Mar 18 2025 6 mins
Pocket Edition of St. Thomas, The Summa Simplified for Everyone, by Walter Farrell and Martin Healy (1952)
Copies of the book available from TAN Books.
A note about the transcript generated by Substack:
The transcript generator twice removed the sentence “Of all creation, the humanity of Our Lord clearly ranks highest in the love of God; no other creature has been as close to God as substantial union” and replaced it with “1 Corinthians 1, verse 1” and made other changes to transcript corrections I had entered manually.
Internet demons apparently do not want readers considering the implications of Our Lord’s humanity.
I corrected a downloaded version of the transcript, pasted below.
Often enough, we must resort to figurative language when we speak of God, simply because the arms of our mind will not go around the infinite truth that is God.
To speak of the anger of God, His hope, desire, or sorrow gets something said of Him as long as we remember that we are borrowing from the poets to hint at things we cannot say.
For all these things literally indicate that God is in some way vulnerable, that there are avenues of inimical invasion of divinity, or that he needs help to reach what is still lacking to him.
We are talking in metaphors and must speak with the utmost caution.
But when we speak of love in God, we are talking in literal terms. This is true of God and cannot be said too strongly. There is no need for caution, no apology for the seeming extravagance of love's language.
St. Thomas, for example, makes so bold as to say, "A lover is placed outside himself and made to pass into the object of his love, inasmuch as he wills good to the beloved, and works for that good by his providence even as he works for his own."
To apply this general truth of love to God, he calls on Dionysius, lest he seem to be going too far: "On behalf of the truth, we must make bold to say even this, that He himself, the cause of all things, by his abounding love and goodness, is placed outside himself by his providence for all existing things.
Much bolder things must be said when it is a question of the divine love that God places in a man's heart, the love we know is charity.
The point here is the truth that thrusts its sharp point at the very heart of the universe: God loves.
The goodness of the world and of the men and women in it is a lover's invitation to our heart to come forth from its lonely castle.
On the contrary, God's heart is not called forth to love, rather, it is His love that calls from nothingness all the goodness that He loves in His creatures.
We wander the world alert to the discovery of something worth loving, helpless to produce that lovableness and so in all our loving, there is a note of surprise, of delight, of exultation that never loses humility's unobtrusive grace: All this is so obviously not from us. We cannot make goodness. We can only discover it and gratefully embrace it.
God's love is always productive of goodness, creative, effective. His heart does not wander the world searching goodness, but scattering it. Wherever the love of God lights, lovableness springs into being and is divinely cherished.
In a very real sense, God loves everything that is, for to every existing thing God has effectively willed some good, otherwise it would not be.
And this is love's best definition, to will good to another and to get it done.
"Thou lovest all things that are, and hatest none of the things which thou hast made." (Wis. 11/25)
This is not to say that every soaring bird or growing shrub is a friend of God's. That is a privilege reserved for us, who can return that love and share the divine life He leads, as becomes a friend.
All the rest of creation is loved by God for Himself, to the sharing of his goodness, and for us, His friends, for there are services they can render to us.
Perhaps it is this last that so shrivels our pride in our own love: that this Friend should put omnipotence to work in the making of the universe that we, His friends, might find our way home to Him.
We get so little done for our friends and demand so much as the price of continued friendship.
Even the greatest sinner, scorning friendship and declaring war, does not cut off God's love for him. God hates the sin that is destroying this friend of His, not the man on whom he lavishes the wonders of a universe.
For us who are his friends, who have minds to understand and hearts to love, the very universe he has made for us opens up the heart of God, for it tells much of the story of His loves.
There is no comparison between the love God has for a puff of dust carried along on a passing breeze and His love for a man striding boldly and purposefully toward the heights of God.
Every touch of God's love produces something of goodness. So the record of goodness, of the share in divine existence given to every creature, is a note in the scale of divine love.
What has more has been loved more by God: the non-living, the plants, the animals, men, the angels.
Yet this scale of natural perfection is not the whole story. Because supernatural gifts have been poured into the worlds of angels and men, our fuller knowledge of God's love must wait for heaven; for now, men can be better than angels, have more of divine life, and so more of divine love.
Of all creation, the humanity of Our Lord clearly ranks highest in the love of God; no other creature has been as close to God as substantial union. No other has had such absolute fullness of shared divine life or grace, such heights of glory.
The next, in certain preference, is surely the Mother of God, above all the saints and all the angels.
Beyond that, we cannot go. To attempt to determine the degree of God's love for Peter or John or James, for this or that man or woman of our acquaintance is a presumptuous invasion of the privacy of God.
"The Lord is the weigher of spirits, and no other." (Prov. 16/2)
Other podcasts in this series:
* Dec. 5, 2024 - Read-aloud: My Way of Life, 1952, Pocket Edition of St. Thomas, The Summa Simplified for Everyone, by Walter Farrell and Martin Healy.
* Dec. 11, 2024 - Read-aloud: The Summa Simplified for Everyone, pages 3-5
* Dec. 18, 2024 - Read-aloud: The Summa Simplified for Everyone, pages 5-9
* Jan. 3, 2025 - Read-aloud: The Summa Simplified for Everyone, pages 9-12
* Jan. 11, 2025 - Read-aloud: The Summa Simplified for Everyone, pages 12-15
* Jan. 17, 2025 - Read-aloud: The Summa Simplified for Everyone, pages 17 to 20
* Jan. 21, 2025 - Read-aloud: The Summa Simplified for Everyone, pages 20 to 23
* Jan. 30, 2025 - Read-aloud: The Summa Simplified for Everyone, pages 23 to 26
* Feb. 11, 2025 - Read-aloud: The Summa Simplified for Everyone, pages 26 to 29
* Feb. 25, 2025 - Read-aloud: The Summa Simplified for Everyone, pages 29 to 32
* March 3, 2025 - Read-aloud: The Summa Simplified, pages 32 to 35
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