“Microcosm & Mediator: The Gift of Humanity in the Midst of Creation – Dr. Michael Taylor
Dr. Michael Taylor (Thomas More College of the Liberal Arts) spoke to Valor Institute retreat participants about the place of humanity within the order of creation. While human persons share an ontological bond with all created beings, they alone are capable of choosing to make a conscious gift of self, echoing the gift-pattern that characterizes reality.
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Transcript
“Creation is a gift because man appears in it. As the image of God, man is capable of understanding the meaning of gift in the call from nothingness to existence. Man appears in creation as the one who received the world as a gift. And it can also be said that the world received man as a gift.”
— John Paul II, “Creation as the Fundamental and Original Gift” (January 2, 1980)
Most of what he says seems intuitive. Creation cannot really be considered a true gift if there is no rational creature capable of receiving it and appreciating it for what it is — of the gratuity, of the goodness, truth, and beauty that overwhelms, that surpasses our capacity to comprehend it. The simple beauty of a sunset, or the sight of a clear night sky shot through with stars, can take our breath away. The inexhaustible wonder of the natural world never loses its ability to amaze us; and in its midst the human person, with the capacity for friendship, courage, humor, and love, binds it all together in a hierarchical unity of inestimable riches.
The final claim, however — that the world has received man as a gift — seems less obvious. And certainly there are many in our day who would argue that, to the contrary, man is precisely what is wrong with the world: a blight and a cancer amidst an otherwise healthy system of homeostasis. In a limited sense, we would have to admit that they are not wrong — despite the sad state of affairs, first, that so often these accusations appear to have come to have some truth to them, and second, that so many seem to have lost hope in the human person’s divine calling, or have no knowledge of it whatsoever. As we shall see, it is only with and through man, in his very being, that physical creation can achieve a significance beyond its fleeting existence. By his unique ontological position, situated on the horizon of the spiritual and the physical, man is the creature who has received the greatest gift, and who therefore bears the greatest responsibility.
I’ll start with the bad news first, as it were — the current status of our thinking about creation as a whole, and about man within it: two errors to avoid, a Scylla and Charybdis of modern anthropological errors, namely those of Darwin and Descartes. From there, we will be able to appreciate more fully the richness of Christian thought about the reality that is the human person. Aquinas will be our primary guide as we outline what human nature is, and thus our mission and vocation in the midst of the created order. Special attention will be paid to the role of beauty in creation — what it is and how it acts, as an invitation and a catalyst for the fulfillment of all things — as well as to time, which man ought to experience as a gift coextensive with the gift of existence.
Modern Misanthropy: Darwin and Descartes
The dominant modern worldview — our technocratic paradigm, and current cultural attitudes — would have us believe that everything that exists was not created, but is rather the consequence of a chain of physical reactions that began with the Big Bang, giving way to the world we see around us. This conception is agnostic toward the real noumenal world, which, if it exists at all, exists entirely hidden behind the phenomena we experience only subjectively. The things around us, in our very corporeal reality, are in this way taken for granted as simply given — the output of physical processes that ultimately have little bearing on the existence of things, which are conceived as unrelated and atomistic bodies in space that act according to the inexorable laws of physics. Human freedom is either an illusion born of evolutionary processes, or an archetypal, undetermined force constitutive of human identity, the mere exercise of which is the essence of human fulfillment.
In a strange twist, this technocratic paradigm and its postmodern relations often blame Christianity for the ecological crises of our time, without ever suspecting the depth and beauty of creation from a Christian perspective. These worldviews, hopelessly trapped in their own skeptical presuppositions, fail to grasp the essential quality of reality — the true meaning of the radical contingency of existence. By taking existence for granted, one is blind to the path of reflection that leads not to rationalism and nihilism, but to self-knowledge, relationality, and fruitful human fulfillment. This path begins with the simple observation that nothing in this world is the source of its own existence, that the existence of each thing is distinct from itself.
