Today’s reading from Exodus was a favorite of my favorite
philosopher, St. Thomas Aquinas. The story reads simply enough, but
for Aquinas the implications were momentous.
Moses is tending the flocks. He sees a burning bush which is not
consumed, and he hears his name called out from the blaze. When Moses
responds, “Here I am,” he is warned to “come no
nearer.” The spot on which he stands is holy ground. He
encounters the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God who has come
to rescue his people. Yet Moses is hesitant: “If they ask me
‘what is his name?’ what am I to tell them?” God
says, “I am who am. This is what you shall tell the
Israelites: I am sent me to you. This is my name forever.
This is my title for all generations.”
This section of Exodus begins an account of the relationship between
God and the Israelites. Their God will be a God of free covenant, a
God who personally intervenes to save them. “I am will
always be with them.”
True, there were other formulations that referred to God, for example: “The Most High,” “The One Who Sees,” “The Eternal One.” And even this particular expression has been given various interpretations, ranging from “I will be who I will be” to “I will be what I was.”
But Aquinas saw in the burning bush a revelation of the deepest mystery of a God who could never adequately and accurately be named or conceptualized. There is no other way to talk about who and what God is other than to say that God is existence itself. Am-ness. God is the holy ground of being. At the bottom of the universe is not some mindless grinding machinery or evolutionary process. What moves everything, from stars to human hearts, is personal existence.
If you just think about it, the fact that there is anything at all is the most wondrous thing. Existence is the giver and gift of all gifts. Nothing could be known, if there were nothing to know. Nothing could be loved if there were nothing to love. There could be no fulfillment, no desire, no truth, if there were no “is.”
Thus, in Aquinas’s own great exodus—his theological and philosophical journey called the Summa Theologica—after offering his five ways to God, he centers on existence itself as the word that can most adequately be applied to God.
Existence is the primary value, the fundamental good, one with the
very being of God. And since all other beings have their own existence
by gift of God, our existence is our primary value and goodness.
“Everything that exists is, as such, good, and has God as its
cause.” If we exist, and we cannot give existence to ourselves,
we must have been willed, loved into existence.
God not only creates and sustains every existing being; God also
creates each kind of being there is. Every being participates in a
hierarchy of goodness and intrinsic value. Each species is good, not
only because it exists in the first place, but also because of what it
is. Each species brings its own kind of goodness into the world; and
each species lost would be a loss of goodness. All creation, in all
its myriad forms, is existentially good.
Aquinas valued personal reality as the “most perfect grade of
existence” because it images the “I am-ness” of God:
life that knows itself and gives itself to the other. This is not some
glib species-ism, which degrades other kinds of life. It is just an
acknowledgment that freedom, intelligence, and love introduce a new
splendor of intrinsic goodness and value into the world which, without
persons, would be bereft of such beauty.
But the existence of personal creatures like human beings also
introduces a host of problems to the world. Our peculiar goodness as
humans is not only a function of the fact that we exist and that we
exist as a special kind. We also present a moral goodness to the
world, since we, with our capacities for intelligence and freedom, are
able to know and possess ourselves and consequently choose to become
the kind of persons we become.
Evil, for Aquinas, has no reality in itself. It occurs only as a
parasite. Evil appears only because good things exist.
Physical evil is a deficiency or lack in the physical reality of
various kinds of beings. Thus, a horse might not be fully good as a
horse, because it is lame. A fig tree is physically evil to the extent
that it does not bear the fruit of what it is.
Moral evil, however, is a deficiency or lack in the kind of human
being you or I have freely chosen to be. It is a negation of our
truth. It is a rejection of our goodness. It is a radical lie about
existence.
All too speculative, perhaps. But might not these philosophical
ruminations unlock the mysteries with which Lent ends? That bright
vigil will recall for us the holy ground of being: In God’s own
image, male and female, God created us. And like the great cosmic
march of species, we, humankind, were pronounced good by the one who
gave us the gift of being. Seduced by the great deceiver, the liar of
liars, we seem to have rejected it all. But by the bountiful grace of
“I am with you,” even the fault itself became a happy one.