It is interesting to consider the relationship of Goodness of each creature or each entity that exists in relation to the Catholic concept of Goodness.
The mainstream theological interpretation of Goodnes or of the Good is that all creatures possess a nature that is Good and that God made everything good. Accordingly, even Satan and his fellow fallen angels have natures that are inherently good although they now employ their natures for morally evil purposes. Thus, there is a distinction between the Moral Good and the Ontological Good with each and every creature that exists posessing ontological good.
Ontological Goodness refers to the goodness of the essential, substancial, and/or accidental properties of entities. The ontological goodness is possessed by the aspect of being of each creature or of its ontological nature. Accordingly, Satan, having been created with such a superior nature has a great degree of ontological goodness.
All animals, physical entities, physical fundamental constants, physical laws, whether of an accidental nature or of a prime matter based essential nature are accordingly inherently ontologically good as are all human beings and any intellegent bodily extraterrestrial beings.
All human beings are considered to have a morally good aspect to extent that they cooperatre in GODs eternal and ultimately mysterious eternal plan according to HIS DIVINE ECONOMY for the entirety of creation we refer to as the Cosmos. In fact, the Catechism of the Catholic Church states that all human being share a fundamental moral equality before God.
All rational creatures such as human beings, angels, and to the extent that GOD permits, any bodily intellegent extraterrestrial beings, have the opportiunity to except the life of grace or supernatural life which by nature is a good that goes beyond the created natural good of the person receiving such grace or Divine Life, thus the reason for the term supernatural.
For all creatures who eventually end up in Heaven, at the point of their entrance into Heaven, they possess a moral goodness elevated in the form of supernatural life that is permanent and entirely irrevocable, i.e., the possibility of such creatures falling into to sin or commiting morally wrong or evil acts is eliminated. This reality applies to all human beings who reach the eternal destiny of Heaven, all angels who have definitively chosen Heaven, and, presumably any bodily extraterrestrial intellegent beings who reach Heaven.
Regarding the GOODNESS of GOD, theological traditions within the Catholic Church hold that GODs nature, essense, substance, and characteristics are at one with his existence. Traditional Scholastic Theology as promulgated by Saint Thomas Aquinas has taught that this is not so regarding all creatures. This applies to all creatures, including we humans, all angels whether in Heaven or Hell, and rational bodily extraterrestrial persons, and indeed any creature whatsoever whether physical, a combination of physical and spiritual such as we humans in this life and presumably any bodily intellegent extraterrestrial persons, and purely spirit creatures such as the Angels in Heaven and the fallen angels.
Accordingly, the very essense of each and every creature is not identical with the creature’s existence. Some interpretations of the nature of creatures divide the creature into two broad catagories, 1) the essense of the creature and 2) the accidental properties of the creature.
For example, Scholastic Theologians have typically discussed the human soul in terms of its essence or substance and its accidental properties. The essense of the human souls is related to its very primal ontological constitution, the aspect of the soul by which it is a first created principle, not dependent on any other creature, created essense, nor accidental properties for the continued existence of the human soul. The existence of the human soul is accordingly independent of the human body including the brain in an intrinsic manner, and to some extent, so are some of its higher operations.
The accidental properties of the human soul are the individual thoughts, acts of will, emotions, feelings and other experiences as well as the various psychodynamic personality traits and other psychic characteristics of the human soul. Each experience accordingly adds to the accidental nature or accidental form of the human soul.
Scholastic Theologians have traditionally made a distinction between the very essense of the Human Soul and its falculties of memory, heart, intellect and will. Presumably, these same distinctions would hold in the makeup of the souls of any bodily intellegent extraterrestrial persons as well who possess spiritual and immortal souls.
Scholastics apply a similar reasoning to physical entities or physical creatures. For instance, Saint Thomas Aquinas would have held a distinction between the matter or the mass that a coffee cup is made of and the actual form or shape of the matter that makes up the coffee cup by which the coffee cup has its particular shape and intended functionality. Note, however, that certain trends in modern theoretical physics and cosmology tend to view mass or physical matter not as a fundamental and irreducable primitive entity, but rather as a stable or metastable accidental property that depends on more primitive created realities that underwrite the existence of or which generate mass; a good example of which is the socalled Higgs Fields, whose field mediating particle known as the Higgs Boson is going to be actively sought after at the CERN facility’s Large Hadron Collider later this year when it resumes operatiion after the repair of damage it sustained during intitial test runs last September.
Even the socalled fundamental properties or parameters of electrical charge, color force or color charge of the various quarks, angular momentum, momentum, and space and time itself is viewed by some theoretical physicists and cosmologists as not the utlimate fundamental aspects of physical reality, but rather as secondary stable or metastable properties of the entities we refer to in terms of their totality in numbers as the cosmos.