Darwinian materialism and Cartesian dualism seem at odds with each other, yet they find common cause in their opposition to a symbolic and sacramental vision. They both denigrate creation, even if they appear to allow for some forms of human exceptionalism. To defend against them, it is not enough to hold tightly to the theological dogmas about the nature of God. For as Aquinas warned, one cannot misinterpret creation without misconstruing the Creator also. Writing in the Summa Contra Gentiles, he explains, “an error concerning creatures spills over into a false opinion about God.” At worst, these errors lead to atheism and nihilism; at best, they lead to deism, which conceives of God as a great architect or clockmaker. Yet so many today live in a state of practical deism, as if God is out there but not in here, at the heart of all things, more intimate to me than I am to myself.
When it comes to anthropology, those errors underlie two flawed notions about the creation of man. On the one hand, we get a meaningless and merely material evolution; on the other, we get a demiurge implanting souls into mechanized bodies amidst an otherwise soulless world. The first submerges man within nature, while the second seems to create an infinite gap between man and nature. And yet both are united in their rejection of the connaturality of spirit and matter which defines creation. Rejecting creation, they reject the Creator.
Despite centuries of rigorous critique by the greatest thinkers, these notions endure, resurfacing in new guises, subtly infiltrating contemporary discourse. Here I would merely point to two errors, consistently committed, that allow these misconceptions to persist. The first is to forget the primacy of actuality over potentiality. Suffice it to say that when we speak of something that is merely material or purely physical, we implicitly exclude something that must already be presupposed for matter to be intelligible at all. Anything that is — that participates in being — is being informed by some immaterial essence, whether it is wood or water, a butterfly or a boy. Even the simplest grain of sand manifests the unity that is informed from above, with an essence that is actually receiving the gift of being in each moment. This unity, that transcendent wholeness, gathers the radiance of truth, goodness, and beauty into a single coherent light. Nothing can be said to be true, good, or beautiful if it is not first being. This is decisive in dismantling the belief that more complex things can always be explained by breaking them into smaller components. This is true in the case of mathematics and mechanics, but there are realms of reality that are irreducible to these. A machine will still work if it is taken apart and put back together again; the same is not true for living things. And yet modern science ignores the difference.
The second error results from a more subtle deception, in which we see the combined effect of materialism and dualism at work. While on one front the Darwinist materialists insist that there is no qualitative difference between humans and animals, the Cartesians are waiting for us to divorce ourselves from the rest of creation, which they deem a mere heap of biological machinery. While, against the Darwinists, they affirm the uniqueness of everything human over everything animal — an affirmation that is not wrong in itself — they are tempted to ignore or downplay every sign of animal intelligence, intentionality, or emotion. Meanwhile, by dismissively describing these behaviors as mere instincts that animals are programmed to carry out, they open the way to the reduction of life to a mechanistic doctrine of creation. If the behavior of animals is explained away as mechanical, then, in the ensuing confusion, the behavior of human beings will inevitably be also — becoming deterministic and erasing human responsibility. Thus, even when we do offer a convincing argument for the distinction between humans and animals, we must immediately contend with the Cartesians, whose philosophy brought us transgenderism, the elimination of sacramentality, and the technocratic paradigm.
Starting with the first, one must begin to defend man and creation from the evolutionary materialists by denying them the privilege of setting the terms of the discussion. For Ratzinger, this did not mean that the notion of the progressive development of life had to be denied, but only its materialistic interpretation. It would be a mistake to conflate the one with the other simply because they are often unjustly paired. It is not the case that the human soul enters the body as something extrinsic, as a foreign second substance; nor is it the result of mechanical tinkering, still less a biological emergence. According to Ratzinger: “the moment of anthropogenesis cannot possibly be determined by paleontology. The rise of the spirit cannot be excavated with a shovel. The theory of evolution does not invalidate the faith, nor does it corroborate it. But it does challenge the faith to understand itself more profoundly, and thus to help man to understand himself and to become increasingly what he is: the being who is supposed to say “thou” to God in eternity.”
