A Companion to the Summa, Volume 1, Chapters 1-5

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A Companion to the Summa

FOREWORD

This first volume of a set of four, unlike most first volumes, does not come as a stranger into a strange world. Through a variety of circumstances, Volumes II and III were born before their time. Of course it was necessary in them to explain that this whole set of books took its rise from series of lectures on the Summa Theologica of St. Thomas Aquinas; that the double purpose of the whole work is an introduction to Thomas and a defense of the truths, natural and divine, by which human life is lived; and that these books are the Summa reduced to popular language, the parallel questions of the Summa being indicated under each chapter heading.

There is no need to go into all that again. Nevertheless, an introductory note to this volume is necessary, for each of the four books has its own immediate and special purpose. Volume II, for example, furnished the key to human life and human action; Volume III concentrated on the manner of the living of human life in its exuberant fullness. This volume is the wise man’s search for the ultimate answers that are the bedrock far beneath human life, human action and the living of human life.

This volume attempts to put in popular form St. Thomas’ masterly study of God, man, and the world in the Prima Pars of his Summa Theologica. His study is of extreme pertinence to our times precisely because we are the victims of a constantly increasing intellectual confusion. We have become more and more timid about digging beneath the surface of life, more and more emphatic about a knowledge of facts, less and less concerned with the wisdom of beginnings and ends. To put it baldly, we have concentrated more and more on the physical world and less and less on man and on God. The fact is, however, that exclusive concentration on a study of the world does not unearth the important truths about the world; an exclusive consideration of man and the world results in a blurred, distorted vision of both. We have tried to know only the world and remained most ignorant of it; to know only man and the world and have become entangled in a mass of meaningless detail. For the world is intelligible only in terms of man and God; man is intelligible only in terms of God; God is intelligible only in terms of Himself.

Thomas does not, of course, attempt to amass all the detailed knowledge that has been gathered by the ages. He does attempt, as deeply as is given to the human mind, strengthened and illumined by divine help, to plumb the uttermost depths of truth. It is not surprising, then, that the reader will more than once or twice discover that such a study is not easy. But man was not made for easy things; he was made for hard things, almost insuperably hard things–a truth that intrudes itself on the mind of man in its every contact with the crucial things of life.

This study involves one of those crucial activities, for it centers around indispensable knowledge. Plainly it is important for every man to know about the world, at least the primely important things like its origin, its meaning its relation to himself; after all, he must live in the world, do something with it and have something done to himself by it. It is of the utmost importance that a man know about himself, at least the important things like his origin, the meaning of his life and his relations to things beneath and above himself; for he has the unique gift of being able to use his life to some purpose, a purpose of immediate concern to the individual man. Unless a man know about God, he cannot know the important things about either the world or himself.

When we go below the surface of a man’s life to the spiritual depths beneath, the image of God stands out more clearly; then we begin to appreciate the servile place of the world, the inestimable dignity of man and the eternal promise which, crowning his life, dwarfs everything else in the universe. Thomas’ study, in a word, is important for our times because the men of our times have learned all but the important things. His study of God, man, and the world, hard and deep as it may be, is necessary because, forgetting God, our times have not recognized men and have yet to see the world. We are learned but far from wise. This is Thomas’ book of wisdom, his searching examination of the profound reasons, his handbook of the important answers.

This is a beginner’s book in a much more literal sense than is the Summa Theologica, explicit as Thomas was in aiming his book at beginners. To the angels, it must seem like a primer; yet men are not angels but always beginners in the way of wisdom. From those human beginners I ask pardon for all the difficulties I fail to remove from their path to wisdom. To the particularly ruthless critics who insisted on the removal of so many of those impediments, I give my sincere thanks. To Thomas, my acknowledgment of all the good things that are in this book.

W. F.
Dominican House of Studies
Washington, D. C.

CHAPTER I — THE WISE MAN’S BOOK 
(Q. 1)

 1. The wise man and his book: 

    (a) The man: 

               (1) Objections to Thomas. 

               (2) A picture of Thomas. 

    (b) His book:

               (1) Objections to it: 

                               a. Seven hundred years old. 

                               b. Ponderous. 

                               c. In a dead, scientific language. 

               (2) The nature of the book: 

                               a. Its wise nature. 

                               b. Its personal nature. 

               (3) Aim and division of the book. 

 2. The place of divine wisdom in human life: 

    (a) Its necessity. 

    (b) Its role in human activity: 

               (1) A divine science–its object. 

               (2) Its place among the sciences. 

               (3) Its character as wisdom. 

               (4) Its subject matter. 

               (5) Its method. 

 Conclusion: 

 1. Pertinence of the man and his book 

        to the twentieth century: 

    (a) The man: 

               (1) His interests — the perfection of God 

                and the perfectibility of man. 

               (2) His battles — in defense of God and man. 

               (3) His love. 

                               a. Its constant basis. 

                               b. Its ardor. 

    (b) His book — an antidote for poisons: 

               (1) Of superficiality. 

               (2) Of provincialism. 

 2. A philosophy of life: 

    (a) The meaning of life — ultimate answers. 

    (b) The goal of life a plan of action. 

    (c) The exemplar of living — a way of life. 

CHAPTER I

THE WISE MAN’S BOOK

(Q. l) 

The wise man and his book

It is not hard to admire St. Thomas Aquinas immovably caught in the splendor of a stained-glass window; it is easy to pay tribute to his Summa Theologica as long as it remains high on a book-shelf giving tone to a library. Under these circumstances, we of the twentieth century can read about them both, talk about them enthusiastically, but pretty much leave them both alone. To have Thomas walking among us, his book open on our desks for serious study — that is something else again.

Objections to Thomas

If Thomas were to drop into a twentieth century club, or a twentieth century pub for that matter, he would, of course, be judged by twentieth century standards. By those standards he could expect no rousing welcome; he might be tolerated in an amused fashion, but certainly no one would get chummy with him. He lived in the wrong place, for his home was a cloister and to us a cloister is much more puzzling than a healthy appendix. He lived in the wrong age, long, long before the modern age of progress, in the very middle of the Middle Ages. His occupation was totally without interest to us. He was a professor and a writer of books: his researches uncovered no new vitamins or explosives, he had nothing to say about earning more pay, he neither attacked God nor debunked man and society, but he had a good deal to say about truth, goodness, love and God; his books had no scarlet pages, no profanity, no biological realism in perfumed words, no substitute for thinking, and no escape from life. Far from rejecting the past, the man actually revered old things!

Personally he was impossible. His family was closely tied by bonds of blood to the royalty of all Europe, bad enough in itself; but Thomas, turning aside from the soldierly preoccupations of his brothers, became (though not without a fight) a begging friar. To get the full force of this last on the modern mind, it must be put cumulatively: he was a friar and a beggar. The man himself was an abstract thinker, a cold, ruthless logician proceeding with machine-like precision and heartlessness from principle to conclusion regardless of consequences. He had no passion in him, for he was a saint; no heart, for he clung stubbornly to truth; no imagination, for he was a metaphysician; no humanity, for he fled from the world.

If a particle of this were true of Thomas, he would certainly have no place in the lives of men of our age; if even less of it were true, he would belong, not in a stained-glass window, but in a museum. There are no people farther apart than saints and freaks; and this picture makes Thomas out a gigantic freak.

A Picture of Thomas

This picture of Thomas is worse than a caricature, it is a calumny of the man. There is no gainsaying the fact that Thomas was a friar; the best defense of that calling was not the one he wrote but the one he lived. It is not at all the same thing to fly from the world and to fly from men: those who fly from men will die from the spiritual anemia induced by the feeble diet and the narrow confines of the cell of self; while those who stand by men, though flying from the world, will be crucified by both–and consider the crucifixion a price well worth the paying. Thomas has had his crucifixion down through the ages; perhaps the most bitter is the modern one of complete misunderstanding of his character.

We come close to the truth when we see Thomas as an eager youngster plunging into the pursuit of truth at the heels of the greatest master of his time. We are digging beneath his inscrutable surface when we see him holding on to that youthful zest in the way peculiar to the saints, supplementing native genius by labors even his great strength could not stand until, before fifty, his life was burned out. Throughout that short life he dreamed great dreams, impossible dreams, and did all a man could do to make those dreams come true; coming to the end of his life he was forced to admit, as we all are, that the accomplishment fell far short of his dreams, that all he had written seemed as so much straw.

Thomas was eminently human. He had a great natural capacity for love. Bonaventure could have testified to this; or the sisters of Thomas who went into his tower room to talk him out of the convent and came out themselves talked into the convent. He had a knowledge of human nature acquired in no little degree in his trudgings up and down, back and forth, in a Europe which knew little delicacy in its revelations of human nature. That knowledge was deepened, enriched by a love of God and a zeal for souls that made his every breath, even his dying one, a wind scattering truth broadcast through a hungry world which eventually would reap the harvest of so prodigal a sowing.

He had indeed fled from the world, but not from men. This man was not without passion, he was on fire; his heart was not empty, it was overflowing; he was a metaphysician in the fullest sense of the word, which means he was a poet and a pioneer with imagination enough and courage enough to step into the dark over the edge of the world. This man doesn’t belong in a museum; he doesn’t belong in a stained-glass window; his place is with the daring ones, at the head of the crowd, with the ones who have the courage to be men.

Objections: 700 Years Old

Still, his supreme book is seven hundred years old. It might, you say, be of historical interest; a collector, whom the rules do not oblige to read the books he cherishes, might be enthused about it. But the world has come a long way in seven hundred years. Thomas was not a prophet; what could he know of our intellectual advancement. Every age has its own problems; what did Thomas have to do with democracy as against dictatorship, with doles, planned economy, or mechanized war? His book was medieval; our age certainly is not. His was an age of speculation, ours of observation; his of approximation, ours of accuracy; his of faith, ours of reason; his a leisurely age, ours one of speed. So we might go on, fondling the contrasts that are only half-true and omitting the essential consideration, namely, that seven hundred years has not changed the model of human nature.

A list of the problems dealt with in the Summa might as easily have been drawn from the schools of Greece, the libraries of modern universities, or, indeed, from the hearts and minds of men of any age. There is, for example, the problem of good and evil; of being and becoming; of change or evolution; of the goal of man; of knowledge; of God; of property; of the state; of pleasure; of duty; of the origin of the world, and so on. If the Summa of St. Thomas has anything worth while to say on these subjects, it is of interest to an age tortured as ours is with the lack of answers to the fundamental problems of humanity. As a matter of fact, St. Thomas was much too human to turn out a work useless to humanity, much too close to the hearts of men and women to have dealt with these problems in an abstract way that would be of interest only to the academic mind.

Objections: Ponderous

The book is ponderous, five folio volumes of closely packed print, and more closely packed thought. We are not of that by-gone age that would accept such a formidable work as an intellectual challenge, to prove it was not as inferior as it felt. We are rather of the age of headlines, compendiums, outlines and summaries. We must have reviews of the week, in pictures for the really rushed; summary magazines do our digesting for us, columnists do our peeking for us, commissions do our fact finding. For ourselves, we are always in a hurry.

Yet, a three volume novel is not too much for us, or even a one volume romance of twelve-hundred pages. We do face pages and pages of reports, platforms, speeches, statistics. We are of the age of heroically persevering scientific research. It cannot be that we are afraid of work. It is more likely that we demand some tangible fruits as the goal inspiring us to the expenditure of so much mental or physical labor. And it would be hard to quarrel with this eminently hard-headed attitude towards life or books. St. Thomas meets such a challenge with his usual overwhelming answer. It is not the age of his work, its ponderous size, even its medieval dress that repels the layman; but the unfounded opinion that this work is not worth the labor involved in becoming acquainted with it, the results of that labor are not pertinent to an age startlingly different from the age in which the Summa Theologica was written.

Objections: Dead Languages

The dress of the book has been changed; live languages have wrapped their attractive folds about it. Not that such a change was so very necessary; it is difficult to hide the beauty of youth behind the thin disguise of outmoded style. Only a superficial observer could have missed the allure of the Summa. It was written with enthusiasm for the enthusiastic, for the beginners who face light-heartedly the agony of the first step. There is about the book much of the eagerness of youth. It attacks the highest problems with a gay heart and sublime confidence; it meets the rebuff of mystery with youth’s resiliency; it accepts the sweeping conclusions of truth with youth’s idealism, youth’s willingness to sacrifice. It aims at high goals with all the vigor of the great heart of youth.

The Nature of the Book

The humanity and perennial modernity of the Summa are the skeleton whose flesh and blood is the culture of all the ages. Within this book is the compressed essence of truth ground from the Oriental and Greek philosophies, from Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, from the Fathers and from those long thousand years that went into the making of scholasticism. Yet it is not a mere compendium of past achievement, a mausoleum of masters long since dead; rather it is the descendant of a noble line, worthy of the blood it bears. The hard won truth of man’s earliest search for wisdom passed through a filter in Aquinas that barred nothing but the dregs which would poison the drink.

The Book is Wise

Perhaps this last is one of the supreme benefits of contact with the Summa Theologica — the constant communication with one of the greatest minds of all time through the medium of his greatest work. The contents of the Summa had been preparing in the retort of a giant intellect through all of a lifetime. We can even see the slow steps of purification by glancing at Thomas’ earlier works seeing the hesitating agreement, or carefully conditioned disagreement, with the thought of his masters. Later the bold statement of his own solutions does not balk at disagreement with the older scholastics, with Albert, Bonaventure, Augustine and the Fathers, with Plato and Aristotle. Agreements, wherever found, are even more startling. Here, in the full fruit of great genius, there is an economy of word and concept that is deceiving: a few lines of the Summa often equal pages of an earlier work and yet leave us puzzled as to what has been omitted. Frequently the marvel is not what has been so well said but what has been so well left unsaid. A principle is presented to us bowing down with human implications, but presented delicately, with a profound respect for the intellect of the reader, like a poem barely suggesting a sublime picture, or an early English drama without scenery. When a word either way might have upset the delicate balance of truth, might indicate an unjustified emphasis, might mislead the reader, that word is not said.

Its Personal Nature

St. Thomas sat down to write his greatest book as a typist might pull the cover off her typewriter and begin the transcribing of her notes. He, too, was unabashed by the task before him; he approached it with serene simplicity, unimpressed with the importance of his work. But his serenity and simplicity were the eternal expression of the confidence inspired by genius and sanctity. He admits, off-handedly in his extremely brief Prologue, that he intends to expose all that pertains to the Christian religion. ln view of what he actually did, that meant that he intended to wander the corridors of eternity; and to neglect no item in the existing universe. His gaze would focus on the crystalline beauty of the angelic world; his step would not falter before the mysterious realms of the human heart; nor would he be confused by the pettiness and magnificence of the mind of man. He would make a thorough investigation of the animal as well as of the angelic side of the human image of God. The origin, end and make-up of the physical world he would treat as profoundly as the birth, life, death and resurrection of God made man. The mystery and misery of sin were to be well within his field; and, of course, thc supernatural instrumentality of the sacraments, the riches of the whole life of grace.

The Aim of the Book

Thomas, faced with the abundance of his material, did not hope merely to toss it before the minds of men; he expected to expose all this adequately, lucidly, and as briefly as the matter permitted. Moreover, he was not aiming at an increase in the intellectual jowls of the well cared for specialists in philosophy and theology; he had in mind, rather, the underfed, the starving, the little ones, beginners who had gone hungry too long. He expected to avoid all that would confuse the thinking of these little ones, that would impede their progress, that might contribute to their discouragement. The thing seemed important enough to this first professor of the age of Universities for an explicit statement of the instruments he had forged to bring it about: order above all, simplicity, and the ruthless elimination of useless questions, arguments and repetitions.

The Division of the Book

The laziest man in the world might draw up a plan such as this. In fact, lazy men are usually prolific in their production of plans, perhaps the better to relish their idleness. The astonishing thing about Thomas’ project is that it came very close indeed to complete accomplishment, so close as to leave the onlookers breathless before the massive beauty of this intellectual cathedral, oblivious of its unfinished sacristy. Thomas’ project was stopped by the only thing that could stop it. He died while in the midst of his treatment of the sacrament of Penance.

The plan of the Summa is as simple as the statement of its aims by Thomas. The first part treats of God, both in Himself and as the principle from which the angelic, the human and the purely physical world take their rise; the second part treats of man’s movement back to the source from which he came; the third, of the means or the road which he travels to that goal and the home that waits for him at the end of the road.

