It’s officially the season to be thankful. Now’s the time to recall one’s blessings and recognize the abundances in our life. In my case, the Thanksgiving holiday itself became an abundance of holidays.

I had a relaxed Thanksgiving. I skipped Black Friday, and I consider a stress-free Black Friday to be its own holiday, given the alternative.

The week ended with the 25th Sunday after Pentecost, which isn’t a special day in the liturgical calendar, but our parish had a baptism, our priest’s birthday, and our priest’s marriage anniversary on that same day.

Our parish was briefly the biggest event in town. It’s a town of retirees living in deed-restricted suburbs, so I’m confident we had:

Can't lose if you're the only candidate.

The abundance of holidays has me contemplating abundance of every kind. Abundance per se, you might say. Abundance is everywhere, and the Orthodox Christian means that as literally as possible.

To be is to be abundant. If you exist, you exude abundance.

Everyone calls The Good News a gift. It’s a trite sentiment to me, but it’s not wrong. I guess the biggest shortcoming of that statement is, ironically; it doesn’t stress God’s generosity enough.

Some things aren’t expressible with words. Sometimes silence is best.

The Good News is more like a gift set bundle. It’s an abundance of gifts. Reflection on the Gospels can lead us to all kinds of pleasant surprises, each of those surprises worthy of eternal gratitude.

“God sides with the poor” is shocking if your culture taught you that gods always ask for bribes, and the highest bidder is usually someone in the 1% like a king or war hero.

“God sacrificed Himself for you” is unbelievable if you previously believed the gods turned a squabble over “who’s the hottest bridesmaid?” into a genocide. (That's literally just the synopsis of The Judgement of Paris and the Trojan War, btw)

And there’s this revelation built into the Good News:

This last one isn’t as obvious as the first two. Some deeper thought is required, but it is definitely part of the Christian gift set bundle.

Anything that exists radiates some kind of abundance. What kind of abundance depends on the kind of thing we’re talking about.

If we’re talking about God, He’s in a class of His own. And I mean that as literally as possible; any theologian worth your time will tell you that God has a unique existence unlike anything else.

Aquinas argues God is “outside every genus”. (ST I Q6 A2 R3) Meaning categories break down when we try to categorize God.

Eastern Christians prefer to say He’s “beyond all being,” since He’s got the power to give every kind of being we know, so He must be beyond it somehow.

I like the term “absolutely absolute” to describe God, which is from the Catholic philosopher John Deely, who did a lot of work that my dissertation builds upon.

David Bentley Hart doesn’t use the exact term “absolutely absolute” to describe God, but the sentiment matches up with his constant emphasis that God is the fount of Being, the absolutely fundamental cause.

God is the origin of all beings, and also the source of all their powers and abundances. We could say He’s got an abundance of abundances.

The Catholic theologians Yves Simon and Jacques Maritain coined a term so they could express that divine trait with one word: Super-Abundance.

Super-Abundance is a characteristic unique to God alone; it’s a quick way to say He’s abundant in a way that exceeds every good we experience in the world.

God’s creative power contains within it every possible good that could be created. His nature is beyond any creaturely nature.

In the same way, His power of creativity is also beyond any kind of creative power we see in the world, whether we’re talking about natural or artificial processes.

One thing I stress about God’s creativity is that it’s a constant activity. Creation isn’t just the initial building of a creature; Creation is also maintaining the creature. Existence doesn’t have inertia. Existence isn’t a property that can sustain itself after its cause ends.

Perhaps the biggest error in Deist philosophy is that they got Creation all wrong, by assuming creatures can continue existing after their creator stops maintaining them.

Creatures can’t support their own existence. Our act of being is always reliant on a cause, and a passive creator will not cut it.

Creation Ex Nihilo means the only thing keeping us from not existing is the unchanging grace of God. The moment God stops caring about the universe is when everything ends.

Super-abundance contains within it every abundance. That’s a small statement with big implications, and we’ll make big errors about God if we misunderstand.

There are different kinds of causes, but only one Cause capable of super-abundance.

Let’s eliminate the wrong ways to think about the Cause, and reflect on the right way.

