Before Theology Argues, It Asks What It Means to Exist

A few years ago, I altar served the Easter Vigil at my parish. If you have never been to one, it is long. It doesn’t just “feel long.” It is actually long. It starts in complete darkness, then there is the fire, the Paschal candle, and readings that go all the way back to Genesis. You stand there in your alb holding a processional candle, solid brass, heavier than it looks, for over 2 hours. Your arms start to burn, and then you start thinking about dropping it. Not just dropping it, but dropping it in front of everyone, in the dark, at exactly the wrong moment. That becomes the real problem. Not the weight, but the possibility of being the one person who breaks the moment.

At some point you stop thinking about your arms and start noticing everything else.

Here were all these people doing something that made no practical sense. It was late. It was long. Nobody was getting anything out of it in a transactional way. No one was optimizing anything. Yet, the church was full. Everyone was paying attention. The readings were not trying to prove anything. They were just stating what is. Creation. Fall. Covenant. Redemption. It felt less an argument and more like someone walking you through the structure of reality as if it had always been there. I did not have the language for that at the time. I think I am getting closer.

Most debates about theology start too late. They begin with doctrines. Trinity. Incarnation. Miracles. Scripture. From there, the argument usually collapses into “Do you believe this happened?” or “Is there evidence?” which is where the conversation either becomes an argument or dies quietly.

I hear versions of this all the time. I am basically the only Catholic in my friend group at school. They are not dismissive, which I respect. They actually push back. The conversations tend to stall in the same place. Faith versus evidence. Miracles versus probability. At some point it just feels like everyone is arguing past something more basic.

This is because classical theology does not start there. It starts with a stranger question.

What does it mean for something to exist at all?

We use the word “exists” casually. A chair exists. A tree exists. A star exists. The owl outside my bedroom window exists and announces it every night whether anyone is listening or not. The grammar makes it seem like existence is just another property, like color or size.

But existence isn’t a property you can add to something.

You can imagine a triangle and then imagine a red triangle. Red is a property. But you cannot imagine a triangle and then add “existence” to it as if it were a feature. Existence is not something contained inside the concept of a thing.

It’s what makes the thing actual rather than merely possible.

That distinction matters. It sounds technical, but it is not.

Classical metaphysics described this difference in terms of act and potency.

Aristotle framed it this way, and Aquinas later pushed it further. A seed is potentially a tree. A tree is actually a tree. The transition from potential to actual requires something already actual to bring it about.

Extend that logic far enough, and you hit a deeper question:

Why is there actuality at all?

Why does anything move from possibile to real?

This is not a religious claim yet. It’s more like a structural problem.

If everything were only potential, nothing would ever become actual. So, something has to exist that is not just actual, but does not depend on anything else to be actual.

Theological language eventually calls that God.

But notice what happened. We didn’t start with belief. We started with being.

This is usually where conversations with my friends stall out.

When someone says “God exists,” it’s almost always heard as “there is a very powerful invisible thing somewhere out there. “ Whis is fair, because that is how it usually gets presented. But classical theology doesn’t mean that.

It means something closer to the grounding condition for existence itself.

Not a being among beings, but the reason there are beings at all.

That’s a very different claim. It is also not a quick one to explain between classes.

I did not get this through a class anyway. It came from a few places that I did not realize were connected until recently.

My grandfather grew up in Korea under Japanese occupation. The classics were one of the few things that could not really be taken away. Greek texts, Roman history, ideas about virtue and order. Decades later he is sitting with me in North Carolina reading those same works. Somehow a Korean kid under occupation and a kid in the South ended up meeting in the same place, which is not a connection I would have predicted but makes sense once you see it.

My Nonna (grandmother) from Italy is the one who took me to Mass growing up. So, my earliest experience of church was sitting in a pew surrounded by retired women, getting quietly passed between them like I was part of a system I did not understand. At some point, a two-year-old version of me decided the silence had gone on long enough and yelled, “I’m Jewish, let’s go,” in the middle of Mass. I do not remember it, but I have been told it landed.

She never argues about God. She just assumes the structure is real and lives like the assumption is obvious.

At my parish while altar serving, I met people who approached these questions differently than anyone at school. Most were homeschooled. Not sheltered. Just more serious about it. One of the older servers, Aidan, understood the faith in a way that was not just inherited or repeated. He read, he thought, and he treated these questions like they were actually worth the effort. I remember thinking he knew something I did not, which is a useful feeling if you pay attention to it.

Between my grandfather’s books, my grandmother’s faith, and those people at church, I was being pointed in the same direction from three different places without really noticing it.

Lately, I have been trying to take that more seriously. Going to Mass when I can. Actually listening to the readings instead of just being there. It is not really about giving things up for the sake of it. It is more like removing enough noise that the question is harder to ignore.

What is real? What is actual? What am I pointing toward?

It does not go away, even when it would be easier if it did.

Why is something rather than nothing?

Why is any of this actual?

That is where theology starts.

Not with argument.

With being.