MADE FOR GOD

MAN IS MADE FOR GOD

                        Man is made for God. This is the foundational reality of man. Being is the first perfection. Existence is not only an endowment; it is purposive, instinct with dynamic purpose, radical intentionality, significance and an end. Creation hungers for the divine, its purpose and end. It cannot but be, since contingent being is participated being, participating in total being, understood by the principle of analogy. Here is intrinsic analogy: every created being is the secondary analogue of total being and cannot be understood apart from it.

                     Every affirmation of contingent being is an implicit affirmation of total being. And God is total being. The intellect affirms God as total truth; and the will chooses God as total good. The truth is known (formal object of the intellect), and the good is loved (formal object of the will). Thus God is known and loved; and in this knowing and loving is complete bliss. That is why God is total bliss. By knowing and loving himelf (the ultimate object of knowledge and love) he is in the act of complete and exhaustive self-possession. He is in one the possessor and the possessed. There is in God no part or element that is yet unknown and unloved, no potency that has yet to be actualized. God is pure act, totally actual, the totality of reality.

                        On God’s part, he affirms himself by one, single and eternal act of affirmation. When I come into being by his created power, he does not make a new act of affirmation, but in affirming himself he affirms me. The beginning of my existence in time was already included in his eternal act of self-affirmation. My coming into being is the temporal effect of an eternal decision. I am the product of the love-knowledge of himself. While not being God, I am caught up in God’s eternal self-possession.

                        What a mystery, this creation, pointing to from within the infinite mystery that is God. God knows and loves himself, and with the same movement he knows and loves his creation. God knows and loves me in himself, which is everlastingly. As the Bible says, “I have loved you with an everlasting love.” And how right Jesus was when he says in the Gospel of John, “Abide in my love.”