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To be merciful is to exceed justice, to give someone something more than they deserve. To be less merciful would not indicate moral deficiency on God's part. We can be grateful for God's great mercy to us. But if God was less merciful we would not be able to judge God negatively.
Funny you bring mercy up here, I recently heard a priest say, in summary, "God's mercy to us is justice to Himself. Divine simplicity entails that God's mercy and justice are the same thing. It would be just to humanity for humans to never be redeemed, but it would have offended against what God owes to Himself - God's justice due to Himself. He deserves our reconciliation because that is what He created us for. Therefore He offers to us salvation, which is mercy to us but justice to Him."
I still insist, that when Catholics talk about God, we are taking in analogy. There are very few statements we can positively say that are true about God. Most of what we can say about God is what He is Not. This is called Apophatic theology.
It is true that Catholic.com uses unspecific language, because it is a apologetic outreach website and not a university-level publication.
Obviously God's greatness is far greater than a sunset or a kitten! I'm also arguing that His greatness is far greater than human understanding of good behavior. These are all poor analogies to the reality of the full significance of God's goodness.
Ok, here. Dolphins are good. They also rape and murder other sea creatures. Explain to me in your example the significant difference between Orcus and Dolphins so I can understand what you think I would object to.
I think we have different assumptions here. To me mercy and justness simply seem like different virtues, which a maximally moral individual would all exhibit. They don't trade off against each other or make up for each other - exceeding justice isn't unjust; mercy alone is not justice however plentiful. They're simply different axes.
Now, certainly, where there is justice, mercy is supererogatory in the context of treating morality as a yes-or-no question - a man who acts justly but without mercy is not behaving immorally. But I feel comfortable saying that a man who is both just and merciful is morally superior to one who is only ever just. And I could "judge the merciless man negatively" on moral grounds, though that judgement would not be the same thing as a condemnation.
That being said, my chief point here is that if mercy is indeed moral quality, then you are "judging" God if your praise of His merciful treatment of mankind constitutes a positive claim that it is present; if you can imagine a world where God was less, or was not, merciful, and in which consequently you would not be moved to compliment Him in this particular way. This seems to hold even if you think no negative judgement would be warranted in the absence of that mercy.
I also notice that the latter idea only works with "merciful", not "just". Justice is not supererogatory however you look at it. The absence of justice would be injustice. Therefore, under my model of praise, to praise God for being just ought to imply a counterfactual where you could, in principle, criticize Him for being unjust.
The difference is that Orcus, as a pseudo-Devil (though not a fallen angel), would be a scriptural figure and thus one priests had cause to talk about, whereas dolphins - to my knowledge - rarely come up at mass one way or the other.
My claim is that, if Orcus was a thing and came up in scripture, no one wearing a cassock would ever organically, spontaneously talk about Orcus's goodness the way they talk about God's goodness, any more than they'd speak about Satan's goodness, even though they would acknowledge that Orcus technically counts as "good" in the same sense as dolphins and scorpions should they be specifically asked. I believe this demonstrates that God's goodness gets brought up for other, specific reasons than that God satisfies the criteria for this technical sense of "goodness".
So in this prong of our discussion I've not been arguing about theology qua theology so much as accusing the Church of rampant muddling-of-the-waters on this issue, which might be regarded either as doublethink-like epistemological confusion on the apologists' part, or deliberate deception of the common-folk for the "greater good" of fostering naive faith.
(In both cases, I am working under the assumption that people are more inclined to worship God and follow His commandments if they vaguely believe that he's good in the sense of being a good person; and therefore that, if the Catholic God is officially, theologically not "good" in that sense, apologists have an interest in obscuring this point, at least until they've got prospected converts fully "hooked" and can roll out the spikier doctrines. The apologist and convert can literally be different people, or a single man who's wrestling with doubt and winds up engaging in a bit of self-deception by mentally equivocating between the two senses of "good".)
It is, I admit, a somewhat aggressive line of argument, and not a fault of which I'm accusing you personally, which is why I'd sort of left it behind upthread as we got lost in the weeds of the specific Orcus hypothetical.
Justice classically defined is to give someone exactly what they deserve.
Mercy classically defined is to give someone more than they deserve.
They are contradictory, and calling God both Just and Merciful is one of the classic "mysteries of faith."
In God they are all the same virtue, because God is one simple thing. The most simple thing in existence. He is composed of no components. He has no composite parts.
I guess we are judging as in assessing. Like I judge an apple to be an apple when I eat it. I can assess that God is merciful. And by merciful I mean something like, "humans are merciful sometimes, and God is doing something analogous to that when He paved a way for our salvation." But not that God is merciful in the same way a human is merciful. Our version of mercy is a pale comparison. The reality of mercy that has its source in God's nature is beyond our comprehension and our own behavior.
Ok, Dolphins aren't explicitly in there, but Genesis Chapter 1 does come up and I was actually explicitly thinking of it when I called dolphins good:
God saw that it was good. Great creatures of the sea and every living thing with which the water teems. God saw that it was good. This is one of those places we see that word. I hear homilies all the time on the significance of this. So is there something else that is different between Orcus and Dolphins?
Don't get me wrong, He is both good and a person. Just our idea of a good person is limited by our overemphasis on our own species and nature.
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