The Rights, Honor, and Glory of God: A Catholic Perspective
Defense of the Trinitarian Dogma
By Joseph Andrew Settanni
A search, through the internet, would easily reveal that there is neither a book nor an article written with the particular title: The Rights, Honor, and Glory of God. One can, of course, get Biblical citations about the honor of God, but no tremendous number of specific treatments on the exact topic of the listed rights of the Supreme Being. All persons, for instance, are said to possess certain kinds of rights, inalienable, human, natural, or political/civil and, sometimes, a combination of all these alleged or real attributes of being a human being; and, these days, even animals are accorded increasing rights.
With the assumption, here granted, that the Deity really exists, that then makes the Lord, axiomatically, a person who has rights, which ought to be more real and certainly more important than any merely human/creature rights; furthermore, the Supreme Being ought then, logically speaking, have notably superior or, in fact, the exceptionally supreme rights, both necessarily and logically, above all other (minor) rights of just mere human beings who are, thus, simply creatures or substantially inferior beings, lesser ontological entities, by definition.
As to the other subject of this article, people, for instance, do speak of honor, public respect, as due to someone, a group, a people, or some institutions because, supposedly, of the noted achievement(s) or accomplishments of that cited person, organization, etc. that has created the sense of there being the assumed deserving of honor or to be honored for certain reasons or for what may be, perhaps, called justifications for honor, the honoring involved. There are variations, on such themes, that need not be covered for the sake of brevity.
So, such commendatory words as, e. g., admiration, esteem, deference, reverence, and veneration are, generally, thought to be synonyms for honor or respect, besides the glory, exaltation, normally attached to the having of any true honor. If any being, by definition, deserves great honor, He, therefore, must be God who properly ought then to be also worshipped, as even the pagan philosopher Aristotle had, some thousands of years ago, easily understood. The Almighty is the height of all honor and all glory.
Analysis of the Terms
Thus, given certain aforementioned, fair, and logical predications, the existence and actuality of the rights and honor of God and rightly attendant glory should be then simply unquestioned. In addition, as a way of providing empirical evidence, all Christian martyrs, at least implicitly, have died for those rights and that honor and an affirmation of such glory, which is, at a minimum, a mighty powerful testimony in and of itself. And, honor and glory are always naturally linked because the one automatically presumes and calls forth the other without question, or so it was widely construed in ancient and medieval times.
But, life is now lived in a modernized and Westernized world where, especially in the West itself, the vast majority of the people now think that they are entitled to their own truths and facts. Political democracy (such as supposedly putting truth itself to a vote) has been extended to both a kind of metaphysical democracy as well as, by and large, a theological democracy where ever increasing plurality is considered normal, and no one, as a result, is to be then so boorish as to, e. g., make any value judgments.
Though not making a judgment is, nonetheless, to make the judgment that one ought not to judge, which points out the inherent nominalist contradiction forever involved. However, one may suggest that the best way to see if there is any real truth to this odd situation, by which philosophical nominalism holds sway, is by applying an empirical test of veracity versus (democratic) stupidity.
What if a brain surgeon thought he ought to have the right to form his own facts and truths about, say, human anatomy, could one not image that there would be some life-threatening situations or worse that could conceivably develop by applying democratic thought to the practice of brain surgery? And yet, in reiteration, there exists a contemporary world where people, too many people, think that they simply have the right to democratically choose their own facts and truths freely. A good book to read for helping to properly avoid the many philosophical pitfalls of such notable asininity would be Sir James Fitzjames Stephen’s Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.
Unfortunately, although Stephen thoroughly and figuratively had ripped John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty to intellectual shreds, the world today is enthralled by Millian “rights theory” with the proliferation of multiplicitous, State-sponsored rights that include, for instance, the right to kill or, rather, murder babies in wombs, known as abortion rights; many consider it a (contemporary) “honor” to commit fornication with a famous movie star; and, “glory” is related popularly to sports figures who achieve physical acts of sports excellence. Thus, the anthropocentric viewpoint, the manifestly humanist-secularist perspective, eventually and necessarily debases and degrades all that it touches, including rights, honor, and glory.
Unsurprisingly, because of such extremely shallow and miscreant modernist thinking, it is quite difficult, consequently, to correctly engage the important questions and issues surrounding the truths and facts about the rights, honor, and glory of God. Those are always of a distinctly different magnitude. One truly sees that the intellectual order within a society or culture, thus, eventually impinges upon the metaphysical order, which is absolutely true of secularism, as it becomes more and more pandemic.
