As some of you may know, one of my favorite passages in the Catechism is at the very beginning. In paragraph 1, the Catechism states, “God, infinitely perfect and blessed in himself, in a plan of sheer goodness freely created man to make him share in his own blessed life.” So much is contained in this short sentence, and so much is implied by it, that it would take several dissertations just to begin to unpack it. But I’d like to reflect a bit on God’s “motivation” in creating us. Not just His motivation in creating the universe, but specifically, the human race.
In one of my classes my freshman year in college, a guest professor to one of our seminars reflected—erroneously, just so there’s no confusion!—on the meaning of the statement, “God is love” (1 John 4:8). According to him, God could not be love without having someone to love, and so, the professor said, God had to create us in order to have someone to love. In other words, God had to create us in order to be Himself! Almost thirty years later, this still makes me think of Christ’s prayer to the Father, “Although You have hidden these things from the wise and the learned, you have revealed them to the childlike” (Mt 11:25).
Now, the idea that God needs us is completely contrary to the Christian understanding of God. God is not just the source of all goodness, but is Himself perfect goodness; He is the Good itself. As the Catechism states clearly, He is “infinitely perfect and blessed (beatus = “happy”) in Himself.” In other words, He needs nothing in order to be perfect, but rather eternally is perfectly fulfilled by loving His own goodness, because there is no good higher than that for Him to love! If He never created anything, He would not be less happy. As it states beautifully in the fourth Common Preface to the Mass’ Eucharistic Prayer, “For, although You have no need of our praise, yet our thanksgiving is itself Your gift, since our praises add nothing to Your greatness but profit us for salvation, through Christ our Lord.”
Of course God is love; and of course, God loves us. His perfection is in fact proof of this: there is not the slightest trace of need-love in God. His love is sheer gift. Even for us human beings, love must be free in order to be love. This is not just true also for God, but infinitely more true: His love for us is infinitely and perfectly free; and it can be this precisely because He does not need us in any way, but simply loves us for our own sake. Contemplating this incomprehensible gift should fill us with awe and gratitude. In the words of the Little Flower, St. Thérèse of Lisieux, “Love is everything.”