6. Sheer Joy Is God’s, and This Demands Companionship.
6. Sheer Joy is God’s, and this demands companionship.6
On the lips of many scientists of our day there lies these questions: What is the purpose of the universe? Why does it exist? And why do we exist? We have in this one sentence Aquinas’s answer to these questions: “Sheer Joy is God’s, and this demands companionship.”
Aquinas proposes that the universe exists for the sake of Joy—God’s and that of the rest of us. “All beings are gladly doing their best to express God,” says Meister Eckhart. In our own time, geologian and eco-prophet Thomas Berry, who was not only named after Thomas Aquinas but admired him and quoted him often, offered his own take on this teaching when he declared: “In the end the universe can only be explained in terms of celebration. It is all an exuberant expression of existence itself.”10 Berry carried Aquinas’s sense of joy into the twenty-first century for us.
Is celebration at the heart of existence? Is existence inherently joyful? Of course there are struggles and hardships. But why dwell on that when the real surprise, the real gift, is that we exist at all (and that it’s taken 13.8 billion years of work on the universe’s part to bring us here and sustain us). Even stars, supernovas, and galaxies live, die, and resurrect—why should humans be exempt? Or the other animals and plants and all? The issue is not whether there is suffering in life, but whether life is a joy in spite of the suffering. Do we make room for the Via Positiva and the joy it names? Can we maintain the joy amidst the pain?
The human species—unlike any other species—often chooses to dwell in self-pity rather than getting on to the task of sustainability and survival so that we all survive and flourish as partners in a joint celebration of existence.
In spite of the struggle toward survival of the fittest, can joy reign? It is a big question to which Aquinas offers a clear and blunt answer. He attributes the existence of the universe not only to joy but also to the inherent desire within joy to be shared with others. Joy begs for sharing. Who wants to be joyful all alone? Isn’t joy naturally oriented to expansion, including others and sharing the joy? That is what Aquinas proposes. The greatest of joy, that of divinity itself, seeks to share the joy and not to hoard it. Fear restricts; but Joy expands and seeks companions with whom to share itself.
“God delights. God is always rejoicing and doing so with a single and simple delight. In fact, it is appropriate to say that love and joy are the only human emotions that we can attribute literally to God” (118). Aquinas is a long way from a punitive father God.
It follows that for Aquinas Joy is at the heart of the universe—what else would follow from the teaching of the original goodness, or original blessing? After all, goodness renders us joyful. We seek its company, we want it around, and we smile in its presence. Aquinas returns to this theme of the presence of joy on many occasions. For example, he says that “God is supremely joyful and therefore supremely conscious.” Notice how he links joy and consciousness. Isn’t it true that you feel most alive when you are most joyful? Isn’t that what joy does to us? Aquinas attributes the consciousness of Divinity to the amount of joy that Divinity carries.
Is this also true of us? Are we most conscious when we are most joyful? Is that when we see the world in all its brightness and splendor? Do consciousness and joy play off of each other? Consider its opposite. Is sadness a kind of darkness that snuffs out joy and render us less alive, less conscious? No wonder we are, in our depths, such blessed and joyful beings.
Joy
is the human’s
noblest act.