In order to defend the spiritual nature of man and his great dignity, we must begin by defending the truth that life is qualitatively different from non-life — a distinction lost on most modern and postmodern thinkers. We must further defend the hierarchical nature of the various forms of life, just as strongly as the difference between rational and non-rational life. Noteworthy here is Aquinas’ insistence that animals are partially voluntary, and the fact that even Darwin’s own second law of evolution — sexual selection — cannot get around mate choice as something analogous to freedom, irreducible to the utilitarian calculus of the survival of the fittest. Here, think of the peacock’s tail. Analogy is imperative here, for it allows us to describe a relationship of similarity within an ever-greater dissimilarity.
In order to defend the uniqueness of man, we would do well to defend all living things as analogous to man — first and foremost, that they have souls analogous to our own. And we must correct our language to reflect these analogous relations. Biological life is not divided rigidly between the vegetative, the animal, and the rational, as if they were three separate kingdoms. Rather, Aristotle himself points out that the souls of plants are best described by the term generative, which is applied to all life, since generation is the ultimate goal of all forms of life, of which plants appear as the most basic members. Meanwhile, the so-called animal soul is in reality the sensitive soul, capable of sensation and imagination. Finally, in human beings, animal nature finds its fulfillment. Calling things by their right name, we see that the creatures to which God has granted life-giving souls are not so radically divided from each other as living things are divided from non-living — though even here we cannot forget that nonliving things possess an immaterial essence all their own. Man himself is not an isolated and alien creation, but carries within himself the generative and sensitive attributes of his ontological siblings, within his rational and spiritual soul. Thus the dignity of man — horizon and microcosm — can begin to come back into view, and his task as steward and mediator begins to be clarified. So far, we have covered the similarity within the analogy: how man is similar to other life. Next, we shall address the dissimilarity. At the same time, we will discover answers to both Darwin and Descartes. But first, we must review some metaphysics.
The Gift of Creation
It was Thomas Aquinas who first incorporated the fundamental distinction between essence and existence into a coherent philosophical account of the world and of man. The real distinction present in every creature would eventually come to be understood as the touchstone of a fundamentally Christian worldview. Aquinas saw that the gift of existence from being itself was related to all substances as actuality is to potency. The noteworthy exception to this rule is God Himself, whose essence and existence correspond entirely. For Aquinas, the act of being — esse — is the fundamental act of every subsistence. Being, for a created essence, does not contain in itself the reason for its existence. This represented a radical transformation of Greek thought, uniting Platonic participation and Aristotelian act and potency; it offered a solution to the ancient tensions between transcendence and immanence by means of the polar relationship made possible through analogy. Esse gives existence to creaturely essences, while these give esse a home — for without creatures, esse would not subsist in the world.
This real distinction between esse and essence allows for a deeper understanding of what it means to be a creature in this world. Because no created being is the source of its own existence, ultimately it must receive its existence from existence itself, and come into being ex nihilo, from nothing. To create ex nihilo implies a fundamental gift from the Creator to the creature — precisely from nothing: no raw material, no prior chaos, not even a potency or possibility. The entire order of reality in which a creature could even come into being is created from the gratuitous superabundance of God’s love. There is no need or necessity; at best, in hindsight, we can acknowledge a certain fittingness to God’s act, but that goes without saying. Creation is not only in reference to what the thing is, but includes the sheer mystery that the thing is at all. Thus creation is not change from one state to another, but the giving of being in a simultaneous gift of both essence and existence — of a specific way to be in the world. This twofold mystery is the originary gift that lies at the heart of every creature.
Creation is different from making in another way. Once we make something, it simply is what it is, entirely independent from us. However, the being of a creature is not a product but an action. No creature is the source of its own existence, and so, in order to be, it must be receiving. To use one of Aquinas’ favorite analogies, the being of a creature depends on God the way light depends on the sun. Thus the gift of existence, for every single creature — and for man in a unique way — is a continuous outflowing of the gratuitous love of the Creator. Without the contemplative and reverential gaze before this unfathomable gift, our understanding can only ever be, at best, incomplete.
