Putin's evil and the holiness of God

'The holiness of God is the inaccessible centre of his eternal mystery.' Photo by Monstera

Descriptions of the war in Ukraine are seemingly not complete without a description of Putin as "evil". But does "evil" mean anything more than "bad"? For sure it does, because the term takes us back to the nature of God, the holiness of God, and the original holiness humans were endowed with before their cataclysmic rebellion, shattering their unqualified friendship with God.

So, by preferring themselves over God, and by doing so scorning God, given the gulf between creature and Creator, our first parents chose themselves before God, giving in to the devil's lies. As a result, sin and evil are now part and parcel of human history: 

What Revelation makes known to us is confirmed by our own experience. For when man looks into his own heart he finds he is drawn toward what is wrong and sunk in many evils which cannot come from his good Creator.

Often refusing to acknowledge God as his source, man has also upset the relationship which should link him to his last end; and at the same time, he has broken the right order that should reign within himself as well as between himself and other men and all creatures. 

           — Vatican Council document Gaudium et spes (1965)

What makes evil so wrong, even beyond the harm, the injustice, done to our fellow humans, is that it is an offence against the justice we owe God as our creator. Also, it strikes at the friendship that God established with us when he made us in his own image. Therefore, in the Old and New Testaments, God had to remind us "be holy for I am holy".

It's worth dwelling on what it means to be "holy". About 100 years ago, the German scholar Rudolf Otto published a book, The Idea of the Holy, and this work has remained a staple for those exploring the sphere of human experience that covers the mysterium tremendum.  Awe, awefulness, "overpoweringness", and "urgency", as well as the "wholly other", are terms that relate to the numinous and our "creature-feeling" within the spiritual world we know intimately. These terms express a reality that is apart from the collection of facts about our material world.

The holiness of God is the inaccessible centre of his eternal mystery. What is revealed of it in creation and history, Scripture calls "glory", the radiance of his majesty (Psalm 8; Isaiah 6:3). [Catechism of the Catholic Church (1994) paragraph 2809]

 One biblical commentator expresses the idea well:

The most important element of God’s nature is his holiness. Holy means “set apart,” and God is clearly separate from his creation based on his nature and attributes. Holiness is the foundation of all other aspects of God’s character. Revelation 15:4 says of God, “You alone are holy.” Revelation 4:8 describes the four living creatures who sing to God day and night, “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty, who was, and is, and is to come.” It is God’s holiness that makes him the “consuming fire” that will judge all sin (Hebrews 12:29). Beautiful doxologies exalting God’s holiness are found throughout Scripture, including Psalm 99:9; Psalm 33:21; Psalm 77:13; Psalm 89:18; Psalm 105:3; and others.

Another goes further: 

Because God is holy, he stands alone, apart from every other person, being or entity. He is not set apart because of arrogance, but because everything about him is higher and greater than all other creation, which puts him in a category all by himself. No one else is revered like he is. No one else is exalted like he is. No one else is holy like he is. He is set apart from all creation and is set apart from all other gods. That’s why he says, “I am the Lord, and there is no other; apart from me there is no God” (Isaiah 45:5).

Bringing our thoughts back to how God's holiness the evil in the world around us, another writer makes this point:

Holiness has an ethical connotation as well, a sense in which God is separated from all evil. He cannot sin, He will not tempt anyone else to sin, and He can have no association with sin of any kind. He is untainted with the slightest trace of iniquity. 

More on how offensive sin is before God:

Sin is abominable to God – He hates it (cf. Deuteronomy 12:31). Sin is contrary to His nature (Isaiah 6:3; 1 John 1:5). It stains the soul and degrades humanity's nobility. Scripture calls sin "filthiness" (Proverbs 30:12; Ezekiel 24:13; James 1:21) and likens it to a putrefying corpse. Sinners are the tombs that contain stench and foulness (Matthew 23:27). The ultimate penalty – death – is the consequence of sin (Ezekiel 18:4, 20; Romans 6:3). 

Texts that convey how thoroughly the Hebrews and then the early Christians were imbued with an understanding that God is holy include these:

Job 6:10

 “But it is still my consolation,

And I rejoice in unsparing pain,

That I have not denied the words of the Holy One.”

Psalm 22:3

Yet You are holy,

O You who are enthroned upon the praises of Israel.

Isaiah 57:15

For thus says the high and exalted One

Who lives forever, whose name is Holy,

“I dwell on a high and holy place,

And also with the contrite and lowly of spirit

In order to revive the spirit of the lowly

And to revive the heart of the contrite.”

Isaiah 6:3

And one called out to another and said,

“Holy, Holy, Holy, is the Lord of hosts,

The whole earth is full of His glory.”