It is the first part of the Summa which will occupy us throughout this volume. After a preliminary question (the burden of the rest of this chapter) we shall investigate the existence of the one God; then the inner life of the one true God, or the mystery of the Trinity; the rest of this volume will be taken up with a study of the angels, of men and of the world, for thus only can we have the full story of the procession of creatures from God. This latter part of the present volume will not involve argument about angels on the head of a pin; Thomas had no room for stupid questions. But it will involve the study and appreciation of all of the world, not merely the material part of it; of all of man, not merely the animal part of him; of all of the angelic world, not cynically amused caricatures of it. The pictures this study hangs in the minds of men will be strikingly different from those that today too often clutter the mind and shatter the heart. Man will not be found pictured here as a frightened god perched on the barren summit of a world in chaos. Nor will he be seen as no different in kind from the rest of the animals–his oddly human capacities for politics and poetry here are not only accidental differences which set him off from the beasts no more essentially than the fact that he is somewhat more fastidious about his bath. God will not have the hurried, harassed look of a timidly ineffective man; these angels will not be gliding around languidly looking for a holy card on which to alight. All these pictures have no inspiration in the world of reality; and it is only with reality that we are engaged in this volume.

It is extremely important, at the very outset, that we lay hold firmly on these two facts: Thomas, all his life, was a relentless searcher for reality, a ruthless enemy of falsehood; and his supreme work was a book of supernatural theology. In our own time, it has become the fashion to divorce theology from reason and so to destroy any certitude of its relation to reality. As for the supernatural, well that is an insult to our self-sufficiency not to be lightly suffered by an intelligent man. It is not too hard to understand the modern’s impatience with the supernatural, for man has always been proud; but only the intellectual suicide of positivism could be so absurd as to limit the horizons of a man’s mind to what he can uncover by the methods of science. This last has no need of rational refutation for the positivist contradicts himself in the denials that make up his doctrine; he advocates a way of death, rather than of life, for life cannot be lived on a basis of denials, it must be fled from. Men are intolerant of the cowardice of escape; they are sympathetic towards a spirit of independence, even exaggerated independence, though they, and everyone else, are barred from expressing that sympathy when the independence reaches the stage of voluntary confinement.

It is unquestionably true that man, left to his own devices, can gather a tremendous amount of information; so much, in fact, as to be smothered under the pile of facts he has heaped upon his own head. He can even, through the patient labor of the years, acquire something of wisdom’s understanding of the pattern of things, of the distinction between details and essentials, of goals and means to those goals. The point that is overlooked too often is that a man simply cannot wait so long for the advent of wisdom. He has to know these things from the beginning he has a human life to live through all the years that are demanded for the personal achievement of the long view of the wise man; and, for by far the greater number of men, the mind, the heart, the hands are well occupied in winning a livelihood from a grudging mother earth. To be quite frank, there are many men who will never arrive at wisdom under their own power if they live to be a hundred and have absolutely nothing to do but think. To be equally frank, it must be admitted that the wisest of men are going to make mistakes.

This matter of human goals that give the directions for human living is much too important to run such risks. This knowledge cannot wait, it cannot be restricted to a few, it cannot be punctuated by error; if we are content to have it so, it is only because we assume the unimportance of the human individual, the meaninglessness of human life, the certitude of long life, the indifference of truth. All of these assumptions are false. Because they are, man, even in those things that are not strictly above his human powers, must have help. He can assert his absolute independence only at the cost of compromising his knowledge of reality and, ultimately, at the cost of failure in the living of human life. He must accept truth from the source of truth; and be thankful the truth is given him.

Necessity of Wisdom

All this would be true if man’s life were to be fulfilled by a goal within the grasp of his natural powers. When we face the fact that the only goal of man is above all nature, the eternal vision of God, we see something of the desperate necessity for a divine revelation that will give him knowledge of that goal and the means by which he can arrive at it.

The illusion of independence can be bought at much too high a price. It could logically demand that we swim oceans rather than depend on a ship-builder and a navigator, that we toddle through blizzards naked until we can make our own clothes, that we fly by flapping our arms. Whatever the price paid, when we examine the thing in an honest light, the wonder is that we bought such a shoddy product at all; the certainty is that we have been badly cheated. There is nothing so completely useless as the illusion that we are self-sufficient, for there is nothing so completely false.

We must have wisdom from the beginning of life. It cannot be our own; nor is it sufficient if it is some other human being’s. It must be divine, for only God is wise from the beginning. To begin life with the wisdom lent us by divinity, and end it by possessing that wisdom; to meet the charges at each station of life with divinely minted coin; to see the road that stretches before us through the far seeing eyes of God — this is not an insult to human nature, it is an ennoblement of it.

A Divine Science — Its Object

In this atmosphere of nobility theology draws its first breath of life, for the deposit of divinely revealed truth constitutes the life principle of all theological science. If philosophy, as the apex of natural intellectual effort, has deserved the name of human wisdom, then theology is rightly called divine wisdom. All of its varied fabric is given solid substance by the thread of divinity that is woven into it; if we unravel that complex fabric, that single thread will always lead back to God, the source of truth and the goal of it. Without that thread of divinity theology is a name given to a crazy quilt that, paradoxically, is devoid not only of beauty but of variety, monotonous with the grey monotony of despair. It has nothing of wisdom about it, for it has nothing of meaning about it. But drawing its life-blood from the source of all order, theology is vibrant with such significance as man would not have dared to dream, with divine significance for creatures who hardly dare to face human life let alone dream of living divine life.

To speak of theology as a science may sound blasphemous to modern ears. Indeed, it is blasphemous if we restrict science to the treasure buried in the physical world, a treasure to be unearthed only by the pick-axe and spade of the experimental method. But if we take science, as it should be taken, in the larger sense of ripe knowledge plucked from principles that escape the blight of doubt, we can hardly mistake theology as a clever imitation of a live science, to be put under glass as a tribute not to its life but to its artificiality. We can, with an easy mind, expose it to the weather to live its rugged, vibrant life; let the rain fall on it and the wind tug at it, the sun shine on it and its enemies drag their tiny bodies over its broad branches. It will live; its roots are deep enough, its leaves broad enough, its branches high enough; it will live. though many a hybrid die beside it.

Theology’s Place Among the Sciences

Theology is no mongrel in the pack of sciences. Like every other science, it has its proper, and utterly distinctive, field–the field of revealable truths. Its paraphernalia is totally inadequate to furnish it with its principles: so, in common with all other sciences, it gets the principles with which it starts and on which it depends from some other source. The philosopher, with no human science above him, accepts without question the self-evident principles his reason discloses to him or he ceases to be a philosopher. The theologian accepts his principles, not from the science of the physicist, the mathematician or the philosopher, but from the science of God and the saints. No science proves its own principles; nor does theology. But the principles of every other science are susceptible, with the help of another science or directly from nature, of clear vision by the human mind; theology alone accepts principles too clear to be seen by any mind but the mind of God. It believes its principles on the authority of the Truth incapable of error or falsehood.

Let us suppose that all the sciences, in person, were invited to dinner by a great university. Where should theology be seated, among the practical or the speculative sciences? Well, the thing is more practical than domestic economy for it deals with the most practical of things the goal of a man and the roads to the goal; at the same time it is more speculative than metaphysics for it handles truths that are divine. It might take the grapefruit with the speculative sciences, move over to an empty chair for the soup with the practical sciences, back to its original place for the fish, and so on; a little fatiguing, perhaps, but then what can be done? Like many another person with an insoluble problem, the hostess will shelve it and pretend it does not exist, for the moment anyhow. Now about places, who will get the first place and who will slide humbly into the welcome obscurity of the seat far down the table? In the speculative section the question will have to be settled on the certitude of the science and the nobility of its subject matter. Theology jumps down from that mental shelf to worry the hostess: it would be hard to find a more noble subject matter than divinity or to compare the certitude achieved by a human mind to the certitude of the divine word. But the method! Yes, the others may be a little uppish on the question of method, but then how can we make a particular method the norm of precedence; is this a scientific dinner or a meeting of a secret society?

Very well, give theology the first place among the speculative sciences; at least that settles the question of where theology will sit. In the practical section, precedence will be determined by the ultimateness of the end served by the particular science. Obviously medicine will sit above domestic economy, but does it go above or below politics? We can settle that later; what is the very last end served by any science; theology again! The only solution is to sit theology in the very center with the speculative sciences descending on the right and the practical on the left, hoping, of course, that no wit brings up the matter of the sheep and the goats.

But enough of the dinner. Abandoning the figurative language and getting down to hard facts, it is true that the findings of the other sciences seem much more certain to us than the conclusions of theology. Of course; but the flame of an acetylene torch is not less bright because it blinds us, less visible because we must see it through smoked glasses; nor is the divine truth less certain because it is too clear for our eyes, it is not less sure because we have to see it through the obscure glass of faith. It is also true that theology uses philosophy; but that is not because the pillars of divine truth need so much bolstering, it is rather because of the comfort our weakness derives from the clasping hand of philosophy. But we shall come back to this matter of philosophy later on in this chapter.

Theology’s Character as Wisdom

It is difficult to conjure up a picture of a rollicking theologian. Perhaps there have been such, but the odds are against it. Not that theology demands that its disciples all have long, white beards; but it does seem to demand that its youngest masters be old and its oldest masters be young. Perhaps all this is because of the bouquet that wisdom throws off as we warm the word in the hollow of our hands. We do associate wisdom with old age, not because the mind of the old is keener, the heart more eager, but because the tired feet have wandered enough to know the highroad from a bypath, the old eyes have seen enough, to know a trifle from the gem for which a man must sell all he has, because the old hands have worked at tasks enough to know the ephemeral from the enduring. Old age should know more of the answers, it should see more of the pattern, it should escape more of the confusion of the terrific detail of life. Theology is wisdom, old with the agelessness of eternity; but young with the youth of an eternal beginning.

The wise man to be consulted for the answers about the new house that is going up is the architect, not the bricklayer; if he does not know the reasons for things, there aren’t any. He may be stupid in many other lines, but in this one, because he is master of the ultimate purposes of the building, he is wise; in any line, this knowledge of ultimate purposes brings wisdom. When the knowledge is of the last of all purposes, it brings that wisdom that needs no qualification; by it a man is simply wise. This will be the man who knows the answers that really matter; these are the answers for, which the theologian exists.

Theology’s Subject Matter

For the theologian treats of nothing except in relation to the first beginning and the last end. He is in the intellectual order what the saint is in the practical order: a man wholly engaged with God. A general order covering the activity of the two men need suffer no single change in phrasing: “begin this task at once, work at it ceaselessly, finish it in eternity.” For the love of God is not to be encompassed in a lifetime; neither is the knowledge of God. However far afield the mind or the heart may seem to have wandered, both are engaged with God Himself or with the things that pertain to God as Beginning or as End. The saint knows the important answers by the quick intuition that has its deep roots in love; the theologian, by the reasoned argument that has its roots deep in study. When study and love are united to make a saint of a theologian, God has been exceptionally kind to men.

It is into the book of just such a man that we are timidly edging our way. There is a definite reassurance in the fact that Thomas insisted that reason roll up its sleeves and get down to its hardest task; this brings back the first day’s study of any science. Moreover he has adopted the fully developed form of that similar method of Socrates; and what is more familiar than a question? The double flattery of a question is hard to resist; the contentedly ignorant and the insufferably omniscient never ask a question, while the fool is asked a question only by mistake. A question, after all, is the movement of a mind in search of truth and there is nothing so pleasant to disseminate as truth. Children and scholars are living question marks and, as Thomas wrote for childish scholars, it was right that every article of his book be a question demanding a straight answer. To clarify the issue, an opponent, fictitious or real, is introduced each time with so forceful a presentation of objections as to cause a little anxiety in the heart of a follower of Thomas.

Method of Theology

The body of the articles throughout concentrates on the work of explaining, illustrating, persuading, refuting and, where possible, proving. Thomas, of course, does not argue about theology’s principles; no science does that. The inferior sciences depend on their superiors to take care of the borrowed principles; metaphysics, without a superior, will argue about its principles with an opponent who grants some of them; with an opponent who denies all of them it can do nothing but refute the denial, exposing its falsity. The procedure is the same in theology, with the added assurance that every objection in denial has its answer for these principles rest on the immutable truth of God.

But there is plenty of room for argument in theology beneath the principles; nor has there ever been a slackening of that argumentation that destroys error, preserves truth and uncovers still more of truth. Here philosophy is put to work in earnest; here human reason is employed to its fullest strength; for here is a task worthy of the great potentialities of the mind of a man. As a reward for this back-breaking labor, theology restricts the field of possible philosophical error, releasing this flood of conserved energy into the channels of real philosophical investigation. Philosophy is not substituted for, it is not destroyed, not diluted; for grace does not destroy nature, it perfects it. It is not superseded by a higher wisdom; it is consecrated by that higher wisdom.

Conclusion: Thomas’ Interests

This consecration and perfection of nature by grace was a dominant note in the life of Thomas. He could never close his ears to its challenge. From the beginning his mind and heart were complete captives to the enticement of the perfection of God; he fought his mother, his sisters, his brothers that he might be freer to pursue it and, in the race to embrace it, nobility of family, wealth and power, the world itself were cast off as so much dead weight slowing his steps. He read the book of the world with all the intense concentration and genius of his great mind: he pondered the divinely revealed secrets like a miser fondling his gold. As the years passed and virtue mounted he plunged deeper and deeper into that infinite perfection and was more and more overwhelmed by it.

Knowing God so well, he knew himself the better. Not only himself, but all men; it was not for nothing that the divine plans had him tramping up and down the roads of Europe in an age when a friar was the beloved priest of scullery maid and princess, of peasant and prince. A dull-witted man with no human sympathy could hardly go through such an experience without acquiring a deep knowledge of human nature; and Thomas has not been accused, since the grotesque accusation of his student days, of being dull witted or unsympathetic. He read the secrets of the human heart, his own and the hearts of others: seeing their pettiness, cowardice, smug mediocrity and even viciousness, he saw how far they could get from God; but seeing, too, their high hopes, their dogged courage, their quick remorse and unselfish loyalty, he saw how close they could come to God. On this double theme the symphony of his life developed: the perfection of God and the perfectibility of man.

In Defence of God and Man

From his first appearance in a professor’s chair Thomas was embroiled in intellectual battle. That battle continued all of his life; nor is it finished yet. It was, and is, a battle in defense of God and of man. Thomas would not stand by and see God torn down from His divine throne; he could not stand by and see the image of God defaced on earth. God is perfect and man can be perfected; any lessening of the perfection of God is a denial of Him and any lessening of the potentialities of man is a denial of humanity. These two truths must stand whatever the cost of their defense: God is divine and man is capable of a share in divine life. One cannot be attacked without the other going by the board; and at no time in history have both come under so ceaseless a fire as in our own time.

His Love

The genius of Thomas could have put up no such fight as it did without the driving force of a love to match its greatness. A love so great, so utterly selfless, so impervious to the allure of every other love could be nothing short of the divine love whose full flower goes by the name of sanctity. Thomas, from the beginning, was head over heels in love with God; to the end his love’s great problem was not to hold a fickle lover but to find the means of spending himself enough to give expression to that love. He came as close to solving that problem as is given to man on earth.

Certainly Thomas placed no conditions on his love. He did not cautiously arrange emergency exits in case love’s demands became too inconvenient. There were no limits of time, of strength, of thought, of surrender involved in this divine contract. Rather that love was a searing flame that consumed the man, that hurled him into a whirlwind of labor that knew no lull until death stopped that great heart. Love such as this may seem a strange thing in a world that has adopted security as a watchword. But only by love such as this will a man ever again come so close to other men and be so intimately joined to God; only on this condition will humanity ever again have such a champion and God such an apostle.

Antidote to Poisons

In his book Thomas offers the twentieth century love and truth; but the love cannot be reveled in until the truth has been mastered. This truth comes as a rather violent antidote to the two modern poisons of intellectual superficiality and naturalistic provincialism.

Superficiality

Another name for that intellectual superficiality is intellectual laziness. It consists in that easy grasping at the first and partial answer, breeding smug satisfaction and a shallowness that will not float an idea. This book looks to the last and the adequate answer, the answer that awes and humiliates, the answer that will intrigue a man’s mind for a lifetime and direct his actions beyond the limits of life. Thomas’ effort for beginners was not directed to the cultivation of the ability to quote others; its aim was to develop the capacity to think for oneself. His is not an emphasis of facts to the neglect of wisdom; his book cannot be read as a memory exercise. Laying it aside after some careful reading, we cannot dismiss it with such remarks as: “how interesting, how odd.” It will hit us between the eyes, or it will not touch us at all; for the ultimate answers cannot be looked at without deep personal reverberations.