In fact, as someone schooled in physics, I would not be surprised if we discover definative evidence of one or more levels of ever more primitive principles that underwrite the realities we know as mass and energy, electrical charge and color force charge, the quantum chomodynamics aspects of entities such as strangeness and other socalled fundamental QCD aspects of our universe, space and time and the like. In fact, for all we can tell, perhaps GOD has created in the physical cosmos, an infinite number of hierachial levels with the most primitive levels being the ultimate physical essense or first created principles that do not depend on any othe creature for their existence and which depend only directly on GOD’s almightly will to sustain them in being.
This brings us back to the point of this discussion. If GOD’s nature is at one with his existence, than GOD being all GOOD must be GOODNESS Itself. However, this only in theory applies to GOD. For human souls, angles, and ETI souls, the goodness of the souls or spirits would not be identical with their existence since the characteristics of creatures are not identical with their existence. So then we may ask how can we know what is the goodness of a human soul, and angel, or any ETI soul.
I would like to argue that, since ontological goodness is not the existence of the created spirit as such, and since it is a fundamental aspect of any spirit posessing goodness, wherein each spirit possesses ontological goodness, because afterall God “Made the Heavans and the Earth” and “saw that it was good”, the ontological goodness of each and every immortal human soul that was ever created, each and every angel, and each ETI soul that was ever created is somehow related to the spirit’s essence, substance, or first principle qualities. This goodness seems to me to be some sort of hidden variable or hidden ontological principle that we can only discern with abstract philosophical speculation and reasoning guided by faith.
We can not measure the ontological goodness of a human soul by spiritual direction or analysis of the spiritual life of the soul. We can not measure the ontological goodness of a human soul by studying its morallly good or morally evil effects on others or on society as a whole. We can not measure or infer its existence by nuero-imaging scans or functional nueronic mapping, nor by any form of batteries of the most sophisticated and objective forms of psychological testing. However, since the Human Soul, the angel, and the ETI soul cannot be said to be GOODNESS itself in a complete and existential sense, the goodness of a created spirit is a trancendential principle that is an inherent characteristic or quality of such a spirit but which is distinct from the essense or substance of the creature although one would have to say that the essense or substance of a created spirit is inherently good in itself although not in an absolute identicality relationship with goodness. However, since ontological goodness is inherent in the nature of a created spirit, it is no mere accident nor falculty of the created spirit although such accidents and falculties of a spiritual creature are also ontologically good.
As a result, this principle of goodness that all rational spiritual creatures have including we humans seems to transcend our essense, the substance or essense of our souls at the level of the being of our souls as first principles but yet is a transcendent and utterly inherent aspect, quality, or atribute of the very essense or substance of our souls as well as that of all other rational spiritual creatures.
As in we humans, the angels, and any existent ETI, our ontological goodness seems to be an inherent property of our selves which is distinct from the fact that we have existence. Since we mirror GOD’S existence because we are made in the image and likeness of GOD, perhaps even though GOD’S attributes and characteristics are at one with his existence and his essense, GOD’s GOODNESS although being GOD’s existence or nature itself is an attribute of GOD that is lexocographically distinguishable from HIS BEING or ESSENCE while at the same time being the exact same entity or thing as GODs BEING or ESSENCE. As a result, perhaps we can speculate that GOD is completely self contained in HIS GOODNESS by BEING in an exact and identical manner HIS very GOODNESS yet also BEING SELF TRANCENDENT in HIS ABSOLUTE GOODNESS.
But could an ALL POWERFUL, FULL, COMPLETE, SELF EXISTENT GOD actuallly transcend HIMSELF. In a sense, in accordance to HIS DIVINE ECONOMY, HE does simple by HIS acts of the CREATION of the cosmos and everything in it and HIS maintenance of all creatures in existence by HIS all powerful Will. We must admit since GOD’s creations are not GOD, GOD is not the absolute sum of all existence. The mere fact that GOD can create from nothing and act outside of HIMSELF shows a latent and inherent self transcendence i.e., HIS ALMIGHTY WILL which is HIMSELF, HIS NATURE, HIS EXISTENCE, and HIS ESSENCE goes beyond HIMSELF to act to produce effects EXTERNAL to HIMSELF. This latent almighty power to me is a sign of GOD’s Self Transcendence.