Relativism and subjectivism, furthermore, permeates the social and cultural order of a civilization, which too often does not properly recognize true nominalist-inspired decadence or depravity when it is seen. So then, with the truly evil advancement of all of hedonism, materialism, positivism, pragmatism, and secularism, there is, at the horrid point of psychological and mental exhaustion, the logical end point of nihilism itself, the worship of the Culture of Death, Weimarization itself.
No one should be surprised to learn that there are rather dire consequences when the rights, honor, and glory of God become mocked. These three attributes have been, in fact, crescively dishonored by the Roman Catholic Church’s hierarchy (the majority) especially since Vatican II and its unholy aftermath; this has included the idea that the vernacular liturgy can then substitute for the traditional Latin Mass, now known as the Extraordinary Rite of the Latin Mass. Apostasy in Europe has occurred, on a massive scale, with its neopaganization result; dilution of the Faith, e. g., in America is also noted easily.
And, any people who do show substantial disobedience to God end up being punished, as with the reelection of Obama who will, eventually, establish concentration camps, a secret police, and seek to confiscate weapons in the hands of private citizens, all done under various euphemisms. His intense hatred of this country will be manifested boldly by the contempt shown for the US Constitution in the efforts toward the radical transformation he has announced.
The US Supreme Court will become a rubber stamp for him. The mass/mainstream media, in general, will turn a blind eye toward the increasing persecution, oppression, suppression, tyranny, murders, and, yes, massacres that are to occur. This year has seen the last truly free election in America. Why is this being said?
Because the Lord will not be so mocked with impunity, especially by His supposed faithful servants in the hierarchy, who surely ought to know better, and, thus, the deserved chastisement is coming. The welfare-warfare State will be made to enlarge to gigantic proportions yet undreamed of right now; its necessary adjuncts, the Regulatory State and Bureaucratic State, will control intimate details of human life to turn citizens into subject slaves of the centralized and atheistic Leviathan, which is the penalty to be paid. Why?
The American leadership of the Catholic Church did not, requisitely and forcefully, call for any massive, meaning very substantive, Catholic Action; thus, it has not defended boldly and openly the rights, the honor, and the glory of God, in this country, as with having vast rallies in all major cities and having millions of Catholics stridently go to the streets of Washington, DC, in a much needed gigantic protest, against all the unjust religious persecution by the Obama Administration, which is sure to increase dramatically; this will be during his growing dictatorship. The hierarchy had shamelessly abandoned its integral pastoral duty as the shepherds of the flock, as the teachers of the faithful.
Justified punishment and retribution, by the Lord, will then fall hard upon this nation and, of course, against Catholics, the good and the bad, as well. The notion of Catholic Action is simply thought to be a joke, an absurdity. Evil goes unrecognized for what it is. Sin and damnation are laughed at as merely Preconciliar Church relics of a bygone, meaning pre-Vatican II (VC II), era having no real theological significance or meaning for sophisticated and enlightened believers in the post-Vatican II New Age.
God has been, repeatedly, spat upon and widely defamed and denigrated, disparaged and derided; too many of the clergy and higher prelates do utter blasphemies, moreover, inside and outside of churches; yet, the idiotic and evil idea of a Santa Claus kind of Deity, who is ever infinitely tolerant, will be revealed to be a complete lie, especially regarding an unrepentant and shameless people who do greatly deserve to be very soundly scourged and shamed.
Too much of the hierarchy, meaning most of them, and most Catholics have, thus, simply accepted the so basic nominalist thinking of the secular society, as being equivalent truth for them. The secularist order of reality has, moreover, greatly predominated their minds and hearts, their own souls and wills, as if it were a form of (religious) revelation. Evil is called good; good is, in turn, denounced as evil. The creation of what has been called neo-Catholicism, with its touchstone of the “new orthodoxy” being blind acceptance of VC II, is here intelligently rejected.
Due to the many and often crescive difficulties involved, therefore, the philosophical and theological discussion, in this article, must be logically held within the suitable context of a Christian order of reality, not a secularist one. That particular higher context will then seek its elevated inspiration and edification from orthodox/traditionalist Roman Catholicism as to a plainly theocentric/Christocentric view of reality, as opposed to the secular-humanist anthropocentric attitude that mainly dominates the Western world, which fully includes America, of course.