The Gift in the Human Person
Considering the creation of man: the human person has always been understood to be the pinnacle of the created universe, but it would take some time to explain this intuition fully. Plato had established the ultimate cause of both being and truth as the Good. In doing so, he argued that this world is good and beautiful in itself, while inviting us to look beyond it to its transcendent source. This is the Platonic tradition that would reach Augustine, by which all of creation could be understood to be necessarily good — even the mosquito — and which explains how Plato could have dissuaded Augustine from his agnostic Manichaeism. Indeed, it was Plato who would accentuate and popularize the idea of man as a frontier being, who lives on the horizon of the spiritual. This movement is natural to man, since truth — the intelligibility of a thing — is coextensive with being. It was also the Platonic tradition that brings in the epistemological aspect of man’s capacity to know all things, his capacity to carry in his mind the entire cosmos, as it were. Thus, despite the apparent dualism in Plato’s vision, these two dimensions are intimately interwoven, and their frontier is porous to the human intellect.
The Christian tradition would synthesize these ideas with theological elements springing from the novelty of the Incarnation. Foremost would be man’s capax Dei, his theological capacity for personal union with the Creator through Christ. The concept of microcosm would embrace the whole human person as a unity, elevating the idea of man to that of an embodied spirit, rather than just that of a soul imprisoned in a body. The material and spiritual worlds, which were seemingly at odds in the Greek understanding, would be fully united in and by the human. In this way, man becomes the focal point of the unity of creation, and the mediator between all creatures and God through Christ.
Maximus the Confessor, the seventh-century Byzantine theologian and martyr, has been praised for showing us that “God entrusted to man the mission of unifying the cosmos.” In the words of Benedict XVI, Maximus wrote of man’s unique nature at the center of creation as “a kind of natural bond, mediating and unifying through himself things that by nature are separated from each other by a great distance, so that, by making of his own division a beginning of the unity which gathers all things up to God their Author.” For his part, Albert the Great — that great thirteenth-century teacher of Aquinas — described the state of the debate in these terms: “Considering the soul in itself, we consent to Plato; but considering it in that it is the form that animates the body, we consent to Aristotle.” He is referring to Plato’s insistence that the soul must survive the death of the body, and thus be immortal, while within the Aristotelian framework it is not clear how that can be, if the soul is the form of the body — which it most certainly seems to be. Aristotle himself seems to have agreed with Plato, but was not able to clarify how this could be.
Finally, Thomas Aquinas would unite Platonic and Aristotelian elements with tremendous clarity. In Aquinas’ resolution of the conundrum, soul and body would no longer need to be bound together as if against their nature, and the human person would be revealed as the focal point within the vast created order that unites the spiritual and material effortlessly, making body and soul a united whole. He explains, with his customary succinctness, that “the greater the mastery of the form over matter, the greater the unity between them.” Indeed, the power of the human person’s rational soul exceeds the capacity of matter to contain it. For Thomas, of course, the spiritual nature of the human soul means that it cannot be thought of merely as the actuality of a body that is lost when the body dies. Rather, because it is the soul itself that receives the gift of being — of esse — a gift it then confers upon the body, the soul survives separation from the body, while at the same time being incomplete without it. This preserves the individual, personal reality of man not only through the passage of death, but unto an expectant hope of a glorified body in the resurrection.
It is worth noting that the relation between spirit and matter in the human being is analogically patterned after the relation between esse and created beings. It can be said that esse gives creatures existence, while creatures give esse a home; in the same way, the human soul animates the body, while the body gives the soul a home that brings the whole person to fulfillment. There is a mutual need that binds the soul and the body together as they come into existence in the fullness of their psychosomatic unity.
Exitus and Reditus
Thomas summarizes all of the qualities we know the human soul to have — consciousness, substantiality, freedom — with a simple notion borrowed from the Neoplatonic author of the Book of Causes. He qualifies man as the one that “returns fully to his essence.” Once again, we see the fittingness of understanding man as a microcosm, for this notion is taken from a much greater pattern — in fact, the greatest of all: the exitus and reditus, the going out and the returning, that describes all of creation in its eschatological trajectory, coming out from God and returning to Him. All creatures have both their source and their end in their Creator. Naturally, this pattern also applies to the life of each individual creature, in its own birth, life, and death. However, there is another sense in which this movement can be seen within creatures themselves: namely, the extent to which a creature reveals its essence through its life can be considered its exitus, while the extent to which it can possess and know its own essence represents a reditus, a return to itself, as it were.
