By Fr. Peter Scott, FSSPX
Table of contents
Is There a Greatest Attribute
Mercy vs Justice
Paschal Mystery
Answer: This question arises because of the affirmation, supposedly made by Our Lord to Sr. Faustina, namely: “Proclaim that mercy is the greatest attribute of God. All the works of My hands are crowned with mercy.”
In order to answer this question, we must first consider what are the attributes of God and then what is there relationship one with another. An attribute of God is an absolutely simple perfection which necessarily exists in God according to our way of conceiving Him. Note that since God is absolutely simple there can be no real distinction between the divine substance and each of the attributes, nor any real distinction between the different attributes. All is God in one simple, infinite and all perfect Being. However, it is according to our way of thinking, knowing about God from creatures, that we distinguish between the attributes of God. The distinction is consequently in our reason, but truly founded on the reality of the world around us, whose perfections come from God. In His indivisible simplicity, God is all His attributes to a supereminent degree.
St. Thomas Aquinas distinguishes the attributes that pertain to the divine substance from those that are relative to His works, that is to creatures. First of all come the attributes that belong to God in Himself, such as simplicity, perfection, goodness, infinity, immensity, immutability, eternity, unity, indivisibility. Then come the attributes that belong to God’s intellect and will as He relates to creatures, such as omniscience, omnipotence, love, providence, justice and mercy. (Cf. Garrigou-Lagrange, De Deo Uno, p. 135). All these attributes are one and inseparable in God, and mutually include one another, in the way that all seven colors are contained in the color white. The distinction is by our way of knowing from God’s action towards creatures, which is by analogy with human qualities. In every analogy the dissimilitude is greater than the likeness, and so in God these qualities are not distinct as they are in men, but they are known from their distinction in men.
IS THERE A GREATEST ATTRIBUTE
Consequently, it is evident that it does not make any sense to talk about a greatest attribute of God. He is infinite and identical to every one of His attributes. However, if we were to consider which attributes were more fundamental, it would be those that pertain to His substance, namely His infinite perfection and goodness, rather than those that simply pertain to His operations, namely to Creation. Now if we were to try to make a hierarchy in the perfections that pertain to God’s operations, we might be tempted to think that mercy is the greatest, because it is the perfection upon which sinners like ourselves are the most dependent. However, are we not also entirely dependent upon His omnipotence, His omniscience, and His providence, all of which are inseparable from His mercy? If we strive to make mercy God’s greatest attribute it is to follow a praiseworthy human sentiment of sinfulness, rather than the objective order of God’s perfections and dealings towards us. Perhaps this is the reason why in the Gospel, where Our Divine Savior speaks often of mercy, he never makes such as rash assertion, but rather: “They that are in health need not a physician, but they that are ill. Go then and learn what this meaneth ‘I will have mercy and not sacrifice’. For I am not come to call the just, but sinners” (Mt 9:13) and “For the son of man is come to save that which was lost” (Mt 18:11). The mercy of the Good Shepherd is clearly evident, without denying or minimizing all of His other attributes.
MERCY VS JUSTICE
However, the real question here is a dichotomy between mercy and justice, that the Divine Mercy devotion attempts to establish, namely that our Divine Savior’s mercy is so great that the attribute of divine justice is no longer important, nor applicable in our times. It is just mercy, the greatest attribute. However, this is a radical false misrepresentation of the mystery of our Redemption, for Christ died on the Cross precisely to make satisfaction to divine justice for our sins, and by that means to offer us the infinite treasure of His mercy. This is the constant teaching of the New Testament. St. Paul speaks thus: “Christ died for us; much more therefore, being now justified by His blood, shall we be saved from wrath through Him”. (Rm 5:9). Also St. John teaches us: “He is the propitiation for our sins; and not for ours only, but also for those of the whole world” (I Jn 2:2). Christ’s death is always taught to be a vicarious satisfaction to divine justice for the sins of the world, and it is precisely because He is God that this satisfaction is superabundant.