Provincialism of Naturalism

Against the provincialism of naturalism, Thomas discovers the meaning of the natural world by frankly stepping into the supernatural; he discovers the perfect fulfillment of man by refusing to accept man as the perfect fulfillment of the universe; his book rejects the modernist’s contempt for the past by offering cultural contact with the wisdom of the ages and with one of the greatest intellects the world has yet seen.

Life’s Meaning, Goal and Exemplar

This man is not to be framed in a stained-glass window; his book is not a library decoration. This is a man and a book providentially designed for the needs of the twentieth century. Certainly no age has greater need for ultimate answers, for a plan of action, for an exemplar of human living; for no age has had less conception of the meaning of life, the things that go into successful living, the manner in which human life must be lived to be successful. In his three great divisions of this book, Thomas gives us precisely these things: a study of the divine architect and His completed work; a study of the goal of human life and the human actions by which that goal is attained; a study of the God who became man that men might become like unto God.

CHAPTER II — HE WHO IS
(Q. 2)

1. Beginners and the beginning:

   (a) The mystery and difficulty of beginnings.

   (b) Difficulty for beginners.

   (c) Reasons for a beginning:

               (1) Their modernity:

                               a. Objections against them.

                               b. Their perennial strength.

               (2) Their completeness.

2. Preliminary notions to proof of the beginning:

   (a) Potentiality and actuality.

   (b) Change: potential, process and product.

   (c) Limitations of proofs of existence.

3. The five proofs:

   (a) From passivity — motion.

   (b) From activity — causality.

   (c) From defectibility — contingency.

   (d) From perfection — participation.

   (e) From order — finality.

4. Characteristics of the proofs:

   (a) A posteriori arguments.

   (b) Not cumulative but independently sufficient.

   (c) Strictly limited to the evidence.

   (d) Foundations of the deductive tract

            on the nature of God.

Conclusion:

1. Significance of the proofs.

2. Real mystery of beginnings.

3. Allegedly non-mysterious substitutes.

CHAPTER II

HE WHO IS

(Q. 2)

It is more than the perennial vigor of human hope that makes human life a long process of constant beginnings. A beginning never becomes a prosaic thing, though we see its counterparts on all sides every day; it is in itself glamorous, enticing, irresistible, for it is in itself mysterious. The feeble spark of young life in a mother’s womb, the first tentative plan of the architect, the first step of the infant, the first scribbled words of a book fascinate us. They swing open doors and we cannot resist straining our eyes to peer down the long corridors of the future they reveal to us. It is not an explanation of this attraction to say that this moment of beginning is tightly packed with love’s rewards, love’s labors and love’s hopes. It is all of this; but it is much more. It is that inexplicable thing that we call mystery, the thing that calls our minds out on the long road along whose winding way the explanation of the mystery may be found.

The mystery and difficulty of beginnings

The woman who gives birth to a child is not only a cause of a wondrous effect, she herself has become what she was not before, a mother. It is not only the marble under the sculptor’s chisel that has become something new; the sculptor has undergone a process of becoming in producing his masterpiece, he has fulfilled a formerly unfulfilled capacity within himself. For in these human beginnings the process of becoming wraps its arms around both cause and effect to pile wonder on wonder and yet leave the mystery intact, the mystery of the beginning of that which becomes both in the cause and the effect, the mystery of the beginning not of becoming but of being itself.

Difficulty for Beginners

Beginnings are not only mysterious, they are also difficult. Perhaps it is because they are mysterious that beginnings are so hard; at least, it is a fact that it is always difficult to begin at the beginning. That is a divine way of doing things, the divine way that made the Son of God start human life as an infant. For divinity itself is the Beginning and is naturally careful of beginnings, even of human beginnings which are but fragments gathered up from the feasts of the past. Surely the Catholic Doctor must be careful, even exhaustively careful, of beginnings: so careful that his works must be aimed, not merely at the learned or saintly, but at those humble beginners who are his particular care as an exponent of the things that pertain to God.

Reasons for a Beginning

Beginnings are hard for us even when we ourselves are capable, the material on which we work is apt, and the work we have to do is no more than to coax to full bloom hidden beauties in the material and in ourselves. To our minds, the uncreated beginning faced the extreme difficulty, not of drawing out hidden powers, but of establishing that which is. Beginners in the way of God, which is to say beginners in the way of human living, face a man-made difficulty that springs from the reluctance of their teachers to begin at the beginning, a difficulty that is only hinted at when we call it a lack of order in the presentation of truth. That reluctance is not difficult to understand: there is an attractive, though completely false, air of excitement in dodging difficulty, shutting one’s eyes to mystery and plunging into the middle of things.

Objections

That excitement has so gripped the modern mind that the beginning of things has become irritating to the point of consuming much of modern energy just in the elimination of it. These reasons for a beginning, which are sometimes called the proofs for the existence of God, have been excluded on thee grounds that the human intellect cannot be trusted outside the boundaries of direct sense experience. Of course, many other objections have been made to them: scientific objections, such as their pitiful dependence on an Aristotelian science long since defunct; they are not the product of scientific investigation; they are in evident conflict with the history of religion and the theory of evolution, both of which show that the Christian God is a very modern luxury.

If the philosopher’s patience is worn thin enough, he may protest that the results of such proofs are meaningless, devoid of qualitative content; which means this philosopher has been much too lazy to think. In desperation, the philosopher may simply toss the proofs out the window regardless of their truth or falsehood; the God they speak of is of no value or service to humanity. And this will be a philosopher who takes all the important things for granted.

Their Perennial Strength

These proofs may be a nuisance to one who tries, philosophically, to keep up with the times at whatever cost; but they cannot be denied modernity if by modern we mean to occupy a place in the minds and words of men of our day. They are strong enough, independent enough to live through this age and all ages. They ask no favors. They ask only what cannot be denied — and then make the most of it.

Specifically these proofs for the existence of God start with a simplicity worthy of the divinity they demonstrate, demanding just two things: a fact evident to the senses and the first principles of the intellect. Understand, now, this sensible fact is not carefully selected, difficult to see or subject to controversy; but an obvious, tangible reality of experience, such a fact as the wink of an eye, the birth of a child, the withering of a leaf, the beauty of a face or the smooth flight of a bird. The first principles of knowledge demanded are only those fundamentals without which intellectual operation of any kind is impossible, the principles which are the rock bottom of being as well as of thought and without which science itself is invalid, nay unthinkable. In thoroughly modern fashion, these reasons proceed carefully, cautiously, adhering strictly to the evidence in hand. They are not dependent on a system of science, a weight of tradition or subjective dispositions to make their way in the world. They are genuine.

Their Completeness

The proofs for the existence of God do not belong on the dubious fringe of philosophy but in a place of honor; they have fought a bitter battle in defense of the intellect of man. A complete treatment of the existence of a beginning of things must always be a three-sided fight which must be won on all fronts or the intellect is lost. On one side are the champions of the ineptitude of man who insist that man’s one distinctive power of intellect has no intrinsic value; of course it cannot prove the existence of God. At the opposite extreme is the camp of optimists and emotionalists, one group insisting the existence of God needs no proof since it is self-evident, the other tacitly admitting the intellectual incapacity of man but holding for an emotional assurance of the Supreme Being. In the middle, carrying the brunt of the offensive today, are those who champion man by destroying God, claiming there is no God, at least no such God as the Christians worship.

The fight is bitter. Because not all men and women have the appetite for fighting, or the time and ability to carry on the fight to the end, and because so very much hangs on the outcome of the battle, infallible authority has come forth to protect those who by force of circumstance are non-combatants. By that authority, the man who cannot follow the intricacies of proof, either by reason of inability or lack of leisured time, knows beyond question that the reason of man, by its own power, can certainly know the existence of God and that God, the supreme Being, certainly exists.

The gesture of authority is necessary, not because the truth it defends is beyond the range of the guns of reason, but because it is essential that every man know of God’s existence for his individual life, just as it is essential for the world about man that God exist. The thinker who has seen and grasped the proof has no need of authority; he holds that truth by a clear insight into a natural truth. This man can prove the existence of God; by that proof he has also shown that the existence of God is not self-evident, it does not rest on an emotional assurance, it does not escape the powers of the mind of man. It is a proved fact.

Preliminary Notions

Of course this man did not arrive at the proof of the existence of God effortlessly, as he might come to the point of raising a beard. The proof demands hard work, the hard work of thinking; certainly this man would have to have some preliminary notions accurately in mind before he could take a step towards the proof itself.

Potentiality and Actuality

There is, for instance, the simple, but decidedly abstract notion of potentiality and actuality, a notion that is perhaps grasped more easily by seeing it in the complex notion of change. Let us look at these notions in a rather clumsy example. Let us take a large, perfectly plain block of marble; then put a sculptor to work on it and have him make a statue of that block of marble. We say, rightly, that in the original marble block there is the potentiality of becoming a statue, the principle or aptitude for receiving this further perfection, the quality of being changed. It may be worth noting that by “perfection” here we mean any respect in which a thing can be completed or become more determinate in its being. When the process is complete, that potentiality has been realized, the marble block has become a statue.

Change: Potential, Process and Product

We call this process of realizing potentialities “becoming,” and whole philosophies have been built upon it. More simply, we call it “change;” in its positive form we give it the name of “development.” Whatever we call it, it is nothing more or less than the motion from potentiality to actuality, from the mere capability of receiving perfection to the perfection received. This is motion in its widest sense; it takes place in every change, of canvas and tubes of paint into a masterpiece, of a farmhand into a doctor of medicine, of an acorn into an oak, as well as in a journey from Chicago to New York. Obviously, this process of change involves three things: (1) a potential or starting point which is prior to the change and contains the potentiality, a thing which is already something but with the capacity for becoming something else, for receiving an added perfection; (2) the reality of the process or movement of change which proceeds from the potential to the actual; (3) the product of the change, the actual needed perfection. It is essential that we hold fast to the obvious fact of a distinct difference between the potentiality and its goal of realization. If this difference be denied, we are forced into a denial of both ends of a change, potentialities and actualities, or into an identification of these two. In either case we are in the impossible position of holding to a motion as eerie as a faceless smile, a motion that has come from nowhere and goes nowhere, or of holding to the absurdity that contradictories are identical, that there is no distinction between the undeveloped and the developed, between farmhands and doctors, marble blocks and statues.

The particular value of clarity in this notion of change lies in the fact that it brings out the complete necessity of explaining every realized potentiality, every perfection, by an explanation external to the realized potentiality itself. It makes more obvious the truth that a developed perfection is not its own explanation, it has not developed itself, nor is it explained by the potentiality which it perfected.

Another value, for our purpose of proving the existence of God, is had from the difference this process of becoming, or change, brings out between the action of God and of creatures. It is on the basis of this process of becoming that we argue from effects to causes in created causes and their effects. Where the cause is divine, the fundamental question remains the same, that is, the explanation of a perfection that is not self-explanatory, that has not produced itself. In this latter case, however, it is not a question of a cause drawing a potentiality to perfection, but of a cause producing that which possesses the potentialities. In a word, the question in this case is not of the cause of becoming (or change) but of the cause of being itself; the transition is not from potentiality to actualization of potentiality, but from non-being to being.

Limitations

One other preliminary notion that must be clarified before proceeding to the actual proofs for the existence of God is the limitation of all proofs for existence. As a matter of fact, there are only two possibilities for proof of the existence of anything: the direct proof offered by sense experience, such as a man has of the existence of a door by ramming his nose against it; and the inferential or a posteriori proof, such as a detective might have of the existence of a murderer when he finds an armless paralytic dangling on a four-foot rope from a rafter fifteen feet above the floor. The detective, by his type of proof, may never come to more than an extremely great probability because it may be impossible to rule out all possibilities other than murder. Where it is possible to rule out all other possibilities, this proof by inference, the a posteriori proof, gives complete certitude.

No other proof of existence is possible, no a priori proof is valid, because existence in no way enters into the very nature of created things; we cannot argue from the nature of things to their existence, as we can argue from the nature of man to the spirituality of his soul. As we shall see, when the proof for God’s existence is completed, existence does enter into the very nature of God; but we cannot presuppose that when starting off on the task of proving God does exist. In other words, a conclusion about existence cannot be drawn from premises which do not assert the existence of anything; to assert the existence of something in the conclusion of a line of reasoning, you must assert the existence of something somewhere among the premises.

Ontological “Proofs”

The contrary is the sophism inherent in all a priori or ontological proofs for God’s existence, the sophism which Kant attributed to all proofs for God’s existence. He argued that some concept of God is essential at the start of any proof for the existence of God and such a concept includes the notion of God’s existence. Kant is right, of course, in maintaining that some concept of God is necessary from the very beginning of these proofs; after all, the proofs are trying to prove something. But it is quite enough, for the purpose of the proofs, that that concept be no more than a statement of the absence of contradiction between God and existence; in other words, that concept, required to begin the proofs, need be no more than a construct which demands only the possibility of the union of the subject and predicate in the proposition “God exists.”

Experience assures us emphatically that we do not have a direct sense knowledge of God’s existence. When, in the course of this volume, we learn more about the divine nature, we shall see why we cannot have a sense knowledge of God. For the present, it is sufficient to accept the dictum of experience and concentrate our efforts along the only line of proof left open to us, the inferential or a posteriori proof, the proof of the cause from the effects.

The Five Proofs: The First Proof from Passivity — Motion

The first proof proceeds from the fact of motion or, to put the same thing in another way, from the fact of the passivity of things. Its extremely simple formulation can be made in these terms: because nothing that is moved moves or changes itself, the unquestionable fact of movement or change in the world about us, forces us to conclude to the existence of a first mover who is not himself moved. That is all of the proof. Its very brevity is reason enough for a somewhat lengthy explanation of it.

The phrase, “nothing moves or changes itself,” means only that a thing cannot be, relative to the same goal, merely movable and already moved, merely changeable and already changed; for the starting point and the goal of the process of becoming are necessarily different. The mere aptitude for receiving motion is not its own completion. The common sense fundamental back of this phrase, then, is simply that what is not possessed cannot be bestowed; and the very notion of potentiality is the absence of perfection that can be possessed but so far is not, for, unless we maintain that contraries are identical, a potentiality is not its actualization.

Actually this argument goes back a step farther, beyond the cause of change to the cause of that which is changed, back of the cause of becoming to the cause of being. For the immediate cause of change alone is itself in the process of becoming by its very causality; the mover of a potentially movable thing is himself moved by the very movement by which he moves this thing, he becomes something other than he was. The peddler does something to himself as well as to his pushcart when he bends his strength to its movement. Unless we come to a cause that produces that which is subject to change, to a cause that does not itself become something other than it was, the process of becoming or change cannot start. Briefly, what is in question here is not the process of motion, but the existence of that perfection which is motion.

It is obvious, then, that the term “mover” is used of the first and of secondary movers not in an identical, but only in a proportional, sense; for the first mover is the cause of being and is himself unchanged, while secondary movers are causes of change and are themselves changed in their action. It is to this unique first mover that the argument concludes.

A not uncommon fallacy today is to suppose that since this particular movement is caused by another, this latter by another, and so on, there is no need for further explanation since it is taken for granted that the world is eternal. From this point of view, since you can never come to thc end of the chain of movers, there is no mystery about the present movement. The fallacy lies in the fact that without a beginning the whole thing could not start; no one of these previous movers is sufficient explanation of itself and its effect on others, yet a sufficient explanation must be found if the fact of movement is to be intelligible, if we are not to have something coming from nothing. The haze of distance or the weight of time do not do away with the necessity of explanation any more than they offer a positive explanation. To be satisfied with this is to be satisfied with the removal of the question to more obscure quarters, comforted by its consequent vagueness. The plain fact is that unless we come to a mover that is in no way dependent we have not explained the existence of the movers who are undoubtedly dependent either for their actual movement or for the power to move; where the effects are patently present the cause ultimately explaining them is not to be denied.

Two things are to be particularly noted about this first proof for the existence of God: the narrowness of the conclusion and the independence of the argument from the element of time. The argument adheres rigidly to the limits of its premises; it concludes to a first mover unmoved — and to nothing more. There is nothing more which can be concluded from the sensible fact of motion with which the argument started. Because there is movement, there is a cause of cosmic movement which is itself unmoved. The argument is not a sputtering flame to be extinguished by the simple expedient of blanketing it with centuries. There is no question here of movement beginning in time. It is not a question of a present reality demanding a cause in the past. It is simply a question of the universe as given, movement or change as experienced, and the conclusion that such a movement or change is unintelligible without a first mover communicating movement to all things. Time makes no difference. If the eternity of the world were to be proved tomorrow beyond all doubt, this proof would be in no way affected; the fact of change is there, the effect is with us, its cause cannot be denied.

