A Summary of Christian Doctrine | Paul Claudel | From I Believe In God: A Meditation on the Apostles' Creed
1. God is the perfect Being, in whom all power is action, inaccessible to our senses, of whom we can only state what he is and what he is not.
2. How do we know a living being whom we cannot see? By the movement of which he is the cause. The, mole under the ground, the hare in the bush, the heart beneath the fingers. For we see that the whole universe is in movement. In this world all is movement, all bears witness to the divine restlessness of nature, always in a state of creation, incapable of existing by itself or in the presence of an unmoving Creator; everything betrays perpetual change.
3. Faith permits us to penetrate farther into the mystery of divine physiology and to distinguish three aspects or functions, roles or Persons: the Father who begets; the Son or Word or Reason who, by his existence, perpetually defines the Father to himself, the Holy Spirit, or Emanation or Love, which is the current running between the two, the Breath exhaled and inhaled.
4. God, being all-powerful, has created only good things. A thing is called good that is well suited to its function. A good pen, a good horse; more or less good because more or less suitable. God has only created things that are very good, that is, perfectly suited, according to their class, to bear him clear testimony, to clarify him. Imperfection in the work can, in fact, only be the result of some obstacle outside the will of the Creator.
5. We see, however, that at the present time things are in fact no longer very good, that is, perfectly suited to bear clear witness to their Creator. We no longer understand their language. And what are we to say if we turn to ourselves?
6. We live, then, in a state of disorder. There has been a corruption of the original order, of the order that charged all things to become visible; there has been a warping of certain wheels, which causes friction throughout the mechanism. The disorder cannot, by definition, be the work of the Creator, because everything that proceeds from him is, by definition, good. Therefore it can only be the work of the free creature, free to choose himself as an end, instead of God who has no end.
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