And here is our dissimilarity. All creatures find themselves somewhere on this circular trajectory that models the perfect motion of the celestial spheres, but only one is capable of completing a full return to his or her own essence: the human person. This full return — this reditio completa — describes the human being’s ability to subsist as a person, capable of relation. Joseph Ratzinger described this reality eloquently: “It means the coming into its own of the creature, as an autonomous creature answers back in freedom to the love of God and accepts its creaturehood as a command to love, so that a dialogue of love begins. In it, the being of the other is not absorbed, not annulled, but rather becomes wholly what it is precisely by giving itself.”
Hans Urs von Balthasar explained it thus: “In man, consciousness attains greater interiority and so becomes self-conscious. His inner dimension is not only luminous, as it is in the case of the animal, but it is also light for itself. Man is the first entity that possesses itself, and because of this self-possession, is free. It is not just that his interior space, like that of the animal, has certain features of consciousness. He is himself substantially spirit. To the extent that man is spirit, he can dispose of himself.”
The human person’s return to his own essence, first and foremost, means that he is capable of an eternal relationship with God. The human person is aware of who he is and what he is meant to be. He is aware of what is good for him, and for that very reason free to choose that good or reject it. In fact, this is the risk and drama of being a subsistent creature. We can fail to live according to the gift of what we are called to be, through our own self-betrayal. A rock, a tree, a star, a sheep will not betray what it was made to be, and in this way serves as a kind of model for us — yet it also needs us, so that the gift of itself might be made complete.
In his discussion of the mutual fulfillment of subject and object in the encounter of knowing, Balthasar describes the self-revelation of a tree, which is, in a way, a gift of itself — of its beauty, and its need for a knower to complete the movement it initiates:
The objects of this world need the subject-space in order to be themselves. A tree — without its green autumnal variety, the pink and white display of its spring blossoms, its fragrance — is simply not a tree. It needs the sensorium as a space into which to unfurl itself. It unveils its color within an eye that sees color; it whispers only in an ear that hears sound. The space of being that is opened and illuminated in the subject makes available to the object an opportunity to be itself in a way that the inferior space of inanimate elements does not. The truth of the tree is the unveiledness of its being, but the unveiling in which the truth is constituted calls for the joint operation of subject and object. Subject and object expand within each other, thus helping each other in a common discovery of truth.
In this way, it is only in man that the rest of creation can find the fulfillment inherent in its being known and loved. God knows all things, of course, for He made them; but as a sign of His desire for man to know and love them too — to recognize their beauty, to which we will return shortly — He left to us the task of naming. The power of the word is not to be underestimated. Here we might cite, just to give one example, the misuse of language to obfuscate the dignity of the unborn child. A true name, according to Ferdinand Ulrich, represents “the simultaneity of knowledge and love which is breathed forth, spoken to and with others.” Thus a proper word is a word that articulates the essential truth of things. As he goes on to suggest, knowledge and love incorporate those to whom we give a name into our very souls, mysteriously allowing myriad other creatures a place within our very subsistence. Thus, though all creatures long to be gathered in by their Creator, and will have to wait until the fullness of time that St. Paul describes, they are already being gathered in by man, through the knowledge and love that is expressed in naming.
Here I must make mention of Wendell Berry, who taught that we should reject the abstract and sterile notions that disembody and disconnect us from the real world and its creatures. He reminded us that, rather than terms like “ecosystem” and “environment,” real names are the particular names of unique rivers and valleys, creeks, ridges and mountains, creatures and people. To love something, he would say, is to call it by its name; and we will only be able to preserve the places and creatures where there are communities of people that love them.
In this life, this return is only fully accomplished in man. But this also means that, through and with man the microcosm, creation completes the pattern for which it was destined. In this sense, due to his reason and freedom, man possesses a special responsibility for his ontological siblings. This responsibility is described in the second chapter of Genesis as a dual task: to care for the garden, and to name the animals. Though no longer in Eden, the call to stewardship remains. Most profoundly, in the Incarnation of Christ, we see how the man who is the microcosm comes to serve not only as the steward of the cosmos, but as medium. As John Paul II wrote, “the Incarnation of God the Son signifies the taking up into unity with God not only of human nature, but, in this human nature, in a sense, of everything that is flesh: the whole of humanity, the entire visible and material world. The Incarnation, then, also has a cosmic significance.” Ultimately, this is the context within which we must understand the vocation of man in creation, who is called to conform himself to Christ — Priest, Prophet, and King.
