"For Your Great Glory"

 How do we praise and thank God?

The Gloria says, “We thank you for your great glory.” What is the “glory” of God?

God’s glory is his greatness and goodness made manifest. We “glorify” God when we make obvious in ourselves or proclaim to others his Being, Truth, Goodness and Love. God is glorified in us (John 15:8, 17:10). And we glorify him when we praise him.

To praise we must appreciate. And to appreciate we must praise. Experience is only complete in expression. So what is the first step toward being able to “thank God for his great glory”?

Saint Robert Bellarmine (1542-1621, the first Jesuit Cardinal) explains in The Mind’s Ascent to God that we should use the “Ladder of Created Things.” There are fifteen steps. We won’t give them all![1]

Bellarmine first explains it is not contradictory to say that “God is not far from anyone of us, since in him we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:27), but that nevertheless we are distant from him. God sees us, is in constant contact with us, holding us in being, and thinks about us continually. But we cannot see God, touch him, or hug him with affection. Worse, we cannot even think about him easily if we are all wrapped up in created things.

The solution is to unwrap the good things God has created and find him revealed in them. But for this we ourselves have to be unwrapped – detached, freed from the smothering embrace of those things that are holding us instead of being held, blocking our vision instead of opening insights into God. When our heart is free, our eyes can see.

Our “heart” is a combination of mind and will. To love is to know and choose. So, like a good Jesuit, Saint Robert suggests we begin by thinking. About ourselves.

Begin with the hand in front of your face. What explains it?

Evolution might explain how it got there, but nothing you see explains why it is there. Its “what it is” does not explain its “that it is.” So what is giving your hand existence?

This is the classic question about the “first cause.” Which came first, the chicken or the egg? The answer is “Neither, because there is nothing in either that could make it exist.” The first cause has to be something that needs nothing before itself; something that, if we could see it, we would see that it cannot not be. Something whose “what it is” explains its “that it is.” It is not the first in a series; it is something different from everything in the series. Something that doesn’t need a cause because there is no real difference between its “essence” (what it is) and its “existence” (that it is).

We cannot even imagine such a being, because an image requires a silhouette, a shape determined by boundaries. So do human thoughts. Our minds are made to understand particular beings, not Being Itself. Our thoughts are still-shots. Everything we know is framed; made clear and distinct by its structure, its boundaries, that “determine” (from terminus) its dimensions, its qualities, its “determining characteristics.” To “de-fine” something is to identify its fines or limits. We only know what something is by excluding what it isn’t.

But Being-as-Such has no framework, no structure. It is “in-finite,” without fines that “finish” or stop its existence at some point by restricting its dimensions. Its “determining characteristic” is to have no determining – that is “terminating” – characteristics. It is All that is, because its Being is to be Being Itself.

God is the Source of all being, but he has no source. His “what he is” is identical to his “that he is.” As God said, defining himself to Moses, “I AM WHO AM. Say to the children of Israel: HE WHO IS, has sent me to you” (Exodus 3:14).

That tells us everything and nothing. It tells us that God is, but unimaginable. So we get to know him by thinking about things we can understand, the things he has made. What they are has to come from God, so he must be what they are, only better. What God is giving them, God must have himself, only in greater measure. The Latin head-breaker for this is propter quod unumquodque et illud magis. If you can translate that, give yourself a star!

To be precise, God is not “better” or “greater,” as one in a series. God is hors de série, above and beyond all comparisons. When we use the same word to describe creatures and God we mean they are “analogously” the same. They are same enough to justify using the same word, but too different for the word to have exactly the same meaning in both. We just have to keep this in mind.

So if we want to “thank God for his great glory,” we have to see how his wisdom, goodness and love are revealed in the things and people he has made. The best way to get to know God is to get to know ourselves. Not just superficially, but in depth.

This is more than knowing how we function. We know that through biology and psychology, through chemistry and physics. We go “beyond physics” and technology – the study of how things work – when we go into “metaphysics,” the study of what things are. Metaphysics is the study of being.

To know God personally – as he is in himself – instead of just” professionally, as “Architect of the Universe,” we have to compare our being with his Being, what we are in ourselves with what God is in himself.

This starts us up the “Ladder of Created Things” to begin our Mind’s Ascent to God.

Stay tuned for our next thrilling episode of praising and thanking God for his great glory.

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[1] Republished by Paulist Press, 1989. In quoting, I have freely rearranged texts and paraphrased.