Good evening, Father, I would like to ask you this question:

If God had feelings and answered our prayers, there would be a change in God.

How can the eternal and the temporal, of which we are a part, correlate without eternity becoming temporalized and time becoming eternal?

Thank you in advance.

Priest’s answer

Dear Friend,,

1. I could briefly dismiss the question by saying that feelings are emotions that involve the sensory life of both humans and animals.

Now God, being a pure spirit, has no sensory life and is not subject to emotions.

2. Nevertheless, God is also the author and creator of feelings, but is not subject to feelings.

Just as God is the author of material reality, but is not matter.

God transcends both feelings and matter.

3. This does not mean that God does not love.

Indeed, according to Christian revelation, ” God is love, and whoever remains in love remains in God and God in him.” (1 John 4:16).

But this love is infinitely superior to the love experienced through emotions.

4. In truth, the sacred text does not say that God is love. But it does say that God is charity.

This new term (in Greek: agape, in Latin: carità) is used to indicate that it is a divine and supernatural way of loving.

This is why St. Thomas says that charity is love, but not all love is charity.

Only the love that is a derivation of the proper and divine way of loving is charity.

In theological jargon, it is said that this is a supernatural love, which does not arise from us, as happens with our feelings, but is infused by God.

5. Coming to your specific question: “If God has feelings and answers our questions, there would be a change in God.”

If that was the case, He would no longer be God.

The conclusion is logical.

But the premise is wrong because it leads to the belief that God—now at one moment, now at another—hears the prayers of men.

But God is not like that.

There is no becoming of God.

God is pure act.

6. Therefore, when God creates or answers the prayers of men, it is the things conceived and willed ab aeterno by God that, at that moment, by His eternal will, while remaining in God’s mind, acquire an existence even outside of God.

But God in no way changes in the act of creating the world or in the act of answering the prayers of men.

7. Finally, to be precise, the things conceived ab aeterno by God are not God, they are not eternity.

Therefore, it is not eternity—that is, God—that is, that is, God that is temporalized, but rather the things conceived ab aeterno by God that are temporalized.

And the things that are temporalized, precisely because they are things and not God, remain eternally in God’s mind, but never become eternity, that is, they never become God.

I bless you, wish you well, and remember you in prayer.

Father Angelo

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