The Contemplation of the Beauty of Creation
We have heard it said that all knowledge comes through the senses; and yet the only one of the transcendentals that we encounter physically in creation is beauty, who, when approached properly, reveals to us her two sisters, goodness and truth. Plato described beauty as the only form that has the privilege of being perceived by sight. Aristotle too would agree that “the end for which the works of nature are put together and produced is the form of the beautiful.” Dionysius the Areopagite, the author of the Divine Names, speaks of beauty as summoning and as gathering. He wrote that God is called beauty “as summoning all things to Himself, and as gathering all things in all things.” Yet beauty does not summon us from the heights of power and glory, but rather from the lowly simplicity of creatures whose beauty shines from within and beyond themselves.
St. Paul, in his letter to the Ephesians, explains that the Father has “set forth in Christ a plan for the fullness of time, to gather up all things in Him, things in heaven and things on earth.” In one of the most heartrending passages of Luke’s gospel, Christ lamented our lack of docility, saying, “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, how often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing.” It is this gathering — which literally means to unite under one head, to recapitulate — upon which I’d like to meditate for a moment. How is Christ to gather us up, if we are not only made free to reject any and all proposals, but often stubborn and unwilling? What I would like to argue here is that through our personal, particular, sensorial and intellectual gathering of beauty in creation, we become ordered toward the beauty of God, who calls us and gathers us into Himself, simultaneously.
Josef Pieper, in his well-known meditation on leisure, argues that “in leisure, man celebrates the end of his work by allowing his inner eye to dwell for a while upon the reality of creation. He looks, and he affirms: it is good.” Aquinas, for his part, affirms that God “is of every beauty, and yet without beauty, inasmuch as He incomprehensibly and exceedingly pours out being over all things, shining over them.” The simultaneous gifts of beauty and being to each unique creature are analogous to the shining of light, while the knowledge of God’s beauty and being is only accessible to us through the physical shining of light on those creatures, such that they can be seen. Thus, to see the world properly is to see it as it truly is — both in its substantiality, by which it belongs to itself, and as it unceasingly points beyond itself to its source. Aquinas associates beauty most closely with Christ, the Word. This aligns with what St. John tells us at the opening lines of his gospel: “In the beginning was the Word. All things came into being through Him, and without Him not one thing came into being.” For this reason, Maximus calls creatures logoi — words in the Word — that bear the traces of their cause and source. Thus, in Pieper’s formulation, to allow the inner eye to dwell upon the reality of creation is to contemplate the invisible traces of Christ in the visible form of His creation. And God does not refrain from directing us toward this beauty, even if it is simply to consider the lilies.
Beauty’s Form and Splendor
As Plato was able to recognize, beauty itself, in a certain regard, takes the initiative, meeting us here in this physical world and drawing us up, ecstatically, to the contemplation of absolute beauty. It is precisely this trajectory on which Dante sets out, from his encounter with Beatrice as a boy in the Vita Nuova to the heights of the heavenly Empyrean in the Divine Comedy. The reception of this tradition circles around two central concepts that have been translated in various ways — species and lumen, Gestalt and Glanz, form and splendor. For our purpose, we will use form and splendor.
For Balthasar, it is crucial to grasp the inseparability and simultaneity of these two dimensions of beauty — form and splendor — which speak to the unity of beauty’s objective givenness and the necessity of its subjective reception. This unity reveals, on the one hand, that beauty is not merely subjective, and on the other, that it cannot be reduced to factual content that can be observed by a distinct, disinterested third party. As Balthasar shows so poignantly in his well-known meditation on the smile of the mother, attentiveness to the beauty of a particular creature reveals three things simultaneously. First, the superabundant intelligibility of the essence of a creature in itself — in his example, the mother and her smile. Second, the manifest reality of being itself, as the underlying context for the encounter in which the mother and the child both exist. And third, the transcendent source of everything, God Himself, as being, truth, goodness, and beauty itself. To see the full depths of reality in this way is to be open to the mystery of the richness and expectation that exceeds our imagination.