The background for the other four proofs is exactly the same as for this first one. Keeping the preliminary notions, explained above, well in mind and holding to the detailed explanation of this first proof, the others can be seen readily. The. point at issue is always the same: the existence of perfection that did not previously exist.

The Second Proof: from Activity — Causality

The second proof proceeds from causality or the activity of things. Here it is a question of the existence of an efficient cause, the external agent by whose operation a thing exists, the question of the existence of the hen that laid an egg, of the thunderbolt which struck a man dead, the storm that has battered a ship into helplessness. The starting point is again the sensible world.

We see in that sensible world an order of efficient causes dependent one on the other for their causality — the powder which propels the shell, which in turn crashes into a storage tank of gasoline, and this throwing out a sheet of flame in the heart of a city, and so on. We find nothing that is the cause of itself. Precisely because of this impossibility of a cause causing itself, the efficient causes of the sensible world force the conclusion upon us that a first efficient cause exists which is itself uncaused.

Here it is said that it is impossible for a cause to cause itself for the same fundamental reason as was exposed in the first argument, namely, because the starting point and the goal of change, the potentiality and its realization, cannot be identical. Otherwise we are identifying opposites, saying that the potentiality is the actuality. Here again, as in the first proof, the argument is really stronger than it looks; for the only alternative is not merely identifying opposites, it is identifying non-reality with reality, non-being with being, for the transition is not from potentiality to actuality but from the purely privative condition of nothingness to existence. Here again it must be noted that the term “cause” is used, not identically, but proportionally, of the first and secondary causes.

A difficulty may be offered to this argument, the difficulty of living causes where the dependence is not so immediately obvious. And the answer is that no one living cause explains the efficacy of the species to which it belongs and from which it derives its power to cause. Yet that efficacy must have its explanation. Infinite regress get us nowhere: without the first uncaused cause there will be no effects produced by any cause no matter how many eons are placed between the beginning of things and the world of today. It is not a question of time, nor is the question made more difficult by adding on a few million years to the age of the world. Again attention must be called to the strict adherence of the conclusion to the evidence in hand: the argument concludes to the existence of a cause that is itself uncaused, nothing more. Either of these two arguments is sufficient to demonstrate the existence of God; their effectiveness is not a matter of accumulative evidence. They are merely different angles, shafts of light focusing on the same spectacle of divinity but taking their rise from different starting points in the sensible world.

The Third Proof: from Defectibility — Contingency

The third proof proceeds from our experience of the contingency or defectibility of things. It can be stated briefly like this: if any beings exist whose essence is not one with their existence (that is, which are contingent), then a being exists whose essence is its existence (that is, an absolutely necessary being). The fact is that in the world about us we see things that can have or lose existence, that begin to exist and cease to exist, that are born and that die. If everything were of this nature, that is if existence is not essentially natural to anything, then nothing would ever exist; which is patently false in view of the existing world. The argument proceeds as do the preceding ones: if things are capable of beginning to exist or of ceasing to exist, then, since they do in fact exist and cease to exist, that capability is fulfilled, that potentiality is realized, and a potentiality cannot realize itself. Much less can nothingness produce that which is the subject of realized potentialities.

The objection of physically necessary substances is answered as was the fundamental objection to the preceding arguments. No such physically necessary being explains its own necessity but receives it (an actualized potentiality). So the necessity of the species is not explained by the species itself; “a multitude of contingent things do not make a necessary thing any more than a multitude of idiots make one intelligent man.” This necessity must be explained by a necessary being that does not receive necessity, but that is its necessity. Again the element of time makes no difference. An infinite chain of beings that receive their necessity, or of beings which are not necessary, neither complicates nor explains the difficulty; it merely attempts to dodge the problem by hiding under the accumulation of immediate causes or the accumulation of the years.

These first three proofs have argued to the existence of God from the passivity, the activity and the contingency of things. The fourth proof argues from the perfection of things. But the argument still proceeds from the world of reality, not necessarily the world of sense experience, sense impressions, but nonetheless from the world of reality. For the real world also includes the things we understand as well as the things we feel, such things as love, justice, friendship, things that we can never grow in the garden or meet on the street but which are, for all that, decidedly realities.

The perfections in question here are only the absolute perfections that carry the note of perfection in themselves, not the relative which are perfections only because of their order to something else. Examples of such absolute perfections are animality, rationality, life, existence. And these can be roughly classified by stressing the point that they are in themselves either strictly limited or completely limitless.

As examples of the strictly limited, we may mention animality or humanity. A man is no less an animal than a lion; nor has a sickly boy less humanity than a strapping giant. These things imply definitely fixed limits. They either are or are not fully possessed; there is never any question of having a little or a great deal of them. To exceed or to fall away from the fixed limit means the complete loss of that perfection. As examples of the limitless perfections, there are life, goodness, existence, and so on. If there are limits to these perfections in this or that individual or species, the limitation does not come from the perfection itself. We note the source of the limitation in our very manner of speech when we speak of human life and animal life, though it never occurs to us to speak of human rationality or animal animality.

Since it is precisely from these unlimited perfections that the proof of the existence of God proceeds, it may be worth while pointing out some of their characteristics. Perhaps the most noticeable is that these perfections are possessed by different kinds of being in an analogous, not an identical, way; thus, for instance, we speak of a good stone, a good fruit, a good horse or a good professor according as each has its due perfection. Obviously the goodness of the professor is not identically the same as the goodness of fruit. There is proportionality there, but not identity. The second particularly noteworthy characteristic is that these perfections are realizable in different degrees; thus, in the course of one lifetime a man may be bad, of mediocre virtue, of more than average virtue, and ultimately a saint.

The Fourth Proof: from Perfection — Participation

The fourth proof for the existence of God can be stated succinctly. In the world about us we see these perfections existing in things in greater and lesser degrees: that is, we see things that are more and less good, more and less true, and so on; we see life within human limits, animal limits, plant limits. Now these limited degrees of limitless perfections can be explained only by the existence of something to which these perfections pertain in their fullness, something which does not possess this or that degree of goodness, truth, life, but which is, by its very nature, limitless goodness, limitless truth, limitless life.

Certainly these limited degrees of limitless perfections are not explained by the natures which possess them. For what flows from the essential principles of a nature is had in its fullness; humanity is not something a man achieves after a long struggle. Moreover, perfections which flow from nature do not vary: the spoiled lapdog is not less animal as the days pass, the puppy does not grow into his animality. Yet, as a matter of fact, in the world about us these limitless perfections of goodness, life and the rest are not had in their fullness and they vary with an infinite variety.

The explanation, then, must be sought outside of the natures which possess a limited edition of a limitless virtue, that is, in some extrinsic source which has the perfection perfectly. Otherwise we meet the fundamental obstacle erected by an identification of contraries, of a potentiality bringing about its own realization, indeed, of the absence of perfection bringing about the presence of perfection. In a word, these limited editions of limitless virtues are received virtues; in the ultimate analysis, they are explicable only by some being who has not received them but to whom they belong, in their limitlessness, by the very nature of that being. Nor is this a question of a jump from the ideal to the real order. These effects — human life, the goodness of a man — are decidedly in the real order. It is not a matter of having an ideal rule by which we may measure these perfections; but of having a real, existing cause by whose action these realities have been brought into being.

This fourth proof proceeded from multiplicity to unity, from the multiplicity of shared or received perfections to the unity of essentially possessed perfection. The fifth proof proceeds from an ordered multiplicity to an ordering unity. The order of the world, which is at the starting point of this proof, furnished one of the most constant evidences of the existence of God to men through the ages. It appealed to Greek poets and philosophers; in un-philosophic form it was preserved in the Sacred Writings of the Jews; primitive peoples appealed to it in their origin myths. It has been not only one of the most ancient of the proofs but one of the most popular. It has been accepted as genuine by the uneducated who were unable to follow its philosophical implications; and, at the same time, was the only proof given a measure of respect by the great Kant.

It was perhaps to be expected that modern philosophy, with its contempt for the past should most strenuously assail this particular proof. Some will say that it was destroyed by the theory of evolution which, telling a tale of the process of development, made unnecessary all explanation of the beginning of that process. Again, the facts of reality are said to be adequately explained by blind chance or by necessity. We shall look at these last two modern (and ancient) objections more closely after we have seen the proof itself.

The Fifth Proof: from Order — Finality

The fifth proof for the existence of God proceeds just as did the other four, demanding no more, resting on just as solid a foundation. It has the same starting point of facts in the world in which we live; it makes use of the same fundamental principle of reason and of things, namely, that opposites are not identical. Here the point in question is the existence of an order; the search for its explanation leads us to a supreme intelligence.

The argument might be phrased briefly like this. In thc world about us we see things devoid of intelligence acting for an end, a fact which is evident from their always, or generally, acting in thc same orderly way to attain that which is best for them. Evidently these actions are placed, not by accident, but on purpose. As things devoid of intelligence do not act for an end unless they be directed by some intelligence, we must conclude that a supreme intelligence exists which directs all natural things to their end.

An immediately obvious difficulty against this argument seems to be that it presumes the order of the world; this order is by no means a fact of experience. If there is such an order in the world, we have not discovered it yet. As a matter of fact, this objection has its roots in the lush soil of confusion, the confusion of external and internal finality. To solve the mystery of external finality we would have to know all the answers to such questions as the external reason for the bite of a mosquito, the existence of a snake, the destruction wrought by a hurricane. We simply do not know these things; certainly we do not know all of them and probably we never shall. It is asking a good deal to demand an exhaustive measurement of divine plans by such an instrument as the mind of a man. As a matter of fact, we do not have to plumb the mystery of external finality for the purposes of this argument.

It is quite sufficient that we establish the fact of internal finality. That we can and do know without doubt. We do know that the eye is constructed for purposes of seeing, the car for hearing; that a mosquito bites for purposes of nourishment, that the snake’s fangs are weapons of defense, and so on. Knowledge such as this is sufficient for the starting point of this fifth proof for the existence of God. Indeed, only one such instance of internal finality would give grounds enough for the proof. This fact of internal finality is quite sufficient to absolve this argument from the charge of anthropomorphism which some philosophers have levelled against it. The argument does not demand that we search the soul of a snake or a mosquito to unearth motives, intentions or plans; it asks merely that we recognize the fact of a constant order of cause to effect.

This internal order is not to be explained by chance. Such an explanation is an insult to common sense: my ear might just as well have turned out to be an organ of smell; on such grounds, is it not surprising that so many animals have ears? The ratio of the chances for a simultaneous chance development of the thirteen conditions immediately necessary for sight has been figured out as 9,999,985 to 15; yet the thing happens every day!

Putting aside the appeal of common sense, which is strangely suspect by the modern philosopher, the explanation of the order of the world by chance is philosophically unsound. Certainly chance exists. It is just chance that a bald-headed man is caught in a thunder-shower without his hat; but obviously if there were no reason for his being out, no reason for the shower, the heavy drops would not now be smacking off the smooth surface of his head. In other words, the very existence of chance presupposes the existence of the essential; chance is no more than the clash of two causes attempting to pursue their own purposive ways; it is an accident which happens to the essential, not which explains or does away with the essential. If everything happens by chance, then all nature is reduced to the level of the accidental; things are not essentially what they are, but only accidentally so, the mirage may melt away before the groping fingers of our mind.

Such an explanation is no explanation at all; it is a contradiction. It is the by now familiar absurdity of explaining the perfect by the imperfect, the greater by the less, order by the lack of order. Or, to put it bluntly, it identifies opposites potentiality with its realization or potentiality with the lack of all being. And we are faced with the old dilemma of denying the potentialities of the medical student and the perfections of the doctor or of denying the difference between the two; that is, we are back to the impossible attempt to deny facts.

The modern, intent on dodging the infinite, is not at all dashed by the breakdown of an explanation which he will confidently use again as soon as the thunder of reason’s guns has died down. For the moment he solves the problem by denying it: the order of the world is explained by the necessity of nature; God is unnecessary because the world is self-sufficient. In plain language, this means that order is discernible in the world, science can continue with its investigation of this order, because things are what they are; this is their nature, they are determined by necessary physical laws to this way of being and of acting, nature itself supplies the necessary determination.

No real question is solved by pretending it does not exist: and this is a real question. The solution offered on the grounds of necessity merely pushes the question back. Whence comes this determination, this necessary inclination to determined action? What is the source of the necessity of nature and of physical laws? Obviously it does not explain itself; chance will not do as an explanation; the only possible solution is a cause above nature, an intelligence that is supreme. Not any intelligcnce will do. For if that intelligence is not supreme, then it is not intelligence but a nature which has intelligence, that is, a nature determined, inclined, ordered to know; and we have the same problem all over again — whence comes this determination, this inclination, this order? This ultimately explanatory intelligence must be, not have, intelligence; it must not be ordered to knowing but must be its own knowledge.

A Posteriori Arguments

Such are the proofs for the existence of God. They have their foundations deep in the solid earth while their superstructure sweeps up to the heights of divinity. These proofs are not airy abstractions, they are not vague constructs made to substitute, in the dim light of argumentation, for solid reality. They are inferential proofs, a posteriori proofs, inductions based on the facts of the sensible world and the first principles of reason. The facts upon which they are based are in no sense disputed facts; given the movement of an eyelash, the perfection of a stone or the contingency of a sigh, these proofs hold. Surely, in all common sense, the foundation asked from the senses for these proofs cannot be denied.

On the other hand, the principle of reason involved in these proofs is no less indisputable. It cannot be denied without the denial of all intellectual activities, without the denial of the world of reality; indeed, it cannot be denied without being affirmed. For this principle is simply that a thing is what it is, a thing cannot be and not be at the same time, it cannot be itself and something else; in other words, the principle insists that differences are not identities, that potentialities are not their actualizations, that non-being is not identical with being.

Independently Sufficient

The philosopher who, for reasons best known to himself, decides to challenge these proofs has entered a war of cosmic proportions; fortunately for himself, he cannot win. Such a victory would be his own annihilation. These proofs are not aimed at a cumulative effect; they are totally different from the mass of arguments gathered in support of the hypothesis of evolution, they are not the frail threads woven into the strong cloth of a prosecuting attorney’s circumstantial argument. From all of them, or from any one of them, the existence of God is established; from any one of them as a starting point, it can be shown that God is existence itself, the perfect being, ens a se.

Strictly Limited to Evidence

No fault can be found with their procedure, for they adhere rigidly to the evidence in hand and conclude within the proper limits of this evidence. The knowledge they give is not that of probability, not even of very high probability; rather it is knowledge of metaphysical certitude, excluding every other possibility, leaving only the first mover, the first cause, the necessary being and so on as the ultimate answer to the facts of the world of reality.

Implications

That these proofs have been shrugged off as meaningless to men, devoid of qualitative content, is something the thinking man will always be unable to understand; and for the very good reason that such an attitude is unintelligible. The following chapters will bring out at length the implications of these notions; but without further elaboration these arguments bow down under the weight of the ripe fruit of profound significance. Thus, for instance, the fact of the existence of a first unmoved mover means that there is no movement, from the crushing force of a tidal wave to the rise and fall of a breast in sleep which does not depend every instant on God; there is no change, from the imperceptible coloring of a leaf in autumn to the upheaval of a social revolution in which God does not play a major part. The existence of a first uncaused cause means that in the swaying struggle of men’s lives, the triumphs of their greatest thoughts and works, their masterpieces, their literature, their architecture, the soarings of the poet or the crisp command of the soldier, there is no instant from which God can be excluded. No walls are thick enough, no wastes lonely enough, no army powerful enough, no governmental edict sweeping enough, no hatred bitter enough to exclude the action of the first cause.

Significance of the Proofs

The existence of an absolutely necessary being means there is a divine sustaining hand whose withdrawal means annihilation; it means that we cannot contact anything of reality without confronting divinity; that God is closer to us than we are to ourselves, that every moment of life, every particle of dust, every stitch of a garment is permeated with divinity or it could not continue to be. That there is an all perfect being means that all the beauty, the love, the goodness that lift the heart of a man out of himself are but shadows of the infinite on the pool of life, vague hints of the ineffable that lies at the beginning and end of life. That a supreme intelligence exists makes it plain that the hairs of our head are indeed numbered; that there is no step, no breath, no success or failure that is without its meaning, without its place in a divine plan, a supreme order, that necessarily goes beyond the human mind’s power of assimilation.

