By Michael Pakaluk
Everything argues in favor of God being in favor of growth, so that those who hold, in some realm of the good, that He favors limited or null growth, have the burden of proof. «Good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over» (Luke 6:38) is the language of someone who loves growth above stagnation.
Let us begin with first principles. God is life; life proceeds from God; but what lives grows; therefore, what is from God shows growth.
He wants the Church to grow, using an astonishing image to express the proportion: from a mustard seed, the size of the period at the end of this sentence, it must grow to become a tree the size of a house, a proportion of approximately 1 to 45,000.
God is light, but light spreads. To say, with the medievals, bonum diffusivum sui (the good diffuses itself) is to affirm that what is good produces growth. When Jesus said: «I have come to cast fire upon the earth» (Luke 12:49), He longed to consume, to spread, to extend.
He wants each one of us to flourish individually, that is, to grow and cause growth. Flowers have as their purpose to produce other plants. A single blooming dandelion is followed by a field of dandelions. Cut a plant that grows well only so that it grows with greater exuberance. (John 15:2)
He tells us to become like little children, that is, like those who are in the stage of life marked by the most dramatic growth, not «they must become like old people in rocking chairs».
In the parables, his multiples mean that the fruitfulness that pleases him is thirty, sixty, or a hundredfold. (Mark 4:20) The man without growth who does not understand his Lord and buries his talent is severely rebuked. (Matthew 25:25)
His talent is taken away and given to the man who has many, for «to everyone who has, more will be given and he will have abundance; but from the one who has not, even what he has will be taken away», which is a principle of acceleration or deceleration. «At God’s pace» means accelerating.
The most fruitful bush, soil, or worker produces a hundredfold. He says: «If the grain of wheat does not fall to the ground and die, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit». (John 12:24) But the typical wheat plant has five stalks, and each stalk has 22 seeds, a proportion of 1 to 110. It is the proportion that He placed in nature—and the formula, presumably, of a fruitful apostolate—.
He likes dispersion, which is the prelude to growth. In his Great Commission (Matthew 28:19), Jesus told his disciples to disperse and grow to become nations. His Chosen People, dispersed from Jerusalem when the Romans destroyed it in A.D. 70, grew to become great multitudes throughout Europe. Hitler hated their growth. The wisdom of «the hour is coming when neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem will they worship the Father». (John 4:21) Any flock not restricted to one place is free to spread and grow.
Yes, spiritual growth is the most important, but God is also in favor of growth in honest human material prosperity. Listen to the instinct of a good human heart in Lincoln’s Thanksgiving Proclamation:
The year that is drawing to a close has been filled with the blessings of fruitful fields and healthful skies. To these gifts of the bountiful Giver of all, which we enjoy so constantly that we are prone to forget the source from which they come, have been added others of nature so extraordinary that for them we cannot but raise our grateful thanksgivings to the Giver of All Good. . . .
The necessary deviations of wealth and of strength from the fields of peaceful industry to the national defense have not arrested the plow, the loom, or the merchant ship; the axe has enlarged the borders of our settlements, and the mines, as well of iron and coal as of the precious metals, have yielded even more abundantly than heretofore. Population has steadily increased, notwithstanding the losses by battle and by disease; and to the country, rejoicing in the consciousness of augmented strength and vigor, is permitted to expect a continuance of years with large increase of freedom.
A Christian must be better than the pagans who praised their gods by offering cornucopias. After all, we marvel at Creation, which is strictly infinite growth.
Is the command «Be fruitful and multiply», for procreators, contained in the rule that two should not have more than two? But they would not have multiplied more than the man who returned a talent had multiplied his gift. Suppose then a growing population. But God cannot reasonably will an end without willing the means. It follows that material productivity, the economy, must also grow.
St. Irenaeus, writing in A.D. 180, recounts from a previous generation, who learned it directly from St. John the Evangelist, that Jesus said:
There will come days when the vines will grow, each one having ten thousand branches, and on each branch ten thousand twigs, and on each twig ten thousand shoots, and on each shoot ten thousand clusters, and on each cluster ten thousand grapes, and each grape, when pressed, will give twenty-five measures of wine. . . . Likewise. . . each grain of wheat will yield five hundred pounds of clean, pure flour.
Scholars reject the attribution because, they say, it is fantastic. But airplanes and supercomputers in your pocket are fantastic. What language would you have used, to convey to peasants in A.D. 30, what economists have called «The Great Enrichment», that hockey-stick growth of modern free economies?
It doesn’t matter altogether if what St. Irenaeus transmitted is authentic. This great saint—and the Christians of that time—clearly believed that it was the kind of thing the Lord might say, that crazy lover of fruitfulness and growth.
We insist on temperance, balance, moderation, and rightly so, but let us make sure that it never excludes astonishing growth.
About the author
Michael Pakaluk, scholar of Aristotle and Ordinarius of the Pontifical Academy of St. Thomas Aquinas, is Professor of Political Economy at the Busch School of Business at the Catholic University of America. He lives in Hyattsville, Maryland, with his wife Catherine, also a professor at the Busch School, and their children. His collection of essays, The Shock of Holiness (Ignatius Press), is now available. His book on Christian friendship, The Company We Keep, is available from Scepter Press. He contributed to Natural Law: Five Views (Zondervan, last May), and his most recent book on the Gospels appeared in March with Regnery Gateway, Be Good Bankers: The Economic Interpretation of Matthew’s Gospel. You can follow him on Substack at Michael Pakaluk.