Mass of Ages - Spring 2025

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THEOLOGY

God is Who He Is In his second article on the Creed, Fr Aidan Nichols explains that whatever the universe contains, from a galaxy to a gnat, it only does so through created participation in God’s unique, incomparable, ‘act’ of being

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he opening words of the Creed can only end by naming God. The absolute self-commitment implied in the Latin phrase credo in would be totally misplaced if it had a creature for its object. In the Latin language, to say, ‘I believe in’ – and mean it – is to entrust oneself unconditionally to whatever or whoever is going to conclude that very short sentence. In such a confession of faith, substituting a creature for God would mean for the speaker spiritual death. Unfortunately, many people who ought to understand the force of the Creed’s introductory phrase turn out in practice to have a distinctly truncated idea of God, undermining the entire enterprise of reciting the Creed from the outset. A God – really, I should write that as ‘God’ – who is simply a very important personage in the cosmos is just not big enough to fill the space the Creed’s first words open to us. People who would be horrified at the accusation of idolatry – the suggestion that they were inclined to worship, say, totem poles or the simulacra of a fertility goddess – may still be what we might call conceptual idolaters. That is why St John Damascene, speaking for the Eastern Fathers, and St Thomas, speaking for those of the West, are agreed that the primary Name of God was revealed in God’s self-description to Moses: ‘I Am Who Am’: God is ‘He Who Is’. (Compare the account of Moses at the Burnish Bush in the Book of Genesis 3:14.) It is God’s nature to be. Not just to exist, as in the case of that Very Important Personage just mentioned, but to be the Fount of being, in such a way that whatever the universe contains,

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from a galaxy to a gnat, it only does so through created participation in God’s unique, incomparable, ‘act’ of being. All possible perfections are actual in this ‘Being One’, which is how that divine Name appears in Greek (‘Ho Ôn’) on Byzantine icons. All goodness, truth, and beauty are pre-contained in God’s unsurpassable fulness. That is why, of course, there can only be one God. The exclusive oneness of God is a truth of reason as well as of faith. To suggest there might be two, three, or half a dozen gods, or even a crowd of them, as on Mount Olympus in classical mythology, is to show we have never grasped the idea of God in the first place. The Nicene Creed rubs this in by making explicit what is only implied in the Apostles’ Creed. Credo in unum Deum, I believe in the God who is one. And while on the topic of misunderstandings, I might add that another slip concerns God’s gender, or, better, the gendered language in which we speak of God. As the fulness of being, God surpasses all distinctions among his creatures, the gender distinction among them. That said, a great deal turns on whether the gendered language in which we speak of God is primarily masculine or feminine. The language, including the symbolic imagery, for God in biblical revelation is primarily masculine. That is for reasons intimately bound up with the way Scripture sees the relation between God and the world. If God’s relation with the world were one of seamless continuity, then the predominant language for the divine Fount of being would be female and maternal.

Our metaphysical relation to God would be like the umbilical cord that attaches – literally! – the baby to its birth-mother. But revelation shows that is not how things stand. Our relation of dependence on God is that of creation – where God makes things to exist by bringing them from nothing, in a fashion that is discontinuous, unexpected, and, indeed, concealed. That is what makes male and paternal language best suited to God. There would be no suits of contested paternity if the biological father were as obvious to everyone as the biological mother. But once, with the Bible, we grasp this crucial point, then we can – again, with Sacred Scripture – confess how ‘motherly’, in the sense of caring, tender, and compassionate – the Father is. ‘The Father’, for that is the next affirmation of the Creed. Here, though, the makers of the Creed have more in mind than just how the universe stands in relation to its Source. For the New Testament revelation (here the Old Testament can only furnish the odd clue), God is named ‘Father’ inasmuch as he is the Generator of the Beloved, the Only-begotten, the Son. From before all worlds, which is as much as to say, prescinding from any notion whatsoever of a universe, the one God enjoyed his plenary being by communicating his divinity to Another. That took place – takes place, for the act concerned is eternal, still going on now – in a movement of superabundant generosity so exquisite that the only name we have for it is ‘love’. Unlike the cosmos, which is made, the Son is loved into being, proceeding from

SPRING 2025


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