Defining of Supreme Rights, Honor, and Glory
What are the rights and what does the honor and glory of the Supreme Being consist of? The Creator, being the First Being of and, in fact, beyond/before the entire universe itself ever existed, deserves, by definition, to be worshipped as the be all/end all, alpha and omega, of the vast entirety of anything or everything that has ever, does, or will ever be. If God is God, furthermore, then the rights, honor, and glory of the Divinity are, axiomatically, to permanently take first priority and advanced precedence over and against any such purported attributes of just mere human beings. Q. E. D.
If the Supreme Being should ever cease to exist (though actually just impossible) for a single second, then nothing would at all exist, absolutely nothing, because everything is ever intimately dependent upon the reality of the First Cause, as any mere elementary or (pagan/natural) Aristotelian philosophy would logically note. The sanctification of such cognition has been, however, splendidly brought forth by Catholicism when appropriately interpreted in an orthodox, meaning a proper and theologically sound, manner.
God, as the absolutely sovereign trans-universal power above and beyond all of reality, is the ultimate reason for all being, for existence itself, and human lives are, consequently, unquestionably dependent upon the fact and truth of the existence of the Deity. Worship, therefore, is what is owed to the Lord; it is His right. No rational intellect, furthermore, should question that fundamental truth given the logic and reasoning above presented. Although people have free will 1 [see: Notes], to choose otherwise, another right of the Deity is that of obedience to the Divine will, which includes, at a minimum, the Ten Commandments, the Decalogue.
Only some examples of the rights of the Almighty can, realistically, be given here because they are, of course, as infinite as is God Himself. As to the honor and glory of the Deity, they are identical as to their realities and bespeak of the everlasting greatness of the Lord. Honor is due because the Supreme Being forever naturally takes precedence as the preeminent reality above and beyond the entire universe that exists at the pleasure of the Lord God Almighty, for all of subordinate being and reality is merely and simply contingent being and reality.
Nothing that exists, aside from the Deity, needs to be; there is no necessity that mandates the universe. There is no ontological imperative to trump contingency. And, matter, of course, can never will itself. The fact of the Supreme Being’s absolute honor and allied immortal glory is beyond question, meaning according to at least all of the above argumentation. By implication, man acquires dignity and respect by being made in the image of God, by becoming children of God through baptism. This, in turn, allows for human beings to have rights, honor, and glory through the existence of the Supreme Being, not the State.
The honor of God relates, by definition, to an always unequalled magnificence beyond any true attempt at comprehension, description, observation, etc.; the glory of God is associated directly with the fact of the status of such a Supreme Being who, by definition, forever defines what honor and glory ultimately is. The truth of the honor and glory involved, moreover, is not really comprehensible, by the limited human mind, as to its necessarily superlative magnitude, thus, existing forever to the nth degree; into the trans-cosmic range of the absolutely ineffable, it remains ever magnificently incomprehensible.
Furthermore, the highest epistemological expression, within Roman Catholic theology, of the rights, honor, and glory of God is seen within the explication and defense of the Trinitarian Dogma. 2 It is also the greatest acknowledgement of ontological reality ever conceived of by the specification of there being three Persons in the Blessed Trinity, which is a mystery, as to its reality, not capable of being fully understood by mortal man. Why is this said?
Conclusion
To really, meaning actually, know God, one must, in effect, be God. There is, by definition, no other way. And, the Roman Catholic Church is, moreover, the only institution that has both consistently and forthrightly upheld and expostulated coherently and theologically the Trinitarian Dogma.
The rights of the Deity pertain to the King of Kings, Jesus Christ; the honor of God is God the Father Almighty, and the glory of God is the Holy Ghost. But, until the rights, honor, and glory of the Supreme Being are adamantly and confidently defended openly by the Church, the dark years ahead, for America in particular and the West in general, will see no end.
Nations rise, nations fall, but only Christ is King forever and ever.
Athanasius contra mundum!
Notes
1. Martin Luther, among others who are famous determinists, never finally confronted and completely resolved the quite integral contradiction that one (he) can freely declare that, in fact, there is no free will, meaning by what freedom did Luther have the presumed ability to declare that man has no free will, a perpetual irresolvable conundrum within the thinking of determinism. Thus, inherently, every determinism refutes itself by its own corrupt logic. Q. E. D.
2. The correct understanding and complete acceptance of the Trinitarian Dogma, within the full context of the Catholic Faith, is the only sure and certain defense against the unwanted corruption of the human mind by nominalism (aka ideology) and its then attendant errors of relativism, positivism, pragmatism, etc.