Here lies the fundamental difference between the Divine Mercy devotion and the traditional devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, who requested two things of St. Margaret Mary – consecration to His Heart of love, and satisfaction or reparation for the insults, indifference and coldness of sinners. As a devotion of love, it both makes up to the Divine Justice and appeals to the Mercy of our Savior. This highlighted by Pope Pius XI in his 1928 encyclical Miserentissimus Redemptor on the duty of reparation to the Sacred Heart. “If in the consecration (to the Sacred Heart) the first and principal purpose is for the creature to render to the Creator love for love, it naturally follows that it must offer with respect to its uncreated Love a compensation for the indifference, the forgetfulness, the offences, the outrages, the insults that He suffers”.
The conjunction of mercy and justice in the devotion to the Sacred Heart was very eloquently described by Pope Pius XII in his 1956 encyclical (Haurietis aquas) on devotion to the Sacred Heart, as it were anticipating the modern errors that would deny the importance of reparation to the justice of God. He affirms: “moved by His ardent charity for us and acting as our rightful and perfect Mediator, the Divine Redeemer has completely harmonized the duty and obligations of humanity with the rights of God. He is thus the true author of that marvellous reconciliation between divine justice and divine mercy where lies the absolute transcendence of our salvation”.
Why would a devotion to Divine Mercy want to eliminate the attribute of divine justice from God’s plan? First of all because reparation for sin requires efforts from our part. It is not enough to be simply have contrition, but we must do penance, make up to Our Lord, whose love we have denied, make sacrifices and bring about a real transformation or conversion of life. It is what St. John the Baptist called “fruit worthy of penance” (Mt 3:8), and it is a test of how true our love for God really is.
PASCHAL MYSTERY
However, there is another reason, and it is a theological one. It is called the theory of the Paschal Mystery. Since Vatican II, this theory has been used to re-explain or rather to take the place of the Redemption. This theory evacuates the Passion of Christ as a propitiatory offering to divine justice offended by sin, instead teaching that Christ’s saving work is a work of pure love by which He pursues man, so that there is no longer any need to the medieval conception of satisfaction for sin. In fact it is the Resurrection which is the principal event, and which shows the importance of Christ’s love for us, not His death on the cross. Christ is consequently no longer the Redeemer, “but rather the supreme revelation of the eternal Covenant which God has made with humanity, and which has never been destroyed by sin.” (Problem of the Liturgical Reform, p. 44). This theory, officially approved by the International Theological Commission in 1994 evacuates the vicarious satisfaction of Christ and hence the justice of God: “The death of Jesus is not the act of a merciless God glorifying supreme sacrifice; it is not the price of redemption paid to some repressive alien power. It is the time and place where a God who is love and who loves us, is made visible.” (Quoted in The Problem of the Liturgical Reform, p. 48).
It is this theory that penetrates the thinking of the post-conciliar Church, and in particular the 1980 encyclical of Pope John Paul II, which has great similarity with the Divine Mercy devotion. The same emptying out of the Redemption is observed: “It is precisely beside the path of man’s eternal election to the dignity of being an adopted child of God that there stands in history the cross of Christ, the only-begotten Son, who as ‘light from light, true God from true God,’ came to give the final witness to the wonderful covenant of God with humanity, of God with man – every human being” (Dives in misericordia §7). Note in this text that there is only one covenant between God and man, and that sin has not broken it, and that consequently the cross of Christ does not establish a new testament, but is imply the manifestation of God’s love for all men. No longer is the payment of justice required by the death of Christ. He simply shows God’s love by dying and rising from the dead. Note also that it is for all men, regardless of whether they are baptized and receive the sacraments which poor forth the infinite merits of the sacrifice of the Cross, which Christ suffered for our sins.
This is the perspective, then, for the 1978 overturning of the condemnation of the Divine Mercy devotion, which had given no proof of supernatural origin, and to the contrary favors a heterodox and modernist notion of salvation, namely the Paschal Mystery instead of the Redemption. It is for this reason that Sr. Faustina affirmed that Our Lord told her that Mercy was God’s greatest attribute. Is it not a sign of excessive credulity and simplicity and lack of understanding of the mystery of the Redemption to accept that Christ would really have uttered such words.