It is for this reason that Balthasar asserts that, especially today, “the Christian is called to be the guardian of metaphysics in our time.” Such a metaphysics contemplates, in the beauty of the world, the continuous gift of existence at the heart of reality — which is not a change from potency to act, but the primordial relationship of cause to effect that is always in actuality, that is always happening in the present. The dual significance of the word “present,” both in English and in its Latin origin — prae-esse, to be before, to be in front of — reveals the unity between the present as time and the present as gift, the metaphysical root of which is the continuously given gift of creatio ex nihilo.
The Gift of Time: The Virtue of Patience
The richness of the present moment is never weighed down by the past, nor distorted by the future, nor is it somehow disconnected from them. G. K. Chesterton suggests: “It may be that God has an eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we. The repetition in nature may not be a mere recurrence; it may be a theatrical encore.” However, the drama of God’s gift of existence cannot play out on the grand stage unless it is first played out on the myriad minuscule ones. For God’s gift of existence is first and foremost given to each and every substance, being in each and every instant of creaturely time. It is only in this way that we can speak of God’s relation to the cosmos as a whole, or, for that matter, analogously, to humanity. Even if our love were universal, like that of Christ, and embraced all mankind, this would not make it impersonal. God’s gift is always personal. And so Chesterton was right when he proposed that “it may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately.”
The gradual unfolding of being, through the myriad minuscule gifts of existence in each and every instant of creaturely time, reveals time as a gift coextensive with being itself. The gift of time is a patient and merciful generosity, a form of love that flows from God’s eternity. Creation must go hand in hand with time, which, D. C. Schindler says, “we may read as generously allowing it to develop gradually into what it has always been meant to be.” Though we are often impatient with time and see it as a limitation to be overcome — for indeed we often think that redemption is found precisely in overcoming finitude and time — we must affirm that the condition of being in time is intrinsically good. We deny the gift of being, and of creation itself, if we see time as something deleterious. Something true, beautiful, and good is being given in every moment, and every moment moves us closer to an ultimate fulfillment. This is the inner logic of a gift: it takes time.
This also implies that we can deny the gift in a second way: if, losing patience, we fail to trust in the fulfillment of its unfolding. Ulrich illuminates this dimension of creation beautifully through a meditation on the parable of the prodigal son — or, as it could be called, the parable of the prodigal, patient father — who imparts to his son the gift of his own ousia, the Greek word for substance, a word used only twice in the entire New Testament. The Father’s gift of his substance is only one dimension of his generosity; the second is the time given, as an epiphany of patient mercy. The Father “waits in advance of the son, from behind the son, at his back — that is, as the one who moves him, through mercy, toward his turning, toward a return, toward conversion. Conversion is the place where the one who waits and the one who is awaited are present.” The Father sees the son from a long way off because he has been waiting, in the freedom of love. The son’s being unfolds into his freedom in the given time — the time granted by the Father, time that integrates the past of the one who has gone away with the present and the future.
Conclusion
Ultimately, the dignity of man’s creaturely existence is bound up with that of the entire cosmos, with which we share this temporal pilgrimage, and indeed for which we have a certain responsibility. All life possesses a dignity to the degree that it participates in the fullness of being — with patience and gratitude as the two fundamental virtues that must shape our disposition toward the gift of our created existence. Dignity is not a limited resource, but, like God’s mercy, “droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven upon the place beneath. It is twice blessed: it blesseth him that gives and him that takes.” God’s act of creation, with all of its limitations, is a mercy and a gift. In response to this gift of love, we ought to say, with St. Francis of Assisi, filled with gratitude: “Praised be to You, my Lord, for all of Your creatures” — and for the gift to love You in return, most of all. This is the vision of those who receive creation as a gift, and who make themselves a gift to the world in return.