Contemplating God is the ultimate good

The following text is the transcript of our Youtube video Contemplating God is the ultimate good.

This video is part of a series on “Man’s Purpose”. You can find all the videos in the series here.

Welcome to Catholic Hub. I’m David, and I’m here to talk to you about Catholicism and what it means to be a Catholic in the modern world today. In the last video, we saw that man’s desire for happiness tends towards a good that is perfect, unchanging, and unending. And that the only good which fits this description is God Himself.

In this video, we’re going to talk about how man can possess God, the ultimate good. We can’t possess God in the same way that we possess a car, or a house, or a sum of money. These things are material, whereas God is a spirit. We can possess God the same way that we possess something true, or something beautiful, or something good. And that is with our human faculties of the intellect and the will. Now, I’m going to explain what this means.

The intellect is the part of our soul with which we know things, and the will is the part of our soul that makes us tend towards things. So we know things, and the things that are good, our soul tends towards those. If we think about something beautiful like a painting, or a work of art, or a piece of music, or poetry, or anything that we could consider beautiful in this life, the specific reason why we find this thing beautiful is because of something immaterial, which is the order and the composition of all of the parts in relation to the whole. And this order is essentially a higher reality than the physical sensations that we perceive.

So we can see the green color of the grass, we can feel the blades of grass, and we can hear the grass rustling in the wind. But the actual thing which we find beautiful is the thing that is grass. The thing that our intellect is considering is not the individual sensations, but rather the essence of the thing itself. And this is what truth is. Truth is the conformity of our mind or our intellect with the thing that we are considering. So if I look at this book and I say in my mind, “This is a book,” that is truth. That is when my mind is in conformity with reality - and this is the operation of the intellect. It is to understand something that exists. And in all of these things, there is a higher reality that we are considering.

This essentially is what is good at the most basic level: that which exists is good, and that which does not exist or which is lacking in something is evil. So we can say a book is good when it conforms to the nature of a book. So this book has a cover, it has pages, it has words inside that we can read and understand. But if the book was incomplete or if there were pages ripped out, we would say the book is not good. And this is an ontological understanding of goodness. It means goodness in reality itself, not a moral good or a physical good, but an ontological good.

So the true, the beautiful, and the good are all the objects of the intellect. The goodness that we apprehend and we understand is the good to which we will tend. I’ll talk about this more in-depth in another video, but for now, what’s important to know is that man’s happiness consists in the operation of the intellect and the will. This means that our happiness consists in contemplating the true, the beautiful, and the good.

Now, what is the most beautiful thing, the source of all truth, and the source of all goodness? It is God Himself. God created the world, God created human nature, He created this desire inside us for what is good. And so it is only natural that we would tend towards God as our end, as the ultimate good.

How can we possess God? We possess Him in the same way that we understand reality, through our intellect and our will. And that means by knowing God and by loving God. And this is what the Bible teaches us: “This is eternal life, that they may know Thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom Thou hast sent.” It’s also the first and greatest commandment: “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with thy whole heart, and with thy whole soul, and with thy whole mind.”

If we know and love God, we will also serve Him. And we serve a person by doing His will. And it is the will of God that we keep His commandments that He gave to us. Our Lord said to the rich man:

If thou wilt enter into eternal life, keep the commandments.

And St. John says:

“This is the love of God, that we keep His commandments.

Our life’s purpose, therefore, is to know, love, and serve God in this life so that our desire for happiness may be perfectly fulfilled by possessing God in heaven for eternity.

Thanks for watching today’s video. I really hope you enjoyed it and that it wasn’t too hard to understand. If you could, please like and subscribe to my channel. That would be amazing as it will encourage me to keep making videos and it will also help me reach more people. If you found this video interesting or if there’s something you didn’t understand, please leave a comment down below and I will read it and answer you. Otherwise, I hope you have a great day and I’ll see you in the next one.