From Creation to God back to Creation

Rightly Ordered Love

One of the ways we can come to know if our love for God and neighbor is rightly ordered is to examine what process is involved when it comes to knowledge. For St. Thomas Aquinas, the connection between knowledge and love was intimate, as opposed to the rationalism that only offers us nominal knowledge. In some cases, philosophy has been taught with a way disconnected from our concrete experience, as mere ‘theory' that has little to do with our actual existence, and the world around us. More often than not, I do hear about the intellectual tradition being presented in a manner that is sterile of love or reduces it to something abstract. Of course, this presentation is false, and gives people a warped understanding of the intellectual tradition. The reality is, we are to love persons not as objects, but subjects. And that concrete love manifests itself through concrete choices. Yet without being informed on the person, their nature, and what is genuinely good for them we cannot “will what is good for the other as other.”

St. John Paul II developed what has been called “Thomistic Personalism” in an era after great evils which were perpetrated by war and communism. Rationalistic morality did not meet the genuine needs to acknowledge what mankind had just experienced. Merely treating morality as a “theory” disconnected the average person from something that needed to be addressed practically and with explicit reference to mankind’s experience of that evil. The other extreme was the subjectivism which discounted the possibility of good or evil, and reduced them to mere constructs. Such a position was entirely dismissive of the horrific and traumatic experiences of many. The tension between a subjectivism that isn’t held accountable to reason and discernment, and a sterile relationship that is theoretical and abstract seem to be an ongoing battle of extremes in our day. Examining how we treated one another during the pandemic where face-to-face conversations rarely took place illustrates this point. In many ways, without seeing the person, we depersonalized them and instead began to treat one another as the embodiment of an ideology rather than an unrepeatable, unique person.

Imbedded in the philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas is a type of personal knowing where we understand that knowledge is not disembodied from our experiences as rational animals, and it always has personal implications. Thus, knowledge and love are intimately connected. Rooted in connection between love and knowledge was also the notion of the good and consequently evil. Man was created to have an appetite for what is good. What he considers good, he seeks out. According to personalists, there is another type of knowing (an equivocal type) that occurs in the very activity of the person loving, and donating themselves to the other. This isn’t a type of knowledge as we typically experience, but its the type of communion of persons, where we approach each other not as objects, but as unique subjects. We, through empathy and love are capable of recognizing that each person is unrepeatable, unique, and rare. They are not reduced to their sin, to their ideology, to their utility. Rather, each is a universe unto itself, and in fact worth more than any of the cosmos that isn’t a person.

Now as Catholics we know that God is the ultimate good. It is therefore reasonable for us to conclude that it is God that we ultimately seek. But this statement cannot merely be one of theory, but must manifest practically in our daily behavior. For this reason scripture teaches us that if we say we love God but hate our neighbor, we are liars (1 John 4:20). In other words, God isn’t looking for some lofty sentimentality found in rationalism - this is a nominal faith. Rather God is looking for an integrated love for God.

In order for us to understand how such love comes about, we might use the natural process of learning according to St. Thomas Aquinas. Aristotle asserts it in his Physics, where we begin with what we know best: the natural world. We come to first know good things that are created. But through reflection and meditation we come to wonder and search-out the cause of the goodness in that created thing. As any grateful person would do, we want to ultimately thank and understand what is at the root of something good. For instance, if you are given an incredible gift, but it is from someone unknown you would likely exhaust all your effort to discover who it was that thought of you, and sacrificed for you this great gift.

To put it rather simply and in scientific terms - man often comes to know things as effects before he understands their causes. For instance, when learning geometry, we might be given an equation, but understanding why that equation works may take more time. The same is generally applied to all of creation, where we come to know creation before we know the Creator. When we ponder what God has created, it naturally leads us back to Him.

Now, if we apply all of this to human relationships, we find ourselves purifying how we look at creation. It so often happens that we in an undisciplined manner will make idols out of created things, including relationships with other persons. Despite the fact that each person is unrepeatable, we are still nonetheless drawn from the goodness of God Himself, and do not exist independently or unoriginally from Him. The opposite can always be the case, where we are so fixated on God’s goodness that we exaggerate or demean what God has created as a way of contrasting the two. This certainly occurred during the protestant reformation where we consider the doctrine of total depravity. One of the metaphysical principals left behind from the Scholastic Philosopher St. Thomas Aquinas led to this rather significant dysfunction in our relationship with God and neighbor.

This perennial principle is called “participation,” whereby we understand that man is good because he is a finite participation in God’s own goodness. Having fallen in love with God, and integrating this notion of participation, man becomes capable of loving man with a heightened dignity because of who God is, ultimately. St. Thomas was able to arrive at this conclusion by first beginning with creation, and drawing back to its ultimate source, God, who created us ultimate in His image. That is to say, that God did not contract-out of Himself to generate the human race, but all of us are a finite manifestation and participation of something true about Him.

In this way, we see that our knowledge often begins in a disjointed way about created things, but they point us toward God. Once we come to know God more, and love him deeply, its important that we do not then throw away creation as if it exists in some competition with God. Rather, we must integrate an absolute and ultimate love for God, and understand that our love for our neighbor results because of that goodness which is contingent upon God. In this way, we go from creation to the Creator, back to creation again. In this process we find a purification of our love for God who comes first, and those in His image, second.

Practically speaking, when you encounter other individuals, do you consider them finite participations in God’s own goodness? Or are they somehow disjointed from God? Do you find that your love for your neighbor is not integrated into a love for God? Do you find yourself loving your neighbor too much, and forget that their goodness is not per se, but contingent upon God? When you encounter someone who is real, concrete, and difficult to love, do you see a a personal, unrepeatable, participation in God’s own goodness.

The cycle of knowledge here cannot be understood rationalistically, but it must be tied to real experience. Many will be quick to share their negative experiences, and yet, God has graced us all with encounters of goodness. How has that experience drawn us back to Him, filtered our notion of the good, and drawn us back to be reconciled to one another?