I am sure that when we arrive in Heaven after the Final Ressurection of the Dead and the re-creation of the Cosmos into the Glorified World to come, we will have all eterntiy to ponder GOD and GOD will reveal to us things or qualities about HIMSELF that will make the concept of the intellectually understood TRIUNE NATURE of GOD seem like just another walk in the park by comparison although we in Heaven will always be absolutely ecstatic and overjoyed at the beauty, light, mysterious wonderment of and vision of GOD as the HOLY TRINITY in ITSELF. What might be more astounding will in no way take away from what we already see in Heaven but rather will make what we all ready see in Heaven seem all the better than it would otherwise seem.
Back to the subject of physical creatures, even physical creatures such as animals, plants, and even rocks, grains of sand, planets, stars, blackholes etc., posess ontological goodness. In fact every created essense, substance, and accidental physical property posesses ontological goodness. This ontological goodness in physical creatures can in a way be viewed as an ultimate form of hidden variable, even far more hidden, sublime, and mysterious than any socalled hidden quantum mechanical variables if indeed hidden quantum variables exist. I personally feel that hidden quantum variables do exist even though the subject is considered taboo by many traditional quantum mechanicists.
Now speaking of moral good, all of us humans can grow in an unlimited manner in the attributes of moral goodness by cooperating with DIVINE GRACE and ITS SOURCE, GOD HIMSELF as a TRINITY of HIS THREE DIVINE PERSONS. This moral goodness is primarilly lived out in our wills as we make choices for or against GOD, for or against each other and any of our fellow non-human rational creatures such as angels and perhaps any ETI creatures.
Note, that I used to be troubled by the concept of the existence of rational bodily ETI creatures and in fact, I used to curse them on a provisional basis just in case they existed, but I eventually realized that if they did exist, then calling down GODs wrath on them and calling for GOD to utterly wipe them out of existence, an act that GOD is most certainly powerful enough to accomplish, was no different than calling down or should I say, attempting to call down GODs wrath on my fellow human beings living here on Earth. In fact, while attending the sacrament of Confession, the priest I was confessing to mentioned to me that it is very sinful to call down utter destruction, denegration, and hateful vengence on any rational creature including Satan and His Fallen Angels, although it is OK to rebuke the evil spirits as enemies of GOD and to pray for deliverence from GOD from the evil effects of the actions of such evil spirits.
There are other ontologically transcendent realities such as ontological and moral truth, value, beauty, mercy, and purpose, and probably infinitely more than we could ever name in this life, perhaps even so in the next life in Heaven.
When we love our enemies, such as the terrorists who are still alive and walking here among us on Earth, even such as any terrorists or planners involved in the 9/11 fiasco, we fufill GODs command in an exemplar manner to love one’s enemies, to do good to those who hurt us, and to turn the other cheeck.
I am in no way advocating not bringing these terrorists to account for their actions, nor am I stating that we should not have a powerful military and a well equiped law enforcement apparatus and intellegence community with all of the high tech weaponry and survailence technology that such requires. In fact, I am a son of a now deceased carreer US Navy man who was heavily involved in the US Navy’s nuclear propulsion program which is an intergral component of one of the three legs of our nuclear deterrence capability, a capability which I fully support and which I am still in favor of within reason (I do not at all believe in unilateral U.S. nuclear weapons dissarmament) as I am in favor of a strong national defense. However, I am of the utmost most belief that each of us Catholics, to the extent that we are capable, must spend some time every week if not dailly praying for all those who are still alive that; persecute us, our country, our faith, the Church, and who revile or repulse us the most. To the extent that we pray that such persons can become and will become saints, even Canonized Saints, can reflect on the degree of our own holiness. Doing such will certainly make us all the more holy and is perhaps the best exercise of the muscle of our free will and its ability to cooperate with GOD and with each of HIS THREE PERSONS in the growth of our moral goodness.
Remember, it was you, me, in fact all of us that nailed Jesus to the Cross. When we pray for the conversion, health, and moral well being of our deepest enemies, we stop nailing Jesus to the Cross and begin to carry the Cross with Him.
We must pray for an end to abortion, and for the respect of human life in all stages of its development from the moment of conception until natural death. The latter includes all those who procure abortions, and yes all terrorists and enemies of our nation, all those from different ethnic backgrounds, all those who are in prison, and yes, all of those mentally ill homeless people that repulse and revile the sensibilities and unfortunately the wills of many well to do U.S. citizens who posessing a higher degree of psychological prowess, wrongly look down on such homeless as “druggies”, “low lifes”, “bottom feeders” and “bums”. When will feel the urge to hate our enemies or those that revile us, we need the remember Christ Words. “The last shall be first and many of the first shall be last.” And “I was hungry and you gave me to drink…In prison and you came to visit me… Naked and you clothed me ..”. When all human life is excepted as a gift from GOD to be cherished and valued for its own sake, then we will see an end to abortion and not before hand.