Real Mystery of Beginnings

These proofs may be attacked as wild abstractions of reason without solid foundation or as cold reasonings that have no meaning, no interest to men. Both accusations are completely false: these are scientific proofs based on the world of reality; they are of an inexhaustible significance and interest to men. If the truth were honestly faced, it would be evident that the real grounds for the modern unease in their presence is the fact that they lead the mind of men to the ultimate mystery. Every beginning is mysterious because every beginning has a drop of the exotic perfume of divinity on its garments. Every beginning is a bridge spanning the chasm between what can be and what is, by its very existence proclaiming the perfection and the mystery of its builder, the ultimate Beginning who laid the foundations upon which every such bridge must be built. The most prosaic beginning intrigues our mind. for the humblest beginning poses a question that only divinity answers and only divinity can fully understand that answer. By a beginning something has come into being that did not exist before; it is a sleight of hand trick, a bit of magic that cannot be true, a mouse giving birth to a mountain unless we come to the Beginning that never began and always is, to the limitlessness that explains the limited, to the utterly independent which is the sole support of the dependent. When we have arrived at that ultimate answer, we are face to face with the incomprehensible precisely because we are in the presence of the limitless.

Non-Mysterious Substitutes

To the man who confusedly identifies human excellence with absolute supremacy, this sort of thing is intolerable; what overflows the measure of the human mind simply cannot exist, for this would be a refutation of the excellence of man. Some other solution must be had, something not mysterious, something that can be weighed, measured and put in its place by the human god of the universe. It may be this man will try to satisfy his mind, and his heart, by the absurdities of order explained by chance, by the blindness of necessity that has no source, or the deceit of substituting a process for an explanation. But such things can satisfy the mind of a man only by destroying it; they do not solve the problem of a beginning, they dodge it, deny it, destroy it, whereas the mind of man can be satisfied only with an answer. If we are to have that answer, we must face the fact of mystery, for mystery can be eliminated only at the cost of eliminating the beginning and so eliminating all that follows from that beginning. Perhaps, some day, the modern man will learn that mystery is not the prison of the mind of man, it is his home.

CHAPTER III — THE INEFFABLE
(Q. 3-11)

1. Limitations of speech:

    (a) By the violence of passion.

    (b) By the ignorance of listeners.

    (c) By the sublimity of the concept.

2.Philosophy’s unspeakables:

    (a)The unknown God of the Christians:

     (1) The enemy of modern politics.

     (2) The feeble governor.

     (3) The pious hypocrite.

     (4) The out-dated divinity.

     (5) The stranger to a changed world:

     a. A world of new knowledge and interests.

     b. A world of new philosophy.

     c. A world in flux.

    (b) The unknown man:

     (1) Not a corrupt puppet but a supreme lord.

     (2) But a vulnerable, ignorant, despairing lord.

3. The ineffable God:

    (a) The obvious perfections of God in general.

    (b) The perfections in detail:

     (l) The simplicity of God.

     (2) The perfection of God:

     a. The difficulty of incompatibility.

     b. Virtual, formal and eminent perfection.

     (3) The goodness of God.

     (4) The infinity and ubiquity of God.

     (5) The immutability and eternity of God.

     (6) The unity of God.

4. Unspeakable modern gods:

    (a) A subjective god.

    (b) A finite god.

    (c) An undeveloped god.

    (d) A pantheistic god.

Conclusion:

1. The crisis of the ages.

2. The modern choice.

3. Evaluation of the choice.

CHAPTER III — THE INEFFABLE
(Q. 1-11)

Limitations of Speech

Undoubtedly there is some advantage in a blind man’s inability to watch with anxious impotence as his words tread their dangerous way to the mind of an other, plodding ineptly, their frail strength weighed down with the heavy burden of thought. But then neither can he detect the garbling of the message, the complete per version of misunderstanding or the meaninglessness of a word that has lost its burden on the way; so of course he misses the incalculable advantage of rushing a host of other messengers immediately in the hope that one will make the crossing safely, of supplementing the gawky word with a swift flash of an eye, the grace of a smile, the sincerity of a gesture that say so much more than will fit into a word.

That words are poor messengers is evidenced by the wholehearted support we give them whenever such support is possible. Where the words must stand alone, in a letter, a telegram, a book, we put them down in fear and trembling; but then, they are the best messengers we have, so we make the most of them. Where they actually break down we are brought up short in the realization of our helpless dependence on them.

Violence of Passion

And they do break down. The man who is so angry he sputters may be so angry he is incapable of forming words; or it may be he can find no words staunch enough to contain the thunderbolts he would like to hurl. Certainly a man consumed by hate is silenced by a bitterness too great for words; the coward is a victim of nameless fears, fears so deep and so violent that they will never have a name. These passions, and many another, stir up within a man the literally unspeakable things, things that pass beyond the boundaries of speech and so are necessarily imprisoned in the heart of their victim; his fight against them must always be a lonely battle.

Ignorance of Listeners

A tourist, whose rugged independence forces him to abandon the protective offices of his guide, soon discovers a quite different example of the breakdown of words. He may ruin his disposition and hoarsen his voice before it dawns on him, but eventually he will come to recognize the fact that shouted words in his own language do not solve the difficulty. In the same line, but much more befuddling, is the professor’s difficulty when his words bounce off his students as though they were wearing thought-proof vests, when example, illustration, contrast, synonymous repetition do nothing at all to the wall of blankness that protects their minds from his incursions. But these difficulties of communication are not insuperable; time, patience and work should clear them up. There is yet another case of the breakdown of words that no amount of effort can overcome.

Sublimity of the Concept

A feeble example of the impossibility of squeezing the ineffable into the confines of words is had in the almost tangible silence that envelopes a moment of crucial parting of those whom love has made one, that moment when we put the whole burden of speech into a tight, lingering handshake, a desperate embrace, or the hopeless silence of tears. Here there are things to be communicated, but things too sacred, too deep, too wide for words. Or, again, there is that mysterious moment of intellectual maturity when reason’s intuition sees antinomies merge and still remain distinct, an insight that must always remain utterly personal because it surpasses words. But if human love and human knowledge of created things reach heights too sublime for the plodding steps of words, obviously human love and human knowledge of the limitlessness of the uncreated soar to levels where words are almost a profanation of the concepts they might attempt to express. A light can be so bright that it destroys sight, a sound so loud it deafens the ears; and there can be a truth so great it defies the messengers of truth which are words. That truth is the truth about God.

Philosophy’s Unspeakables

There is, then, an infinite chasm between the unspeakable things that are too base, too irrational for words and the ineffable things that are too high, too intelligible for the framework of speech. The chasm, however, does not stop the modern philosopher who has had so much practice identifying contradictories and laughing logic out of court. He has bridged the chasm by making the ineffable divinity an unspeakable thing.

The Christians’ Unknown God

The picture he draws of the Christian God is revolting enough to drive any man to atheism; but the paint he uses for the picture is not squeezed from the tubes of facts, rather it is the free-flowing, bodiless stuff of an imagination gone wild. To him the Christian God is the embodiment of tyrannical absolutism. In our modern political ideas there is no room for this sort of thing; men can no longer be looked on as the slaves, the puppets of a Caesar-like God living in epicurean felicity while his underlings drag out their lives in misery. What kind of a god is this, they say, who governs less wisely than a dishonest member of a corrupt political machine? Their god must be constantly striving, however unsuccessfully, against evil, or they will disown him. They have no sympathy for thc hypocritical god who covers an essential corruption of man with the bright cloak of trust, leaving the essential rottenness untouched. If god is not battling against evil, even physical evil, but rather is pretending that the evil is not there, then he isn’t much of a god and we shall get along without him.

Outdated

The modern philosopher protests so much against God that he creates the suspicion he is having a hard time convincing himself; the longer and louder he protests, the more unsound are the reasons he offers. He argues, for instance, that God should be, if not as variable as fashions at least as changing as the ages. So in one age an idea of God is completely satisfying while, in the succeeding ages, an entirely new one is necessary to satisfy men. No belief retains its divinity unchanged through different generations; our race has changed, so our God must change. The Christian idea of God is old fashioned, an aloof, rigid idea; it is the notion of a God incapable of participation in human affairs, sublimely above them and, at least as far as concrete evidence is concerned, not so intimately worried about them.

A World in Flux

Our world has changed. The views of the men and women of that world have changed. Our instruments of investigation are vastly improved, our methods of inquiry are better, more accurate; and the particular interests involved are quite different, for the things we seek and discover were not objects of inquiry for our Christian ancestors. We need a new god. Our philosophy today is different; philosophers today are not theo-centric but homo-centric. Their chief interest is not God but man; they have a new conception of the supernatural, the bible and Christ. Of course that conception does not leave much of the supernatural, of the bible or of Christ; but it has the one indispensable quality — it is new. To match it, we must have a new concept of god. Moreover, we envision the world as dynamic, reality as dynamic; the world and reality are not stable but a mysterious flow sweeping on to yet unsuspected perfections. The absolute God of the Christians simply will not do for this changed point of view.

Not a Puppet but a Lord

The plastic surgeon of philosophy who does not hesitate to do a face-lifting job on God could hardly be content with man as God made him. The finished product would move the mother of men to deny her parenthood indignantly; and no one could blame her. Man is no longer the puppet and slave of God; he is the supreme lord of the world. Apparently there is no medium. But for all his exalted position, he is a bedraggled figure. Physical evil, sickness and death, are his supreme misfortunes; that is to say, he is so highly vulnerable that he must slink through life in terror of ill health, a blow on the head or the crack of a gun which would utterly destroy him and his happiness. He is an ignorant fellow, his knowledge limited to a suspicious acceptance of history, the cluttering details of science and the vague findings of the collective judgment of men, though he may get an irrational lift out of that emotional thing called religious experience. If this ignorant, frightened creature exercises his unhappy privilege of looking beyond the sunset of today his eyes focus on the goal of all his terrified living — oblivion; and the gates are thrown wide to despair. 

A Despairing Lord 

The philosophical plastic surgeon may run his caressing eyes fondly over the product of his surgery; certainly no one else can, least of all a philosopher whose chief interest is truth. This is much too high a price to pay that the modern philosopher be happy. This monster he has created is not a Christian man, indeed is not any kind of man. The corruption allegedly fixed on man by Christianity got much too late a start to deserve the name Christian; Christianity began before the sixteenth century. The philosophical plastic surgeon started out to remove a blemish that was non-existent and ended by utterly disfiguring the image of God whose treasures were so deeply buried within the impregnable fortress of his soul as to be secure from all but himself, whose mind could leap the boundaries of sense, of time and space, whose goal was eternal life, a goal worth much more than the struggles, failures, discouragements and dashed hopes that have to be faced in the living of life. This unspeakable thing created by modern philosophy is not man as we know him, as men and God have known him from the beginning.

Still less is the God modern philosophy attacks, the God whose existence Thomas proved in the preceding chapter of this volume. As Thomas knew Him, the God of the Christian was not a being from whom a reasonable man would recoil in horror; rather this God is a being to enthrall the heart of a man, a being for whom man would leave all things and lose his life to have all things and to save his life. This is the God whose ineffable nature and divine messages engaged the minds and hearts of Fathers, doctors and theologians down the centuries; who was the inspiration of the saints, the courage of the martyrs, the purity of the virgins, the charity of all men; this was the God who came from Mary’s womb to die on the Cross that men might have more abundant life.

The Ineffable God

Such a God is well worth the knowing. In this chapter we propose to give a rough description of Him, a description adequate enough to allow us to recognize divinity, yet totally inadequate from the point of view of the rich personality of God. Just as we might describe a man by talking of his dark hair, his blue eyes, his long swinging stride yet know full well that only deep acquaintance, solid friendship and even the full consecration of love can make that man really well known, so we describe God as simple, utterly perfect, good, infinite, present everywhere, unchangeable, eternal, one; knowing well that only eternal vision and unending love can dissipate the haze which shrouds divinity’s heights from the mind of men.

God’s Perfections in General

This list of divine perfections is by no means exhaustive. We shall learn more of God as we progress further and further with the analysis of the divine nature. This is merely the brief, muttered formula of introduction. There is much still to be said of God’s knowledge, of His will, His mercy, His providence and His justice: all these will be taken up in the succeeding chapters of this book.

The particular attributes selected for treatment in this chapter were chosen as the most obvious implications in view of the proof for the existence of God in the last chapter, the proof of the existence of a first unmoved mover, the first uncaused cause, the absolutely necessary being, the absolutely perfect being, the supreme intelligence at the root of the order of the world.

It is to be noted that our knowledge of these divine perfections is not arrived at by way of “religious experience”, they are not the projections of faith states, of self-hypnotism, they are not the ethereal transports of the poet or the rich imaginings of pious souls; they are not the result of an outlook, an age, a political or scientific theory. They are rigid deductions, implications from an established fact. And implication, here, is to be taken in its full strong sense, the sense of being contained, wrapped up in what has been previously established. There are, it is true, other senses of the word, senses that have about them the unhealthy pallor of a slyness, a cowardice, of an uncleanness that shirk the bright sunlight of direct speech to haunt the alleys of suggestion, hints, indirect or double-meaning speech.

The sense in which we are using the word here is as bright as sunlight on sand, as clean as the smell of the sea; the sense in which, for example, thc motherhood of Mary is implied in the statement “Christ was the son of Man.” In this same sense it follows that, since I am a man, I am a rational animal; since this person is a woman, she is not a man. These are inescapable implications whose validity rests entirely on the validity of their foundation.

Simplicity

The most obvious implication from the proofs for the existence of God is that God is in no sense a composite or complex being; He is wholly simple. Before going on to establish the obvious character of this divine attribute of simplicity, it might be well to admit frankly that we have done such strange, contradictory things to simplicity that God might consider this particular attribute a dubious compliment. There is a great difference between the simple things we pity or patronize for their simplicity and the simple things to which we pay the tribute of profound respect and admiration. A simple-minded man is one who, through lack of ability or opportunity, does not know any better; whereas a richly simple gown is the result of supreme ability and unlimited opportunities. The simplicity of the child’s essay is altogether different from thc simplicity of the literary craftsman’s easy grace with words. In the one case we see simplicity as the mark of imperfection, in the other, as the stamp of genius; in both cases we are right, but it must be seen that we are using the word simple in decidedly different senses.

Simplicity is a badge of imperfection and will remain so in the world of created things where perfection must be measured in terms of potentialities and their realization. Man stands at the peak of the physical universe precisely because of his rich potentialities; his life is richer, fuller, as more of those potentialities are realized, as even greater potentialities are acquired, in a word, in proportion to the increased complexity of his life. He may cast an envious glance at a cat sleeping in a sunny window; life is so simple for a cat. But the envy is not real; no man wants to spend his life curled up in sleep. particularly in a window.

Yet this rich potentiality, the very basis of the complexity which makes up the perfection of created things, is itself a statement of imperfection. It implies imperfection; it is a declaration that something can still be had, that there is a void still to be filled up by some one some thing else. The being who has no potentialities, but only pure actuality, who is the source of all potentiality, alone escapes the stigma of imperfection and is free of the basic element of complexity. This being is utterly, completely simple; this is the being who receives nothing but gives all things. The simplicity we so admire and respect in created things, the simplicity that smacks of genius, is not really simplicity at all but the appearance of simplicity; men have succeeded in giving to rich complexity a smooth unity by a perfect coordination to a single end and we salute the faint image of divinity thus produced.

To say that God is simple means, in the concrete, that He is in no sense composite. He is not, has not, a body; He is not a golden calf or a painted idol. He has not divinity as man has humanity; He is divinity. His nature is not a cup filled to overflowing with existence, He is not full of life; He is existence, He is life. There are no family quarrels of the gods; there is nothing in God upon which to base a difference in divine nature. He does not grow fat or thin or red in the face; His thought is not a procession of concepts as is ours, for there is nothing accidental, transient, unessential in God. Because He is simple He cannot enter into composition with others as sugar does with coffee or oxygen with hydrogen; He cannot be immersed in the inert mass of matter like Bergson’s élan vital, expending His divine life fighting free with all the agony of a boy fighting his way out of sleep. God is simple because He is the first the completely independent source of all being.

