Tag: Creation

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Church Teaching

Theological Anthropology 101: What is a Human Being?

Father Harrison Ayre

April 13, 2023 7:00 am April 13, 2023

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5 min read

The human being is described in The Catechism of the Catholic Church as created in God’s image – as both male and female – and is one person with both…

The human being is described in The Catechism of the Catholic Church as created in God’s image – as both male and female – and is one person with both a body and a soul. These are the defining characteristics of who we are and are worthy of our exploration.

Image of God

In the book of Genesis we learn that humanity is set apart from the rest of creation – created in the image of God (see Gen 1:27). This image is given uniquely to man, who is willed by God for his own sake. Animals, on the other hand, are made not for their own sake but for service to man.

God’s image is reflected in each human being and perfected in the communion persons. Just as God is a unity in a diversity of divine Persons, so too does man reach his fulfillment and dignity by entering into communion with others. This purpose was darkened through sin. But, by giving ourselves away for the sake of another in Christ, we find ourselves in the only truly life-giving communion.

Body and Soul

This image of God is also found in man by our composite nature of body and soul. So often today the body is misunderstood as a mode of expression that is easily manipulatable for the expression of one’s spiritual, true, inner self. The body is seen purely as an extension of the self. This is known as dualism, which focuses more on the separation of body and soul rather than their integration. The Christian tradition rejects that view. Rather, man is a singular nature of which the body and the soul are intimately united. Not just our souls, but our bodies manifest being made in God’s image.

The soul gives man two especially unique qualities that distinguishes him from the animals. These are attributes of God Himself and found in no other creatures aside from humanity: intellect and will. Man’s intellect gives him the ability to reason, to judge, and to know the truth. Most importantly, man’s intellect gives him the ability come to know and contemplate God.

The human will is the means by which we have true freedom. Through it we can choose the good and reject evil, and are able to offer our lives in the service of others. It is through the will that man is able to choose virtue over vice, to choose God and his salvation. The human will is the seat of action: the animals act but without the freedom of human beings. Man, through a certain intentionality, is able to give expression to his desires and to seek out the truth.

Male and Female

So often, when discussing our human nature, we look to body and soul, intellect and will as the summation of what it means to be human. Thanks to the magisterium of Pope St. John Paul II, another element was rediscovered and re-emphasized: that man is created in God’s image as male and female.

The Catechism emphasizes the equality between man and woman, created to be a unity “in one flesh.” Thus marriage is instituted from the beginning by which the union of man and woman makes visible the God in whose image man is made. Sexual differentiation is willed by God, and both man and woman make present something unique about Him. In a union through the gift of self in marriage, man and wife bring together their unique qualities to complement each other, and making present a more total vision of the human being in God’s image.

This teaching that man and woman are essential to human nature also reveals a final quality of humanity that is difficult for modern man to comprehend. So often we do not see ourselves as a corporate body, part of something bigger than ourselves. Rather, we see ourselves as atomized and separated from other human beings, focused more readily on “me.” We may speak generically of “the human race,” but practically and experientially – especially due to individualism – we have a hard time understanding the social nature of humanity. By virtue of the fact that God created man as a communion of persons from the beginning, it demonstrates that the individual is not perfected in isolation from others, but that it is built into our nature to seek out communion with others so as to come to our own perfection. This is, again, due to the fact that man is made in God’s image – who in himself is a communion of persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. As each person of the Trinity is only themselves in communion with the other persons, so, too, in man is an individual most fully themselves when in communion with others.

Father Harrison Ayre is a priest of the Diocese of Victoria, British Columbia. Follow him on Twitter at @FrHarrison. Read more from his Theological Anthropology 101 series here.

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4 min read

Creation

Discovering The Creator In Creation

St. Basil of Caesaria

March 28, 2023 6:45 am March 28, 2023

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4 min read

“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” (Gn 1:1). I’m struck with admiration at this thought. Yet the pagan philosophers have worked hard to explain nature apart…

“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” (Gn 1:1). I’m struck with admiration at this thought. Yet the pagan philosophers have worked hard to explain nature apart from God.

Not one of their intellectual systems, however, has remained firm and unshaken. Each one has been overturned by its successor. Why bother to refute them? They can destroy one another all by themselves.

Those who were too ignorant to rise to a knowledge of a God could not allow that an intelligent Cause presided at the birth of the universe. This was a primary error that involved them in sad consequences.

Some turned to purely material principles, attributing the origin of the universe to the elements of the world. Others imagined that atoms, and indivisible bodies, molecules and ducts, form, by their union, the nature of the visible world — all on their own. Atoms, reuniting or separating, produce births and deaths, they said, and the most durable bodies owe their consistency only to the strength of their mutual adhesion.

It’s a true spider’s web woven by these writers who gave to heaven, to earth and to sea so weak an origin and so little consistency! Why? Because they didn’t know how to say, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.”

Deceived by their inherent atheism, it appeared to them that nothing governed or ruled the universe, and that all was given up to chance. So to guard us against this error, the biblical writer about the creation, from his very first words, enlightens our understanding with the name of God: “In the beginning God created.”

What a glorious order! The writer first establishes that there was a beginning, so that it might not be supposed that the world never had one. Then he adds “created” to show that what was made was only a very small part of the power of the Creator.

