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65. The Creation of Bodies

1. God is the source of being, bodily and spiritual, substantial and accidental. God is therefore the Creator of bodies as well as of spirits. And while some bodies can propagate and reproduce their kind, God had to give first beginnings and the power to propagate; God must also support the process of propagating in its being and effectiveness. Scripture says (Ps.145) that God is the Creator "who made heaven and earth, the sea, and all things that are in them."

2. The entire universe, bodily and spiritual, is the work of God's goodness. All creatures manifest the divine goodness and tend to it as to their goal or final cause.

3. The theory that God made the angels, and then the angels made the bodily world, cannot stand. For, as we have seen elsewhere, only God can create. No secondary cause (that is, no creature) can produce anything without having something to work on. But creation is total production of a thing from nothing.

4. A body is made of primal matter and substantial form. Some have said that the substantial forms of bodies were taken from the angels. This is false doctrine. Bodies come in first instance from God the Creator; no bodily element is supplied by angels or other creatures.

"The one thing necessary which Jesus spoke of to Martha and Mary consists in hearing the word of God and living by it."
R. Garrigou-Lagrange, OP

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"The supreme perfection of man in this life is to be so united to God that all his soul with all its faculties and powers are so gathered into the Lord God that he becomes one spirit with him, and remembers nothing except God, is aware of and recognises nothing but God, but with all his desires unified by the joy of love, he rests contentedly in the enjoyment of his Maker alone."
St Albert the Great

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"It is vanity to be concerned with the present only and not to make provision for things to come."
Thomas á Kempis

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