Perfection

One of the greatest concentrations of perfection the world has seen was to be found in that small house of Nazareth when Gabriel saluted the Immaculate Virgin; yet even in this sublime company there was the spectre of imperfection, which is limitation, that haunts all creation. The angel had the potentialities of successive thought that all eternity would not exhaust; the virgin had the undeveloped potentialities of mind and heart that are the task as well as the glory of human nature; both had the imperfection inherent in the limited character of their respective nature, for the angelic no less than the human nature has its boundaries fixed. The most intimate glimpse of the limitless perfection of God given to man on this earth is to be had in the picture of the Madonna with the divine child in her arms; for there is all the perfection of human nature along with its inevitable limitation, but there also is the unfathomable abyss of the boundless source of all perfection.

There is simply no place for imperfection in God. In Him there are no potentialities to be realized, as all potentialities must be realized, by something other than themselves. He is absolutely independent because He is first; all others depend on this first cause Who cannot depend on any other without ceasing to be first. More than that, He has in Himself the perfections of everything else that ever has, ever will, indeed, that ever could exist. Unless He be their cause they cannot be; He cannot be the cause of perfections that are not in some way already His.

Virtually, Formally and Eminently

When we come down to detail, the argument for the utter perfection of God seems to involve insuperable difficulties. If we try to picture God as a combination of the ferocity of a wolf and the pathetic friendliness of a dachshund, the beauty of youth and the serenity of age, the grandeur of a sunset and the peace of night we shall drive ourselves insane. But why should we try this sort of thing in our thought of the divinity when we are so careful to avoid it in our thought of the created universe? We know that a father contains within himself all the perfections of the human nature of his son and in exactly the same way; if we had to put this in a technical phrase, any journeyman philosopher could tell us that these perfections were possessed formally. We are quite sure an acorn contains the perfections of an oak; but we do not try to picture the oak’s huge trunk and stubborn leaves as packed into the tiny confines of an acorn. We know these perfections do not exist in the acorn in the same way as in the oak; they are had, not formally, but virtually, radically, in the acorn. We do not hesitate to attribute the perfections of a poem to its author; but we do not make the absurd mistake of expecting the poet’s mind to get musty, yellow with age, or covered with dust on a library shelf. It is not the poet that leaps out of the frightened child’s mouth in elocution class. In this case the poet possesses the perfections of his poem but in a completely superior manner, eminently.

It is in this last fashion, eminently, that the perfections of all creation are found in God; He is the cause of them all, they exist in Him, not virtually, not identically, but eminently. The conclusion that all reality is godlike is quite true. What we see in the world of existence, of beauty, of goodness, of grace and all the rest is had from God Who is overflowing with perfection. These creatures share, participate in the perfection of God. This was a truth close to the heart of Francis of Assisi and Martin de Porres, a truth that made all irrational creation and the whole world of men a lover’s note to be read slowly, tenderly, repeatedly, to be treasured caressingly until the writer in person made plain all the beauties that could not be squeezed between the lines. It is right that the strength of a storm at sea, the innocence of a child, the calm of a country twilight should stir us to the depths of our being for these are shadows of divinity passing by.

It might be well to note here, for accuracy’s sake, that we speak of divine attributes in a double sense, often without realizing the distinction. Thus when we state these attributes positively, such as simplicity and perfection, we are speaking only by way of analogy; that is, we do not mean to attribute these things to God in exactly the same way in which they belong to men but in an infinitely superior manner. On the other hand, when we state them negatively, insisting, for example, that God is incomposite and devoid of all imperfection, we are talking literally, univocally, and expect our words to be taken without qualification.

Goodness

Another caution that may not be amiss is that we have an entirely accurate notion of the particular attribute under discussion. Thus, to speak of the goodness of God in the sense of sanctimoniousness is to divorce the discussion from reality, as, well as to flavor it distastefully. The notion of goodness adds nothing to being but the smack of desirability, that is, a thing can be good, desirable, only insofar as it is possible or thought to be possible; it can be pursued and enjoyed only insofar as it has being. We do not desire an automobile that can be folded up and dropped into a purse. We can see the advantage of a servant with five arms, but we do not advertise for such a one. We do, however, have a real desire for real things–for friends, a ham sandwich, new clothes, knowledge. It is this smack of desirability that goodness adds to being which is at the root of all activity.

Activity, then, is striving for the desirable thing, for something good; boredom, on the other hand, is the absence of knowledge of and interest in the good and is the nearest approach to stagnation to be found among living things. As a matter of fact. everything in the world has its desirable something, its goal. Concretely that goal is the completion, the perfection, the complete fulfillment of the particular creature; every creature is good in proportion as it is, it is better in proportion as it has approached its goal. Briefly, a thing is good insofar as it is real. Bluff, defect, incapacity have nothing desirable about them because there is nothing real about them. But He Who is, the cause of all reality, the perfect Being, is the highest goodness for He is the most real Being. Not that He has goodness; rather He is goodness, as He is reality. On His goodness all other goodness is modeled, from His goodness all other goodness proceeds; all other goodness is a similitude, a participation, a limited miniature of the limitless goodness of God.

Because of the smack of desirability which goodness adds to being, God is most desirable, most lovable. So true is this that everything in the universe hustles eagerly to this goal of goodness, each in its own way: man with alert steps along the dangerous road of knowledge and love, brutes with the unerring aim of instinct, the inanimate world with the blind, plodding step of physical necessity devoid of all knowledge. For each creature in the universe is spurred on to action by the goal of its own perfection, a goal which is nothing but a similitude, an image, a mirroring of the goodness of God.

Infinity

No limits are to be placed on the goodness of God, as no limits are to be assigned to any other divine attribute. How can you have a fence with nothing, absolutely nothing, on the other side of it? What is there of reality, that God will not have, to mark the spot where the fence must begin? Limitation is essentially a declaration of potentialities achieved or potentialities capable of achievement; without potentiality limitation is a contradiction in terms. And there can be no potentiality in God, for potentiality is a declaration of dependence. God has not received existence within the limits of a human, an animal or an angelic nature; He has not received at all, He is. The idea of reception is the idea of change, of potentiality actualized, of perfection within limits–something that our proof for His existence forced us to exclude from God. He is infinite, and He alone; for He alone is first, receiving from no one, giving to all.

Ubiquity

In a very real sense, this utterly limitless God overflows the limits of the universe. He is everywhere within it, yet not contained by it. Everything in the universe comes from God; existence is His proper effect. Where anything exists,\ there is God. Understand, now, this is not merely a matter of God first giving existence and then abandoning the universe to its fate; He does not give us a pat on the back as we leave the corner of nothingness to jump into the ring of life, leaving us to take the blows while He shouts advice that takes none of the sting out of the blows. Existence belongs to God; as long as existence endures, there is the hand of God sustaining it as a mother supports her infant or the throat of a singer sustains his song. God is everywhere, and only God; for only God is the infinite, the first cause explaining every existent thing.

The ubiquity of God, in common with all the divine perfections, is not a cold, abstract thing meaningless to men. Its significance for human living is inexhaustible. In the concrete, it means, for instance, that God is in the surge of the sea, the quiet peace of hills and valleys, the cool refreshment of rain, the hard drive of wind-driven snow. In the cities He is in the bustling of crowds, the roar of traffic, the struggle for pleasure, for life, for happiness, in the majesty of towering buildings. In homes He is not to be excluded from the tired, drowsy hours of night, the hurried activity of morning, from the love and quarrels, the secret worries and unquestioning devotion, the sacrifice and peace that saturate a home. In every individual one of us God is more intimately present than we are to ourselves. Every existing thing within us demands not only the existence of God but also His constant presence, from every rush of blood from our hearts to every wish, every thought, every act. In other words, everything that is real must have God there as the explanation, the foundation, the cause of every moment of its reality.

Thomas puts this all succinctly and beautifully when he says that God is in the world, in everything and everyone in the world, by His essence, causing all things, by His presence, all things being naked and open to the eye of this intelligent cause, by His power on which everything depends, to which everything is subject.

There is in this conception a majesty that transforms the earth. The mistaken exaggerations of Eastern philosophy made men walk carefully lest, treading on a living thing, they tread on the soul of a man. We have no fear of treading on the soul of man nor on God; but we do live in a world vibrant with divinity. We can give a real reverence to every being because within it, supporting its very existence, is the living God Himself. There is terror in this conception, the terror of moving in an atmosphere pervaded with divinity, of being ourselves wrapped about with divinity, penetrated with the infinite. But there is also courage and comfort here to be had from no other source. We bar the world in general from everything but the surface of our lives; friends are allowed to enter a few rooms of our palace; love throws open the gates as far as it is given us to open them–as wide as physical signs or clumsy, stumbling, inadequate words can open our souls, as wide as sacrifice and devotion can keep those gates open. Only God can walk freely about the innermost corridors of our being. And He does. Unless He be there, we could not be.

The pessimistic pantheism of the East, to which our modern philosophy edges closer every day, distorted the truth of the intimate presence of God to the point of identifying everything with divinity. On such premises there was good grounds for pessimism. All distortions are false, this one is as absurdly false as the identification of my image in a mirror with myself or the inability to see any difference between the poet and his poem. None of the things created by God are divine; rather they are the mirrors of divinity, the effects of the divine cause that depend every instant on that cause for their reality.

Immutability

Nor is this intimate presence of God in the world to be mistaken for that tortured, twisting, developing god of the moderns that fights its way towards perfection through the struggle of the universe, changing as we change, getting better as we improve. God is altogether unchangeable. For what is change but the realization of a potentiality, the receiving of something new or the loss of something old. In God there can be no potentiality, nothing to be lost, nothing to be gained. He is pure actuality, pure being, possessing all things. He is beyond change and He alone; for He alone is first, dependent on no other, free of all potentiality.

To the modern philosopher this notion makes God completely static; if this be true, then this is a dull, stagnating, deteriorating God. His reason is not dissimilar from thc reasons for a New Yorker’s distaste for travel, an Englishman’s tolerance of the continent or an American tourist’s amusement at the strange antics of the rest of the world. In his own little world of creatures, the modern philosopher sees clearly that there must be change for progress, that immutability is closely akin to stagnation and deterioration. The point is that he is provincial enough to judge everything, even God, by the standards of that created world. It is true that change is inseparable from perfection in the world of unrealized potentialities; but it is also true that such a world is inconceivable without a Being of pure actuality, a Being Who is pure activity, Who has no potentiality, no possibility of losing or gaining but is a white flame of perfection. Such a Being is not in a state of static inertia; His is an activity so intense that change of any kind is impossible to it.

Eternity

This God did not begin; He cannot end. For both beginning and end proclaim a change, a reception or a loss, an imperfection, a dependence. He is eternal and He alone; eternal with that absolute, complete eternity of a divinely unchangeable Being.

Unity

Obviously there is only one such God. More than one demands some ground for difference — something one would have and another lack; this God lacks nothing. Where would infinity stop, which has no limits, that another infinity might begin? How could there be beginning or end, limitation, to the infinite perfection and pure act that is God? He is one, distinct from the world of finite, limited creatures, yet intimately within it. In the beautiful words of the divine Office: “To the King of ages, the immortal, invisible, the only God be honor and glory forever and ever.”

Unspeakable Modern Gods

This is the God rejected by modern philosophers. Caught by the glitter of their words, thousands of men and women have turned their backs on the only God and their faces to the gods of modern philosophy. What is offered to them?

A Subjective God

One group of philosophers suggests a subjective god, one of our own manufacture. To some of these, such a god would be no more than a projection of our subconscious states or of our social and racial instincts. The god-makers would be, for the most part, the weak, the oppressed, the downcast; for such a god is offered by way of compensation for inferiority. The superior man, they say, does not need this sop; but for the others, who still remain children, it is necessary that they have some enduring symbol of parental shelter to which they may run when life becomes too much for them. Others of this group suggest a deification of humanity: the spirit of a people, of the world of humanity, or of living beings taken in their associated and ideal experiences. This conception of divinity, says one of these philosophers, is best expressed by such terms as “alma mater” or “Uncle Sam”! Still others advise that we make our divinity of a quality of the world peculiarly akin to ourselves; or perhaps the material best suited is the higher reality on which we lay hold when we comprehend a truth or obey a noble impulse. These are the doctrines American universities are swallowing whole!

A Finite God

A second group of philosophers cast their vote for a finite god, not a subjective god, but one who needs our help, who is sustained by the world, whose interests are at stake in the world. God cannot be infinite, omnipotent, a static absolute if he is to work and make a difference to us. They will have a god who began but will never end; one who is not a creator, not infinite. But one who began with the human race, grows with it, an ideal gathering up to itself the achievements of humanity.

In the last analysis, both of these are stark atheism, the name of god is a cover-all to hide the ugly body of doctrine; both are violently opposed to the solid facts. In both there is a pathetic note: a note of weakness and of fear. The thesis paints a picture of lonely men trying to find comfort in a crowd, bundling themselves together with their fellows in the hope that somehow they will add up, not to a number of men, but to divinity; and it paints a picture of men who are not only weak but who are searching desperately for an escape from the fear of life, the fear of liberty, the fear of action.

An Undeveloped God

The third group takes a further step towards madness in advocating a kind of fluid, undeveloped god. God is the perfect in process, the principle of all struggling towards perfection through matter; yet this principle is fluid for everything real is a process of becoming. Others, within the group, insist that god is the next higher step, the empirical quality just above the highest we know; divinity, in other words, is the mechanical rabbit that lures human greyhounds into running their hearts out in a hopeless race. Maybe this undeveloped god is the finite world with its nisus towards deity; maybe this god is evolution: maybe it is the spirit of rational order. Make it anything you like; but do not dare to make it divine!

A Pantheistic God

The fourth group of modern philosophers come out frankly for a pantheistic god. Some say God is the life force identical with man and the universe. Others, not covering their shame with a blush of words, insist there is no ontological separation of one being from another; and this, if it means anything, means I am my dog and my dog is God just as I am. The connection between God and the universe is an organic one.

These last two groups represent the brutal pessimism of the Orient not yet carried to its logical conclusion; logically, these opinions should lead to utter despair and offer self-destruction as the goal of human life. Both are open violations of the facts; on such a basis, obviously the universe could not exist. It is important to remember that all four of these modern ideas of God are sponsored by men of learning, honored in their universities, hailed as leaders of thought.

Crisis of the Ages

God has been crucial to the thought and life of all ages, not only the existence of God, but knowledge of Him, love and hatred of Him. Men of all ages have had to think a great deal about God, for men of all ages have had to think a great deal about a goal to which they might direct their lives. To many men in many ages, the crisis has been one of loyalty, of the heart rather than the head; the difficulty has been in resisting the lure of the world’s tempting byways, and of holding fast to the path they knew to be the true one. This crisis will never be absent from the lives of men for it is the crisis of sin. Some men have failed to meet that crisis with any courage. Others will meet the same failure, but their difficulty, and the difficulty of all the sorry ones who follow after them, has not been in finding the courage to admit the truth of God and His law, but the courage to live up to the truth they admitted even though it condemned them.

The Modern Choice

In our day, as in all days, the crisis of loyalty, the crisis of sin exists. But today, on an increasingly alarming scale, men are being forced to meet another crisis, the crisis of choice, the crisis of the head more than of the heart. It is being made difficult for them to know the true God, let alone give Him their hearts, for modern leaders have set up false gods and demanded, with all the influence of their position, their learning, their skill in words, that men bow down and adore.

Evaluation

The choice offered to the man of the twentieth century might be summed up by saying that he is offered a human god, an inhuman god and the divine God. The human god is the product of subjective sentiment or of communal huddling together to the destruction of personality, a god that takes the alternative forms of personal sentiment, humanitarianism or of absolutism. The inhuman god may be the intangibility of a process under the name of evolution or the absurdity of pantheism. The divine God is the Christian God some of whose attributes we have looked at in this chapter. There is, of course, no rational choice between these three. The first two have no foundation in reality or reason; they are flagrant violations of fact arrived at only as a result of the denial of reality, of reason, of the supernatural, while the last is an inescapable truth.

The choice, from man’s point of view, can be stated in concrete terms. One gives immediate and complete oblivion in the crushing force of an absolutism where the individual is less than a cog, or in the vague future of the race in the name of humanity to the denial of men; the second is a matter of hiding from life in the sweet nothings of subjectivism with its promise of sure oblivion after death; the third insists on the dignity of man’s personality, on its eternally vital character, it demands that man, fully responsible and with eyes wide open, carve out a personal destiny that can never end. This last is the only God, simple, perfect, infinite, unchangeable, supporting the universe and present in the depth of all that is.

CHAPTER IV — THE VISION OF GOD
(Q. 12-18)

1. End of the myth of man’s omniscience:

   (a) The fact and its causes.