We need to do a little metaphysics. Metaphysics has a reputation for being arcane, but it doesn’t have to be! All we’ll really be doing is reflecting on reality. It’s a bit of a mystical exercise, honestly.

All this talk about causes is getting us into causality; the nature of cause-and-effect. Let’s start with two obvious rules of cause-and-effect:

If you want a thorough explanation or defense of either rule, let me point you to Edward Feser’s Scholastic Metaphysics, especially section 2.5 on the Principle of Proportionate Causality.

There are three varieties of causes:

An eminent cause is a being exercising its power to create something with a different form.

The human intellect is the best creaturely example of an eminent cause. An intellect can design things that have no resemblance to its own nature.

An architect’s intellect can design a tower, even though towers have nothing to do with human nature. A physicist’s intellect can theorize about black holes even though there’s nothing on Earth like them.

A univocal cause is a being with a certain form or property that passes the same form/property to another being.

We see this daily with properties like heat and momentum. The Sun passes its heat to the Earth. A bowling ball smashes into a pin, transferring its momentum and sending the pin flying.

Genetic inheritance involves univocal causes, but form gets transferred instead of properties. Parents pass their genes to their children. Reproduction always results in a child with the same nature as its parents.

The similarities between parent and child are so strong that it’s possible to reconstruct a distant ancestor’s genes by looking at their descendents.

A virtual cause is a being that decays, leaving behind its parts. Those parts become distinct things with their own nature and powers.

Radioactive decay begins with a virtual cause. An unstable atom ejects some of its protons and neutrons, causing a simpler element along with some very energetic particles (that’s the radiation).

Uranium is a virtual cause of Lead, meaning a uranium atom contains all the protons, neutrons, and electrons needed to form a Lead atom, but we won’t actually have Lead until the Uranium decays.

Algae is a virtual cause of gasoline. We could get gasoline from algae, but the algae has to decompose first. The algae alive today contains lots of carbon and hydrogen, but they’re bound as fatty acids and carbohydrates (which are just carbon, hydrogen and oxygen, hence the name).

These atoms are part of the algae’s DNA, they also power its metabolism. They’re essential elements for life.

Now the carbon and hydrogen in the algae could become gasoline and power an engine, but

Basically, the algae would have to die and decompose for it to create gasoline. So algae is a virtual cause of gasoline; algae has the potential to create gasoline, but only through decay.

Why bring up these options? Because they clarify what we mean when we call God “the cause of creation” or “the Creator of abundances”. There are different kinds of causes, as we just saw, and they start with very different beings.

If we want to respect God’s “absolutely absolute” super-abundance, we need to get the metaphysics right.

Creation doesn’t come from the same stuff as God. He’s not a univocal cause, as if god was just a big physical being who moulded some spare matter into miniature versions of himself.

Our universe isn’t the corpse of a dead god, or pieces falling off a passive god. So God isn’t a virtual cause either.

Both options give us a creator who cannot be super-abundant. In these scenarios, we have a god who’s just another being capable of falling apart, not “the Fount of all being.”

God is an eminent cause. His super-abundant nature, combined with his creative power, results in existence. That’s a power no creature can have, which points to the radical difference between God’s nature and our own.

God's creation of reality is a product of power, not transaction, nor decay.

A single eminent cause can create many effects, because it doesn’t give up any of its own nature in the process.

Again, the intellect is a good example. My intellect has recently produced:

A single intellect can produce these diverse things because the intellect has a nature beyond all of them.

A human intellect can handle form of all kinds, so of course it can handle a few particular forms. And the intellect doesn’t wear out any parts as it creates.

Likewise, since God exists beyond creaturely being, He doesn’t have a limited supply of existence to hand out. He loses nothing when He makes a creature.

One eminent cause (God’s Super-Abundance) creates limitless effects (all created natures and their abundances).

In simpler terms, God has power over being itself, and with that kind of power, the only limit to creation is His imagination.

We worship a super-abundant Creator. This season of Earthly abundance is the perfect time to contemplate how He provides it all.

If you want to learn more, these books are great places to start:

Edward Feser’s Scholastic Metaphysics

David Bentley Hart’s The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss