The great metaphysical truth on which the whole of Sacred Scripture opens, and to which everything from beginning to end testifies, is that this world in which we live and move and locate our being is a visible and created place. That it is, moreover, the result of a good and generous God who, bringing it forth from nothingness, holds it in being from moment to moment lest it fall back into that same nothingness to which all creation tends when left to its own devices.

Therefore, the world we see and touch, taste and smell and hear, is not the outcome of a God having to somehow struggle against a horde of lesser deities, forced to wrestle with the forces of chaos in order, as it were, to capture the cosmos. But a God who need only say “Be!” and things are, they exist. A God whose very name bespeaks being. “I Am Who Am!” he thunders forth when asked by Moses to reveal his name to the Israelites. “Thus shalt thou say to the children of Israel: He Who Is, hath sent me to you” (Exodus 3:13-14). This is how we are to address the God of Israel, who is at the same time the God of all peoples, and of the universe itself — Yahweh, for Yahweh means “He Who Is.”

Why else would Aquinas, reaching for the most apt, the most precise definition of God, insist on calling him Qui Est (“He Who Is”)? Because it is the name more proper to God than even the name God itself. Nothing less will do, nothing else can possibly carry the freight of sheer being, the ipsum esse of a God who simply is. It follows, therefore, that the only possible basis upon which a world filled with finite and contingent beings may be said to exist, is that He Who Alone Is has done this. The universe belongs to God, who is not only the owner of all that is in it, but the sole sustainer of its being, its continued existence. And the act by which God has done this, has given being to that which is not, we call creation.

“Between ‘He Who Is,’ and ourselves,” writes Etienne Gilson, the foremost expert on the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas, “there is the infinite metaphysical chasm which separates the complete self-sufficiency of his own existence from the intrinsic lack of necessity of our own existence. Nothing can bridge such a chasm, save a free act of the divine will.”

Or, putting it in the starkest possible way, which is how Christ himself put it in conversation with St. Catherine of Siena: “Do you know, daughter, who you are and who I am? If you know these two things, you have beatitude in your grasp. You are the one who is not, and I Am He Who Is.”

It is the first principle of the spiritual life — i.e., the realization that there is a God and that it is not any one of us. And from it, all else follows, including the fact that this world in which we live is a most meaningful place to be. How could it be otherwise when the author of the world is no less than God himself? Because God does not make mistakes, the world he made, having spoken it into being, is something very good indeed.

“In the beginning was the Word,” as Josef Ratzinger once exclaimed, “and the Word burst into song.” It cannot be unfitting, therefore, to regard the world as part of God’s chorus. So long, that is, as we acknowledge him as having written the song, orchestrating the world in giving it voice. The world cannot generate its own song.

This is why, in giving us such a world, we must not see it as merely a dungeon or a place of dark shadows. But rather as a haven of hope and happiness, a setting full of bright light and endless promise. And every contact we have with it becomes an invitation, an enticement even, to explore all the features and facets of it, plunging ever deeper into the heart of its mystery. Because the meaning of the world is not finally itself, but that of Another, of God, who is more present to it than it is to itself. Thus it will signify far more than it can say. “The world,” says Luigi Giussani, “is like a word, a ‘logos’ which sends you further, calls you on to another, beyond itself, further up.” It serves as a kind of launching pad, a gateway no less, to eternal life.

Whether it works out that way, however, depends on the disposition we bring to our encounter with it. Concerning which, Giussani tells us, two options present themselves. Here is how he describes “the two types,” he calls them, “of men (who) capture entirely the grandeur of the human being: the anarchist and the authentically religious man.

By nature, man is relation to the infinite: on the one hand, the anarchist affirms himself to an infinite degree, while on the other hand, the authentically religious man accepts the infinite as his meaning.

Notice how the two options turn on the question of creation itself, whether one is disposed to receive it as a gift, the sheer gratuitousness of which moving one to give thanks, or as an arbitrary and oppressive imposition, the terms of which one will not accept. So long as one insists on being one’s own center of the universe, God cannot give us anything. “I personally understood this,” Giussani continues, “when a young man, urged on by his mother, came to me for confession.” But he had no faith, only an insolence in the face of whatever poor Father Giussani was trying to tell him, against whom he would conscript even Dante to make his case.

‘You cannot deny,’ the young man declared, ‘that the true grandeur of man is represented by Dante’s Capaneus, that giant chained by God to Hell, yet who cries out to God, “I cannot free myself from these chains because you bind me here. You cannot, however, prevent me from blaspheming you, and so I blaspheme you.” ‘This is the true grandeur of man.’

Not the usual sort of exchange one imagines between priest and penitent. Nevertheless, he goes on to ask the young man, “But isn’t it greater to love the infinite?” The young man leaves unshriven, but returns four months later, telling him that he was so “eaten away” by what he had said that “for two weeks he had been receiving the sacraments. … He died soon after in an automobile accident.”

The conclusion Giussani draws is so moving that it is worth repeating in full, especially as it illustrates the argument of this essay: 

Anarchy is the most fascinating temptation, but it is as deceitful as it is attractive. The strength of its deceit lies precisely in its appeal, which make us forget that man is made — that at one point he does not exist and then he dies. Only pure violence can make him say, ‘I affirm myself against all and everything.’ It is much greater and truer to love the infinite, that is, to embrace reality and being rather than to assert oneself against them. 

The evidence is all about us. Yet, by our refusing to see it, disdaining to embrace a reality we did not create, we may forfeit the possibility of ever accepting either ourselves, or others, as pure gift. We will then take ourselves to a place we were never created to have to face. Forever …