Revelation 4:8

And the four living creatures, each one of them having six wings, are full of eyes around and within; and day and night they do not cease to say, “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God, the Almighty, who was and who is and who is to come.”

Habakkuk 1:13

Your eyes are too pure to approve evil,

And You cannot look on wickedness with favor.

Why do You look with favor

On those who deal treacherously?

Why are You silent when the wicked swallow up

Those more righteous than they?

John 17:11

I am no longer in the world; and yet they themselves are in the world, and I come to You. Holy Father, keep them in Your name, the name which You have given Me, that they may be one even as We are.

1 Samuel 2:2

 “There is no one holy like the Lord,

Indeed, there is no one besides You,

Nor is there any rock like our God.”

Exodus 15:11

 “Who is like You among the gods, O Lord?

Who is like You, majestic in holiness,

Awesome in praises, working wonders?”

1 Thessalonians 4:7

For God has not called us for impurity, but in holiness.

Romans 3:23

For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God,

Acts 3:14-15 

But you denied the Holy and Righteous One, and asked for a murderer to be granted to you, and you killed the Author of life, whom God raised from the dead. To this we are witnesses.

These days, to refer to someone as "holy" may convey a negative value to the extent that charity is collocated with "cold", or "righteous" has the connotation of "hypocritical". So let's dig deeper into that term:

When people hear the word “holy,” they often think “devout” or “virtuous,” but qodesh, the word for holiness in the Hebrew Bible, is not a moral or behavioral term. It means “apartness”, conveying an inherent, critical difference between what is holy and what is not.

Unlike other divine attributes like power, justice and love, holiness has no analogue in the everyday life of Israel. It doesn’t refer to a common experience and then say God is like that. Instead, it evokes the one quality of God which is unlike anything we know.

In ancient Judaism, holiness meant the radical otherness of God, the Holy One. The divine presence is not to be approached easily or casually, either by our bodies or by our language. God dwells in a sacred zone which is highly charged, difficult and risky to enter. 

Israel’s worship practices grew up around this strict sense of separation. At the center of cultic life was a holy of holies, a space set apart from contamination by the world. And only priests, who were themselves set apart and highly trained in the intricacies of access, were allowed to have contact with this sacred center. There was a sense that if the sphere of holiness were to be contaminated or carelessly regarded, the presence of the Holy One might withdraw from Israel, and that would be disastrous. 

Leviticus, [...], contains a long section known as the Holiness Code because of its repeated use of holy and holiness, as well as related terms like sanctify, hallow, consecrate, dedicate, and sacred.  

The writer of the above adds a challenge that bears on the theme of this post, the loss of our relationship with the holy, even with the Holy One, because of inattention, even outright rebellion. He continues:

You shall be holy, for I your God am holy (Leviticus 19:2). God is not content to limit holiness to Godself. God’s people are invited to be holy as well. Not just our sanctuaries, but ourselves, are made to be set apart, consecrated, sanctified, hallowed. Biblical theologian Walter Brueggemann has called this the “obligation tradition”, where “the purpose of Israel’s life is to host the holiness of Yahweh”.

As the biblical people gradually figured out, hosting divine holiness means more than maintaining ritual purity or devotional piety. It means embodying justice and peace as well, uncontaminated by the dehumanizing, violent and oppressive practices of the dominant culture. Such holiness requires the consecration and dedication of every aspect of life to the will and purpose of God.

That God is worthy of being named "the Holy One" is brought out in the following excerpt from a series in The Guardian on philosopher-priest Thomas Aquinas's study of the human effort to know God, from ancient Greece, through the era of scholarship among the early Muslims, and into the Christian era:

Aquinas might say that we know no more of God through creation than we know of Mozart through his music. We can only allow our wonder to be awakened by the beauty of what has been created. The being of God is better understood as a verb than a noun. It is the dynamism of being that sustains all beings, so that were God to cease the activity of holding creation in being, "all nature would collapse" (ST I.104.1).

We could say that God's being is what God does, most perfectly expressed for Aquinas in the words "I am who I am" (Exodus 3:14). This is what Aquinas means by God as "pure act" (actus purus). It is a simplicity of being beyond all the complexity of matter and form, body and soul, potency and act, which constitutes the universe of created beings.

Evil we know well, in the horrendous actions of world leaders, as well as in our own hearts. The point of this post is to make manifest how the mind-blowing nature of God is as far removed from evil as east is from the west, so to speak. The burden of the message here is also that the evil we perform in thought word or deed, or fail to perform, is an injustice, an offence of extreme magnitude against the God who created us to be friends in eternity.

As we have seen, God hates evil—but not the sinner—because it strikes at his essential nature, and because when we are the perpetrator of evil we commit a grave  offence against our own dignity with which God lovingly created us.

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