III. "The World Was Created For the Glory of God"

Scripture and Tradition never cease to teach and celebrate this fundamental truth: “The world was made for the glory of God.”1 St. Bonaventure explains that God created all things “not to increase his glory, but to show it forth and to communicate it”,2 for God has no other reason for creating than his love and goodness: “Creatures came into existence when the key of love opened his hand.”3 The First Vatican Council explains:

This one, true God, of his own goodness and “almighty power”, not for increasing his own beatitude, nor for attaining his perfection, but in order to manifest this perfection through the benefits which he bestows on creatures, with absolute freedom of counsel “and from the beginning of time, made out of nothing both orders of creatures, the spiritual and the corporeal….”4

The glory of God consists in the realization of this manifestation and communication of his goodness, for which the world was created. God made us “to be his sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will, to the praise of his glorious grace”,5 for “the glory of God is man fully alive; moreover man’s life is the vision of God: if God’s revelation through creation has already obtained life for all the beings that dwell on earth, how much more will the Word’s manifestation of the Father obtain life for those who see God.”6 The ultimate purpose of creation is that God “who is the creator of all things may at last become ‘all in all’, thus simultaneously assuring his own glory and our beatitude.”7