I commented here on the account of the Tower of Babel. Since I was making another point at the time, I did not remark on how God is portrayed in the story.

It could be argued that in the story, God is simply punishing human arrogance. The people say, “Let us make a name for ourselves,” which seems like an arrogant thing to say.

However, one also might think that God is responding to them in an envious way. “Look, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is only the beginning of what they will do; nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. Come, let us go down, and confuse their language there, so that they will not understand one another’s speech.” If they make a name for themselves, it will be by doing great things; so let us stop them from doing great things.

Of course, God is not actually envious in this way, for several reasons. First, the Supreme Good is lacking in nothing, and so cannot be harmed by the good of others. And the things themselves are perfected in this way, as we noted a few days ago. St. Thomas explains divine governance:

Secondly, the effect of the government of the world may be considered on the part of those things by means of which the creature is made like to God. Thus there are, in general, two effects of the government. For the creature is assimilated to God in two things; first, with regard to this, that God is good; and so the creature becomes like Him by being good; and secondly, with regard to this, that God is the cause of goodness in others; and so the creature becomes like God by moving others to be good. Wherefore there are two effects of government, the preservation of things in their goodness, and the moving of things to good.

God is not envious of his creatures when they bring about something good, because this was a big part of the idea of creation in the first place. In contrast, human beings are often jealous on behalf of God when this happens. We will discuss this in another post.