   (b) Laymen and this fact.

   (c) Philosophers and this fact.

2. Answers to the question of God’s omniscience:

   (a) Negative answers:

               (l) The lazy answer — Agnosticism.

               (2) The timid answer — Naturalism.

               (3) The cowardly answer — Psychological mechanism.

               (4) The proud answer — Idealism.

   (b) Affirmative answer.

3. The Knowledge of God:

   (a) He knows Himself:

               (1) The fact.

               (2) The manner of this knowledge.

   (b) He knows everything else:

               (1) Actual and possible things.

               (2) Evil.

               (3) Infinite thoughts of angels and men.

               (4) Future conditioned things.

   (c) The unvarying character of this knowledge.

   (d) Some sources of modern difficulties.

4. Man’s knowledge of God:

   (a) Triple source of this knowledge:

               (1) The effects of God.

               (2) Revelation.

               (3) Direct vision of God:

                  a. Possibility of this vision.

                  b. Object of this vision:

                               1. The divine essence and all formally contained in it.

                               2. The perfections of creatures.

                  c. The achievement of this vision.

Conclusion:

1. Significance of the affirmative and negative answers:

   (a) Freedom and slavery.

   (b) Inspiration and despair.

   (c) Humility and conceit.

   (d) Courage and fear.

2. The vision of God and life.

CHAPTER IV — THE VISION OF GOD
(Q. 1-11)

End of the myth of man’s omniscience

NOT so many years ago the very learned man got up from his breakfast and turned to his researches as joyously as a child hurrying to play with the toys Christmas showered on him. It seemed that the world and all its secrets had been handed to men as castles, towers, cranes and bridges are handed to a child in the gift of a structural toy; all that was necessary was that men work patiently piecing things together and eventually they would know all things knowable. Surely no one would be mean enough to give them such a toy with some of the pieces missing; it was entirely incredible that not all the mysteries could be reconstructed from this shiny array of unlimited possibilities. So the very learned labored happily in their play-rooms; and, saturated with their own contentment, they were very polite to all the rest of the poor ignorant men who still talked of the inscrutable knowledge of God, the mystery of the supernatural, the intangible, spiritual truths of philosophy.

Since then some one has told these happy creatures that there is no Santa Claus. Their naive world is crumbling about their ears; and it becomes more evident, day by day, that some of the pieces were missing, countless pieces. Today we are not quite so sure of the sweep of our own knowledge, not at all certain that we know it all. The mechanism of the nineteenth century, the happy theory that made the gears of the world and the metallic clanking of laws almost audible, has definitely broken down; with its collapse came wholesale confusion among the better educated. Today that confusion has not been lessened by the progress of the sciences, it has been immeasurably increased; while physics and biology seem to point more and more in the direction of the purposive and the idealistic, the modern psychologies look more and more to the purposeless, the irrational, the mechanical.

Laymen and this fact

Such conflicting results have given pause to the brash confidence of our fathers; they have humbled us a little, slowed up our process of conclusion considerably. We are proceeding with the caution of the spoiled child after his first week in a public school. The confusion and humiliation have been good for us. A tragic note in the whole affair is that the ordinary man and woman have been completely deprived of a proper share in this confusion and humiliation. Their ordinary sources of information proceed on the old mechanistic basis as if nothing had happened, as if, somehow, they had been water-proofed against the seepage of such scandalous uncertainty from the higher levels; to the layman, the implications of the old mechanism are still established facts, he is polite or pitying to those who are not scientifically up to date, and his life is aimed earnestly at grotesque goals that enjoy a macabre existence now that the mind that sponsored them has retracted.

Philosophers and this fact

The layman need not feel too lonely in his ignorance; hordes of modern philosophers are right at his side patronizing the rest of men for their unscientific neglect of the new truths that are already decrepit. At least this confusion of the mechanistic basis of life has not produced any great clarity of thought among modern philosophers. They still retain that frigid politeness and bored tolerance, characteristic of nineteenth century scholarship, in the face of such problems as the knowledge of God, of the soul, of absolute morality and all the rest of the things outside the reach of science. Perhaps the one outstanding evidence of the crash of mechanism has been a slightly more sympathetic attitude towards other explanations; that and a bewildering variety of answers to all the questions that matter.

Negative answers

The lazy answer — Agnosticism

Take, for instance, the question of God’s knowledge. The modern agnostic evades the problem by shrugging his shoulders and confessing a complete ignorance, a complete inability to know the answer. Such tactics may conserve his intellectual energy, but only at the price of a flat contradiction of the facts; for surely we can know the existence, and something of the nature, of a cause from its effects, we can form some idea of the knowledge of a poet from his poem, the knowledge of an engineer from his bridge. It is not too much of an effort to raise the mind from the poem to the poet, from the bridge to the engineer, from the world to God.

The timid answer — Naturalism

Certainly the naturalist is not lazy. He hustles along the road of knowledge like a boy hurrying past a cemetery at night, whistling to prove he is not afraid. But he is afraid, afraid to go beyond what his hands cannot touch. He states that science and the experimental method are the only sources of truth. In either form he is contradicting the facts that he himself must live by, every day facts like our knowledge of love, of justice, of friendship, which are slippery things to slide under a microscope.

The cowardly answer — Psychological mechanism

At least naturalism tries to put up a bold front. Mechanistic psychology has quit the fight altogether; it has given up the task of facing human life with all its possibilities of failure and defeat, with all its burden of responsibilities. It is willing to surrender all man’s claims to humanity, to bury his head in sub-human muck. Of course it will have nothing to do with the problem of God’s knowledge.

The proud answer — Idealism

The idealist is not a bluffer, neither is he a coward; he is blind. He cannot see the world, let alone raise the eyes of his mind to the cause of the world. As far as he is concerned, man can know only what is in his own mind; he can know of God only in so far as he is a part of God, or is God. He invites all men and women, not to share his blindness, but to set up havens of darkness of their own where, with no truth intruding to interrupt the game, they can play at being God, or a part of God.

All of these people agree that we can know nothing of the knowledge of God. If their particular explanations are not appealing, a man might try, without stepping outside the boundaries of a negative answer, the despair of the evolutionist’s answer — that men are the only part of the life process enjoying intelligence, our knowledge is all there is. Or he might embrace the narrow provincialism of the pragmatist, the humanitarian and the humanist — the men who have little time for God because of their consuming interest in men, or who have time enough only to agree that, whatever God knows, He certainly does not know all things.

All of these opinions might be summed up in terms of the last chapter, where we saw that the world today gives us a choice between a human and an inhuman god, whereas the facts demand a divine God. For these men the question of God’s knowledge is reduced to this: what can a human or a less than human god know? Obviously such a god cannot have divine knowledge.

Affirmative answer

The affirmative answer to the question of God’s omniscience is not, as has been alleged, a dream wish, the urging of the unconscious or the surging of a dumb life force; it is not made up of the sentimentalities of subjectivism; it is not mere poetry, though it surpasses the beauty and nobility of great poetry. It is not vague, hesitant, theoretic. Above all it is not a denial of the facts. It is objectively valid, proceeding from the solidly proved fact of the existence of a first mover, a first cause, a necessary being, a perfect being, a supreme intelligence; it is simply the admission of the implications that necessarily flow from these proved truths. To admit such implications means no more than to refuse to deny the facts themselves.

The Knowledge of God: He knows Himself

Obviously we cannot deny God knowledge of Himself without making Him less than divine. A man who knows nothing about himself needs medical attention and rest; plainly he is sick, a victim of amnesia. A man who gets himself mixed up with someone else, who imagines, for instance, that he is Napoleon or the archangel Gabriel, is evidently insane. If God is not sick or insane, He knows Himself; if, as has been shown, He is completely perfect, then He knows Himself perfectly, for ignorance of self is certainly an imperfection.

The manner of this knowledge

To put this truth more philosophically, we may point out that knowledge is the result of a union between the knower and the thing known. No matter how tempting the intellectual fare served by a teacher, the pupils remain immune to knowledge until such a time as their intellects touch this intellectual food. Knowledge cannot be poured into a student’s head; if, as the fathers of modern philosophy maintained, there is an unbridgeable chasm between the world and the intellect, then knowledge is forever impossible. We have already proved that God is supreme intelligence; for knowledge of Himself, then, all that is necessary is that He be present to His own intellect — a condition which His divine simplicity makes it impossible to avoid. He is supremely real, therefore supremely intelligible; He is supreme intelligence, therefore supremely intelligent; He is utterly simple, so that the union of intelligible and intelligence is absolute, complete.

He knows everything else: Actual and possible things.

An obvious difficulty presents itself from the fact that we do not leave our intellects at home when we go for a walk; we are certainly present to ourselves, yet we pick up the facts about ourselves like spectators. The fact is that our mere physical existence does not make us present to our intellects in the only way things can be in our intellects, that is, not physically but intelligibly, intentionally. We are potentially, not actually, intelligible to ourselves; we must judge of ourselves, as we do of other men, by the activities we see ourselves engaging in. Perhaps we could sum up both the question of knowledge and of intelligibility by pointing out that all determination is a limitation both of the degree of knowledge and of intelligibility. Because the eye is determined to no one color It can see them all; if, through the instrumentality of green glasses, we determine our eyes to one color, then we can see nothing else. If a being is absolutely determined to one form, as is a plant to its own form, then it can have no knowledge whatever; if it is indetermined in the sense of being able to receive the forms of other things through sense images, as is the animal, then it can have sense knowledge; if it is free of determination to such an extent as to be able to receive all forms as intellectual concepts, then the wide horizons of the intellectual knowledge of men and angels are opened up; while if there is no determination, no limitation, whatever, as in God, there we have supreme intelligence and supreme intelligibility. There is much more to be known about an animal than there is about a plant, for the animal is less determined, less limited; there is more to be known about man than about animals, much more to be known about angels than about men. As for God, well, in the unending act of our vision of God we shall never be finished learning what there is to be known about His absolutely unlimited reality.

The frightened penitent, after his first disastrous bout with passion, can say with real honesty, “I don’t know what made me do it; I never do such things.” Our mask of nonchalant complacency often hides real astonishment as the thought runs through our minds, “I didn’t know I had it in me.” We can and do surprise ourselves, for better or for worse. But if we picture God as gazing in astonishment at the ludicrous results of His creation we’ve entirely missed the comprehensive character of the knowledge of God; God cannot surprise Himself, He cannot be ignorant of anything about Himself without being imperfect and He cannot be imperfect without ceasing to be God.

That God should know all about Himself seems fair enough. That He should know all about everything else, particularly about ourselves, is an altogether different and decidedly disconcerting thing. Still, we make no objection to an architect’s knowledge of a house he has designed nor to a poet’s knowledge of his poem. God is the architect of the universe; He needs no instruction on the product of His creative act. He is the cause of everything of course He knows all that is.

Nor is this knowledge gathered by His peering out a window of Heaven. He needs only to look at Himself. The puzzle in this is, not that it should be so, but that we should be puzzled by its being so. The mystery of a weekend guest finding his way to the kitchen in the dark is cleared up as soon as we discover that he is the architect who designed the house. We are not at all surprised that the poet is able to explain the thought of his poem without a glance at it. Why, then, should God have to grub about the corners of the world or employ an intelligence staff to keep informed of what is going on? He knows Himself perfectly, so He knows how far His powers extend, how far they have been exercised, how far they will be exercised; all that is is His product. Everything that exists was made according to the plan of the divine architect, made to the scale laid down by the mind of God; a sinner’s rupture of diplomatic relations with divinity does not deprive God of a source of information. God sees men and women as they walk down the street, not by waiting for them to turn His corner, but as they and their every step exist in the divine mind. Nor is this an indirect or vague knowledge. Every instant of existence, every bit of reality is immediately dependent on the divine cause; moreover, every item of perfection in the universe is an imperfect mirroring of the unblemished perfection of divinity. Knowing the perfect perfectly, God knows immediately all the shades of imperfection, of limited sharing of that perfection; otherwise His very knowledge of Himself is imperfect.

This all embracing divine knowledge is the cause of all existing things, past, present and future, for they exist because of the model in the mind of the divine architect joined to the divine decree which called them from nothingness. As we have seen, in the second chapter of this book, there is no other explanation of the world about us. God’s knowledge of existing things, then, is not had by reasoning closely from a principle to a conclusion. He does not forecast them as an astronomer foretells an eclipse of the moon; God is eternal, the divine model is eternal, the divine decree is eternal and this eternity encompasses time like a cloak thrown about it. In one glance at His divine self, everything is naked and open to the eyes of God.

Evil

To say that God knows all possible things, things that could have been but will not be, is only to insist on God’s knowledge of the extent of His power, His comprehensive knowledge of His own perfection; for unless He knows in how many ways His perfections can be shared, imitated. mirrored by creation, He does not fully know Himself. There is absolutely nothing that can escape the mind of God. The thoughts of men and angels run the length of an endless road with a speed beyond measure; but the road is not long enough, nor the speed great enough to outdistance the divine mind upon which every thought, like every other reality, depends intimately, ceaselessly, ultimately. Evil is a gaping hole in reality; unless that hole be known, reality itself is not perfectly known. Obviously we do not know a man’s face if we do not know the hole in the middle of it, we do not know a fence unless we are also cognizant of the boards missing from it here and there. Evil is a defect, a privation of good; God’s perfect knowledge of good necessarily includes a knowledge of the way in which good can be or is defective.

Future conditioned things

Even the knowledge of those future conditioned things that might happen but do not is at the fingertips of God. The debutante of five years ago has had her mind made up for years to devote herself to marriage, if someone asked her; as the years go on, with the condition still unfulfilled, hope does not die in God’s heart. He has not been on tenterhooks all this time; the very condition which hides in the halls of the future depends upon the first cause of all that is or can be, not only upon its own proximate causes.

The unvarying character of this knowledge

If God is completely above all change, as He certainly is, then He does not forget things, His knowledge does not ebb and flow, He does not acquire new knowledge by keeping His eyes open, through long periods of concentration, or by eavesdropping. In a sense there are many ideas in the mind of God, in the sense, that is, that God knows many, indeed, all things; but He knows these things through His own divinely simple essence, not through a multitude of concepts. More accurately, He is His intelligence. His knowledge; and He is the immutable first.

We can sum up all this doctrine on the knowledge of God in the one profound statement: God is truth. For truth is in an intellect when that intellect knows a thing as it really is; truth is in a thing, when it measures up to the intellect which caused it; God’s essence not only measures up to His intellect, it is His intellect; God’s intellect not only knows His essence, it is His essence. This is the immutable first truth, the foundation of all other truths. Every other truth participates in this first truth or ceases to be truth: the world of reality as it measures up to the divine exemplar; created minds when, measuring up to the world of reality, they get a glimpse of the divine exemplar. When we touch upon truth we are in the shadow of divinity; when we embrace it, we are ennobled by the contact to a degree easily recognizable by all men. In the world of reason, love of truth produces the philosopher; in the world of affairs it produces the gentleman; in the world of grace it produces the saint. The respect given these men is the spontaneous tribute given to divine messengers. Humanity doffs its cap or makes its curtsey and goes its way with renewed hope; God is truth.

Some sources of modern difficulties

Thus far, in exploring the divine knowledge, we have used only the compasses and guide books of philosophy. All that has been said is an inevitable implication of the proof for the existence of God. The mind of man can go thus far unaided, though there is authority at hand to help those who are prevented by circumstance from following the philosophical argument. Yet the contrast between the modern philosophical limitation or denial of divine knowledge and the all including sweep of divine knowledge we have portrayed is so great as to be a little ludicrous. Even more striking is the determined, and patent, resistance against the acceptance of a really divine knowledge in God. If reason can come to grasp the fact of this divine knowledge, why does the reason of so many highly trained men make such a desperate fight against this truth of reason?

The thing is puzzling. Certainly we cannot uncover reasons to justify this modern stand, for there are no valid arguments to justify an attack on truth. We may, however, be able to understand it to some extent by seeing something of the very human weaknesses that creep in to color the thoughts of men. There are a great number of these, perhaps for the most part not fully realized. Thus, for example, an understandable conceit or intellectual pride may move a man to blind boasting about the human mind, as when he insists that the mind of man, as the peak of evolution, is the measuring stick of all knowledge, thc supreme rule which simply cannot admit a superior; on the other hand, the same pride may be at the root of a pathetic eagerness to deny all intellectuality, all validity of the intellectual efforts of man. In this last case, the evident weakness of our best efforts has so discouraged the modern thinker that he indulges in the petty gesture of despair that strives to chain man down to the world of animals; at least here he can be the biggest frog in the pond. Surely some of this resistance to truth can be traced to a timid snobbery evident in the mob fear of obstructing the wheels of progress, of not paying the full meed of worship to the scientific method, of being old-fashioned. Certainly fear plays its part. We like to have a few dark corners in which to stow away the unpleasant litter of life; human life, without a basement or an attic where things can be hidden away and forgotten, is a fearful thing. To have to stand up, in the clear light of our own knowledge and the much clearer light of another’s perfect knowledge, and face the responsibilities of all our actions every minute of every day, admit they clang out in the halls of eternity for all time — this is a bit too much to demand of human courage.