The potter, after having made with equal pains a great number of vessels, hasn’t exhausted either his art or his talent. In the same way, the Maker of the universe — whose creative power, far from being bounded by one world, could extend to the infinite — needed only the impulse of His will to bring the immensities of the visible world into being.

“In the beginning God created.” It is He — all-giving Nature, Goodness without measure, a worthy Object of love for all beings endowed with reason, the Beauty that is most to be desired, the Origin of all that exists, the Source of life, intellectual Light, impenetrable Wisdom — it is He who “in the beginning created the heavens and the earth.”

Nor must anyone vainly imagine that the world has no end. “For this world in its present form is passing away” (1 Cor 7:31). And “heaven and earth will pass away” (Mt 24:35).

What was begun in time is destined to come to an end in time. If there has been a beginning, don’t doubt that there is an end.

Of what use ultimately, then, are mathematics and physics and far-famed astronomy — what a laborious vanity they become — to those who cannot conceive that a whole, whose parts are subject to decay and change, must of necessity end by succumbing itself to the fate of its parts? But “their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools” (Rom 1:21-22). Seeing clearly into science, they have nevertheless willfully shut their eyes to the knowledge of the truth.

Such atheists may measure the distances of the stars and describe them, may observe with exactitude the course of the stars, their fixed places, their declensions, their return and the time that each takes to make its revolution. But they have discovered everything except one thing: the fact that God is the Creator of the universe, and in the end He will be the just Judge who rewards all the actions of life according to their merit.

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5 min read

Creation

Health and Holiness Are Not Opposed

Father Harrison Ayre

December 21, 2022 6:25 am December 21, 2022

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There is a lingering, though prominent, tendency in the Church to pit the created realm against our eternal destiny. To put it differently, there are some who have a tendency…

There is a lingering, though prominent, tendency in the Church to pit the created realm against our eternal destiny. To put it differently, there are some who have a tendency to see eternity with God as the only thing that matters, and anything lower than this goal is at best unimportant and at worst impeding it. This mentality, often unrecognized and typically based in no ill will, suggests God is against his creation, creating a competition between us and God. By that is meant that whatever, or whomever, “wins out” will dominate over the loser. The problem with this view is that God, being God, will always win and, moreover, dominate. Furthermore, the competitive view of God and creation looks at the relationship through the lens of power, which means that promoting the eternal to the neglect of the created ultimately overwhelms the latter and removes any sense of importance.

A common misconception lies at the root of this false competition. While it is obviously true that God and our destiny toward him are the most important things in our lives, we often make an error in reasoning about the lesser goods — namely that we think “because this is the highest good, the lower goods are of no importance.”

Just because something is more important, it does not entail a neglect of the lower goods, but rather an orienting of them toward the highest good. For example, though our eternal destiny is our ultimate goal, part of achieving that goal is to look after our neighbors, which entails looking after their health, etc. These are all the means by which we achieve the eternal goal: through lower concrete goods that God has tasked us with.

Not looking at the hierarchy of goods with a properly Christian attitude can undermine some basic truths of Christian revelation. For example, the competitive view described above can undermine our understanding of the person of Jesus and the doctrine of the Incarnation. When the Word took on flesh in Jesus Christ, humanity was not overwhelmed, but rather was it lifted up and perfected. Jesus’ Incarnation has a reason and a purpose: to lift up all that is created — matter, time, spirit, indeed the entire cosmos — and put it all in right relationship with God. But this redemption happens in cooperation with and within the created order. Putting God and creation in competition portrays a view of the Incarnation that the only meaningful doctrine is the divinity of Jesus, that his humanity can be cast aside, at best, and at worst it is destroyed and overwhelmed by the presence of God. If the eternal is all that matters, then we have to put blinders on some key aspects of Jesus’ saving mission—– notably his death and resurrection. Yet, it is precisely in Jesus’ saving mission that God shows he has no desire to circumvent his creation. Rather, through Jesus, God embraces his creation, works through it and raises its dignity. What God has created good, he does not want to destroy, rather, he wants to save it.

The Christian understanding of the human person also shows how it is problematic to pit eternity against creation. So often we can forget that our eternal destiny happens by means of and through our created nature. Yes, we have an eternal goal, but that goal is achieved in and through creation — through time and space. The soul is not all that matters, but the body does, too, because, ultimately, our goal is more than heaven — it is the resurrection of the body. To say that the eternal is really all that matters facilitates in us the idea that our health, the poverty of our neighbor, or even the common good really are not all that important because they will dissolve in the eternal presence of God. Rather, though, we see life as a training for the resurrection, whereby God wants to redeem and redeem all that is good, including the body and all of creation. Our eternal goal is important, but it is done in and through the body. Our bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit and caring for them — in working to safeguard the health and wellbeing of ourselves and others and looking out for the material needs of those less fortunate — is vital practice for our share in the divine life.

And so, our higher goods are not in competition with the lower. Rather, it is through the lower goods that we actually come to achieve the final goal — our eternal destiny. God works through created things to draw us to himself, this is his primary mode of working. This means health and holiness are not opposed. Catholics would do well to stop looking at the hierarchy of goods as somehow in competition, but rather as the means to submit all things to Christ.

Father Harrison Ayre is a priest of the Diocese of Victoria, British Columbia. Follow him on Twitter at @FrHarrison.

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