, entirely simple and unchangeable, he must be declared really and essentially distinct from the world, perfectly happy in himself and by his very nature, and inexpressibly exalted over all things that exist or can be conceived other than himself.[iv]
Fifteen internal attributes of God, independent of his role as Creator, are enumerated. These are not mere expressions of piety and still less were they chosen at random. They represent so many affirmations about the Godhead as the genius of unbelief had raised to the surface. In the century since this divine litany was assembled and, more than ever today, it serves as a check list of faith in a being without whose existence no other premise of Christianity has meaning.
God is said to be one in the absolute sense that there cannot be another, and in the relative sense that there are not many gods (polytheism), or just one chief god (henotheism), or two gods (Manichaean dualism). Each of these exclusions had been made, some many times, in the previous conciliar history of the Church’s defense of the divine unicity.[v]
He is the true God and not a figment of the human mind. His existence is objectively verified, and not, as men like Ludwig Feuerteach (1804-72) claimed, that God is a product of the imagination, since religion is simply the mirror of man’s own fears and desires.[vi] Marx rested his case against theism on the writings of Feuerbach.
He is a living God, where life declares animate existence and vitality that belongs to the nature of his existence. He is, therefore, not some impersonal force or cosmic energy, such as certain Moslem philosophers advocated in the early Middle Ages and their European admirers resurrected in the 1800s.
Divine omnipotence is attested by all of revelation: “With God all things are possible” (Mt. 19.26). It was described in the Old Covenant by the sacred name El, especially in the composition of El Shaddai (God almighty), and says that nothing is impossible to God, except, of course, what would contradict his nature. Thus God cannot change, cannot lie, cannot effect anything that is contradictory in itself. In other words, he cannot disown his own being.
The eternity of God is a dogma which asserts that he possesses the divine being without beginning and without end, and without succession in a constant, undivided now. In their conflict with the genealogies of paganism, the ancient Fathers frequently spoke of God’s eternity. According to Augustine, “The eternity of God is his essence itself, which has nothing mutable in it. In it there is nothing past, as if it were no longer; nothing future, as if it were not yet. In it there is only ‘is,’ namely, the present.”[vii]
God’s immensity or measurelessness is another way of saying that he is sublime and therefore beyond all spatial dimensions. The term was consecrated by the Fourth Lateran Council in answer to the Albigenses, who restored the Manichaean notion of deities who occupied (and were circumscribed by) the earthly and stellar regions. In the first article of a first-century creed, we read, “For the first thing believe, that there is only one God . . . who encompasses everything, while he alone cannot be encompassed.”[viii]
His incomprehensibility, also borrowed from the Fourth Lateran, is the same as God’s immensity, but with the added connotation that his presence is not limited, even in a nonspatial way. Thus, the angels, who are created spirits, are not incomprehensible, although they do not occupy local space. God is not confined either in the manner of a body or of a created spirit.
Among the attributes of the Deity, none is more crucial than his infinity. On it everything else depends, and against it every form of atheism has been opposed. Three aspects of infinity are specified “in intellect, will, and in every perfection.” The Fathers of the Church furnished the vocabulary for this attribute. They speak of God as infinite, boundless, uncircumscribed. For Gregory of Nyssa (c. 330- c. 95), “he is in every way without limit.” Theologically this goes beyond affirming that God has no limitations. It says that he has within himself the fullness of all perfection, whether knowledge or power or being.
Above his oneness is the divine uniqueness. To bring out the significance of this perfection, Church writers since the second century have restated the doctrine in a clear dilemma. Revelation unambiguously teaches that God is the Highest Greatness. It follows, then, that “the Highest Greatness must stand unique and must have no equal, in order not to cease to be the Highest Essence. Since God is the Supreme Essence, our ecclesiastical truth with justice declares: If God is not One, there is no God.”[ix]
The spiritual substance of God may be understood in two different ways, and both are necessary to a sound grasp of the divine nature. Since he is pure spirit, God is therefore immaterial. He has no body or corporeal dimensions. More positively, however, he has a mind and will; in a word, he is personal in the basic sense of possessing what we commonly identify as the basic quality of a person (before we think of anyone as an individual), that he has a mind with which he thinks and a will by which he loves. Moreover, when the First Vatican Council spoke of God as substance (substantia), it did not mean that he also had accidental properties. The divine substance is really the divine being, a term used already at I Nicea to identify the being (ousia)of the first and second persons of the Trinity.
In vernacular language, simplicity isan ambiguous word. Doctrinally it means that there are no components or parts in God—say, of body and soul, of bodily members, of substance and accidents, or essence and existence, of nature and person, of power and action, of passivity and activity, or genus and specific difference. In revelation, God’s essence simply is equated with his attributes. Christ said of himself, “I am the way, the truth and the life,” and St. John says that “God is love” (Jn. 14.6).
His unchangeableness is likewise a matter of faith. The Psalms are filled with references to God’s immutability, and more than once the Scriptures bluntly affirm the fact. Speaking of himself, in the prophet Malachi, God says, “I, Yahweh, do not change” (Mal. 3.6), and the apostle James encourages the Christians to confidence in the “Father of all light,” with whom “there is no such thing as alteration, no shadow of a change” (Jm. 1.17). Not even the Incarnation effected any change in God. If we analyze more closely why he must be changeless, the reason is that he eternally possesses the fullness of being, whereas all that changes ceases to be what it was and begins to be what it was not. Not so God. When he acts outside of his own being, as in creating the world, he is not performing a new action but entering on a new realization of his eternal will to bring into existence something out of nothing.
The final attributes of God’s transcendence, as really distinct from the world; of perfect happiness in himself and without dependence on any other being for beatitude; and of sublimity above whatever exists or could conceivably be–are all relative to creation and follow logically on all that historic Christianity believes about God. But they needed to be brought into the open, because modern atheism which denies the God of Christianity, has its own substitute for the Deity. What it postulates is not so much a world without God, as aworld that is God.
[i] Hardon, John A., S.J., The Catholic Catechism, Doubleday & Company, Inc. (New York), 1975, pp. 54-58.
[ii] Pius IX, encyclical Qui Pluribus (November 9, 1846), included an analysis and condemnation of Communism: Denzinger (2786).
[iii] Leo XIII defined Marxism in the encyclical Quod Apostolici Muneris (December 28, 1878): Denzinger 1851 (3133).
[iv] First Vatican Council, Dogmatic Constitution on the Catholic Faith, 1: Denzinger 1782 (3001).
[v] First Council of Constantinople: Denzinger 86 (150); Fourth Lateran Council: Denzinger 428 (800); Council of Florence: Denzinger 706 (1333); Council of Trent: Denzinger 994 (1862).
[vi] Feuerbach, Ludwig, The Essences of Christianity, passim.
[vii] St. Augustine, Expositions of the Psalms, 101:2, 10.
[viii] Pastor Hermae: Mandate 1:1.
[ix] St. Gregory of Nyssa, Contra Eunomium, 3.