Perhaps the most seductive element in this resistance is the apparent comfort, the alluring softness of the doctrines of psychological mechanism, evolution and positivism; they assure us that we are as free as a bird, which is to say that we are not free at all. We are offered escape from responsibility at the cost of our humanity. The subjective sentimentalities of the various forms of humanism are the deceptive resemblances of a decadent nobility; their superficial interest in man has the appearance of nobility, but without nobility’s mind and heart. For communal groupings of men and their aspirations which leave the individual out of consideration, losing him in a fog or crushing him in a crowd, have no solid claim to the respect of men; the individual must not, cannot, be lost, not even a hair of his head is unimportant enough not to be numbered. To attack the truth of God in the name of man on this basis may be sentimentally attractive in some strange way; but the attraction is a soft, decadent, effeminate thing, repulsive to the touch.

Man’s knowledge of God: The effects of God

God knows us inside and out because He made us. What do we know of God? In attacking this question, we can safely put aside the modern aberrations of a man-made, a human or an inhuman god and honestly face the facts; after all, these things have been sufficiently refuted in the second chapter of this book. In the light of the facts and the proofs already offered, it must be clear that we can know God from the world as we know an author from his book, as we know any cause from its effects. This is the sole knowledge we have been using thus far in our discussion on the nature and attributes of God. We have seen that it necessarily involves the removal of the limitation or imperfection of the creature from our concept of the perfections of God; it means the tracing of every perfection in the universe to God, but understanding these perfections to be analogically in God, in an eminent fashion, somewhat as the beauty of a poem is in a poet. This is rock bottom knowledge. It is absolutely dependable; it starts from the most indisputable of facts and goes no farther than those facts allow, or rather than those facts insist upon.

Revelation

From what this solidly certain knowledge has told us of God, it is immediately evident that God can tell us things about Himself. We have seen Him as supremely intelligent, knowing Himself perfectly, the first truth. Obviously then, He cannot deceive Himself. Clearly God cannot be guilty of silly boasting or a downright lie; He is truth itself. He can tell us things about Himself; and those things will always be true. This is the knowledge of God which comes to us by way of revelation.

Direct vision of God

There is yet another possibility. Can man know God, not indirectly through his effects, not darkly through faith in revelation, but clearly, openly, directly, face to face, through the immediate union of his intellect to the divine essence? The very question itself is a refutation of the idea that God is a fictional sop given in kindly pity to the little weak ones unable to munch the solid food of truth; it is not the weak, the defeated, the cowardly who advance boldly to peer at divinity itself, it is the violent who storm the kingdom of heaven for a direct vision of the beauty of God.

Possibility of this vision

Quite frankly, this idea of seeing God face to face is so high and bold that it probably would never have occurred to the mind of a man left to himself. The solid basis of the affirmative answer to the question is not the facts of the sensible world, not the firm steps of intellectual proof, but simply and solely the authority of God, the word of Him Who can neither deceive nor be deceived. (1) The supernatural is not to be reached by the instrumentality of any created thing; it is utterly, wholly above nature, the proper field of God.

From our side, once the possibility has been revealed to us, we can readily see how beautifully the vision harmonizes, perfects, completes our nature. For here is the ultimate quenching of our thirst to get at the cause of things, here the ultimate answer to our perpetual “why,” here is the ultimate peace for that intellectual restlessness that refuses to be satisfied with anything the world of nature has to offer. Here is a fulfillment of our potentialities for all truth, a fulfillment so great that its abundance can be accommodated only by the gift of still greater potentialities within us. In this vision is the goal of our searching, the home for our wandering feet, the quiet for our clamoring heart; only God can offer us these things, and only by this vision can we directly, immediately come home to God.

Coming down to particulars and attempting to be objective about the question, we take John Jones as the average man. How is he going to see God? He has a fine, sharp pair of eyes, but they will be of no help to him; God is not a body and so not to be seen with bodily eyes. John Jones has a good enough mind when he can whip up the energy to use it; but again, this is not sufficient. How can God be seen through any image or concept? What finite concept can show us the infinite God as He is in Himself? Before this infinite essence all the natural powers of our intellect are as helpless as the eyes of an owl in the midday sun; this light is too bright to be seen in its undiminished brilliance by the eyes of our minds. What is known is in the mind of the knower in the way that is peculiarly proper to him. So a man can know sand and sugar; in a sense these are in his mind, not scratching or scarring it but ennobled by it, lifted up to its immaterial, universal level. In the same way a man must know all other things; what is beneath him must be lifted up to his level, what is above him must be dragged down to his level and taken apart that it might be carried through the narrow door of a human mind. God, brought down to the level of the human mind, is not God seen as He is in himself. For this, the human mind must be lifted to a higher level as a child is hoisted up to see over a crowd; our mind must be lifted up to the heights of divinity and by the strength of One Who is divine. That supernatural help given to the mind of man in order that it might see God is called by theologians “the light of glory.”

Object of this vision: The divine essence and all formally contained in it.

Perched thus on the shoulder of God, head and shoulders over the world, we look at a sight that opens our eyes wide with awe — and which will keep them so for all of eternity. By this vision we see the unveiled beauty of God; not just a shining part of it, not an unending succession of its splendors, but all of it at once. It can be no other way, for God is simple; you must see all of Him or see Him not at all. The magnificence of that beauty is eternity’s secret; the eye has not seen, nor has the ear heard, nor has it entered the mind of man to conceive it. Some faint shadow of it is thrown across our lives, however, in the glimpses we get into the gallantry of courage, the splendor of love, the sincerity of sacrifice. In the knowledge of what these faint, distorted images of divinity can do to our heart we have a foretaste of the rapture of the blessed in heaven. There it will not be the image but the original; we shall see all of it, though our finite minds, even with divine help, will never be able to exhaust, to comprehend the infinitude of that divine perfection.

The perfections of creatures

As a matter of fact, we shall see a great deal we missed on earth for in heaven our insight into the perfections of creatures will not be limited to territory of a few squares in a city, of a few miles in a country or of a few years of life. God has in Himself all the perfections of creatures: the full story of the thoughts, hopes, and struggles of those closest to our heart, a detailed account of the complicated laws of the universe. All these we shall see: not exhaustively, for that would be to comprehend the plans of God; not equally, but in proportion to the degree of that supernatural help which is the light of glory; not by images or concepts, but as God sees them, in His very essence. And we shall see them, not bit by bit, day by day, year by year, but all at once. This, however, is the work of heaven and the proper material of the second and fourth volumes of this work.

The achievement of this vision

Earlier in this chapter it was said that the contrast between the affirmative and negative answers to the question of God’s knowledge was so great as to be ludicrous. When we turn to the implications of these two answers for the living of human life, the contrast is utterly tragic, so tragic, indeed, that the choice made by the modern thinker numbs the mind with its horror. Only a kind of madness could lead men into even a moment’s hesitation between the two answers.

Freedom and slavery

The one answer sets a man free; the other enslaves him. In the divine knowledge, as we have portrayed it, we have an invitation to enjoy the utmost limits of our possibilities. We are not only privileged to wander up and down the highways of the universe finding knowledge where we can, our mind is given wings to soar to heights undreamed of by any mind in nature. The modern philosopher limits our possibilities of knowledge to the sense level of a high grade animal; he not only puts the mind in the limited area of nature’s jail, forbidding its flight to the heights of divinity, he builds a partition across the cell, further narrowing the space. There we can pace back and forth until we have driven ourselves insane.

Inspiration and despair

The one answer to the question of divine knowledge is an inspiration; the other is a condemnation to despair. The one throws open the gates of all desire, putting no limits to what we can desire because it puts no limits to what we can know. It offers us the completion of our human nature, its fulfillment; it assigns reasons for individual dignity, for individual self-respect, for a personal goal and so for a life with a distinctive personal meaning. The other offers us the opposite of all these things. We are counselled to lose ourselves in a mass, a process, a group; to strive for an impersonal goal, to live a meaningless life of bitter, hopeless striving to inevitable defeat and oblivion.

Humility and conceit

The one answer confers on us the nobility of humility’s truth; the other wraps us about with the pettiness of conceit. The one demands a recognition of our responsibilities, our privileges, our possibilities, our realities; yes, and of our failures, our defeats, our dangers, the battle we must face. But it also sees the possibility of success and of a victory well worth all the danger, the struggle, all the intermediate failures. The other invites us to eat our meals by candle light in order to create the theatrical air of romance, to destroy the mirrors about the house that we might the better hug the illusion of our peerless beauty, to close our eyes that we might contemplate only the illusion of our beauty and might the better deny perfection to everything else.

Courage and fear

The one is a courageous answer. Only a brave man can face his life knowing how open every detail of it is to the eyes of God. Only a very brave man, with a full knowledge of his own defects, could aim at a direct vision of God. Bravery is not without its compensations, particularly in this matter. For the brave answer does give a meaning to things, does bring the assurance that an intelligence is directing the world and all in it. This brave man knows what it is all about, where he is going, and why and how. The other answer is so timid an answer as to be despairing. The man who has made this answer his own faces the terror of the unknown, a terror increased by the conviction that this unknown is unknowable, or even is devoid of all meaning. The world he faces has all the terror of darkness where light would reveal worse horror, the terror of blind, resistless force, of being hopelessly at the mercy of the unfeeling sweep of the elements or of a god gone mad.

The vision of God and life

There is much truth in the statement that man cannot see God and live. Surely he cannot know God and merely plod through the bare routine of existence; he cannot know God and not have his heart moved to high things by the vision of the horizons of hope, of courage, of golden goals such knowledge opens up to him. He cannot know God and miss the greatness of man. It is even more profoundly true that man cannot live without seeing God, for he cannot see man in the vague twilight of a godless world, he cannot see a goal towards which life can advance, he cannot see an instrument of action that will not crumble in his hands. Perhaps the greatest horror of this murky world is not what cannot be seen, but what can be seen, for it is a world divorced from the first truth and so devoid of all truth.

———-
Notes:

Sacred Scripture gives explicit testimony to this direct vision: I John, ch. 3, v. 2: “We shall see him as he is.” Matt. ch. 5, v. 8: “Blessed are the clean of heart for they shall see God.” Cf. Matt. ch. 18, v. 10; I Cor. ch. 13, v. 12.
The definitions of the Church are no less explicit: thus the Constitution Benedictus Deus of Benedict XII (Denzinger, Enchiridion Symbolorum, #530): “. . . they (the dead) see the divine essence by an intuitive vision, face to face, without the medium of any other creature; but the divine essence shows itself immediately to them, nakedly, clearly, openly….” Cf. Council of Florence (Ibid., #693). 

CHAPTER V — THE WILL OF GOD
(Q. 19-21)

1. The mainspring of action:

    (at The nature of appetite.

    (b) The boundaries of desire.

2. Two views of the appetite of God:

    (a) A denial.

    (b) A distortion.

    (c) Sources of these views:

               (1) A perversion of knowledge.

               (2) A double difficulty:

             a. The difficulty of human freedom.

             b. The difficulty of evil and suffering.

3. The existence of the will of God:

    (a) The proof.

    (b) Supremacy of this divine will.

4. The nature of the will of God:

    (a) Its objects:

               (1) Necessary object.

               (2) Free objects.

    (b) Its characteristics:

               (1) Cause of all things.

               (2) Infallible.

               (3) Invariable.

5. The difficulty of human freedom:

    (a) Preliminary notions to the solution of the difficulty:

    (b) Precision of the question and of Possible results.

    (c) Solution:

        (1) Definition of freedom.

        (2) Proof that the divine will is the cause of freedom:

             a. Indirect proof.

             b. Direct proof.

6. The love of God.

7. The justice and mercy of God.

Conclusion:

1. The erroneous views of the will of God:

    (a) Their significance for men.

    (b) Their common bond.

2. Significance of the truth of the will of God:

    (a) For freedom.

    (b) For love.

    (c) For justice.

    (d) For mercy.

CHAPTER V: The Will of God

(Q. 19-21)

The mainspring of action

In a practical world, such as ours, everyone knows that it is not the dreamers who make dreams come true. Activity is necessary for achievement; it is absolutely essential for life. The bird that is too timid to risk the first flight from the nest will die from its very devotion to security, the tree that is too sickly to sink its roots deep enough to find moisture will wither away from its very conservation of energy. We have learned well the lesson that the price of life is activity, so well, in fact, that we are tempted to quit life’s school as soon as we have passed this kindergarten test. Many men and women of our age have framed their kindergarten diploma and proudly opened up an office for the living of life; the shingle they displayed to the world proclaimed them to be doers, apostles of activity, zealots devoted to progress, to more and bigger and busier days.

The nature of appetite

Their restless content might have been undisturbed were it not for the frequency of that pungent modern question: “so what?” A man might twiddle his thumbs just {or the sake of doing something; but he will certainly not go hungry just for the sake of doing something, he will not wear down the hours with his labors, or face a sneering mob from the height of a cross. Life’s mysteries are not solved by stifling the dreamer and shattering his dreams. Process, change, progress, activity are not bugle calls rousing men from inertia; they are man’s answer to the fundamental challenge of the desirable thing. There is something deeper than activity which is activity’s cause; there is something beyond activity which is its goal. There is, deep in the heart of a man, a spring which can be released only by the ethereal touch of a dream; resultant activity, begun by the touch of a dream, rushes to the materialization of that dream and beyond, to its enjoyment, unless the dream was not worth the dreaming.

In other words, activity is not limited to process, change or striving; it goes beyond to the possession of the desirable thing that was at its root. Man does not run for the sake of getting out of breath, he does not live for the sake of consuming life, the days of his search are not filled with a dread of the search being successful. In all this he is at one with the world in which he lives. There is in everything a tendency or inclination towards that desirable thing which is self-perfection and what pertains to that perfection, to its achievement and its enjoyment.

The boundaries of desire

The general term for this inclination is appetite and it responds to the smack of desirability as the intellect responds to truth. In the animals it is sense appetite; in intelligent beings it is will. By a kind of courtesy, easy to those in superior positions but uncommon, we extend the term to the whole of inanimate and plant creation and there call it natural appetite. It is to be well understood that this is merely courtesy, for appetite always follows the lead of knowledge and never outdistances its guide; these things have no knowledge of their own and so, strictly speaking, no appetite. They do, however, have a determination to a single course of activity. A plant, pushing its roots deeper in dry weather, is following the knowledge of God impressed on its very nature; but without knowledge of the thing it seeks and with the invariability of inviolable physical law. A dog sniffing for his buried bone has at least the flashlight of sense knowledge lighting up little patches of the path his appetite runs along; while a man, seeking social position, happiness, love or truth walks in the broad daylight of intellectual knowledge that makes plain the beginning, the end and the space between.

Two views of the appetite of God A denial — A distortion

It would seem hard to deny activity in the world in which we live, though it has been done; granted activity, it would seem impossible to deny the desire necessarily behind that activity and the organ of desire which is called appetite. With activity and appetite present in the world, inevitably men’s minds turned to the question of activity and appetite in God; in fact, it has been as impossible for men to keep their minds off the question of the will of God as to avoid the question of the existence of God. The answers, affirmative or negative, have repercussions for human life so momentous as to make any attempted detour around them a palpable child’s game of pretense. This thing must be settled, for on its solution depends the whole complexion of the life of man.

Sources of these views

The variety of answers offered by the ages of human thought is overpowering. But then, that is not surprising: one absolutely certain result of an open forum on any question put to men is this same dazzling variety. In this matter the various erroneous answers can be roughly reduced to two: the completely negative answer and the answer which distorts divinity by ascribing to God an appetite other than a divine one. Both these answers are rightly based on the truth that appetite is blind, deaf and dumb, unable to take a step in any direction until knowledge takes it by the hand. If, as the first sort maintain, there was neither intellect nor knowledge until our own human variety mysteriously appeared, or if even now there is no such thing as the spiritual faculty of intellect with its shafts of knowledge piercing the armor of time and sense, then obviously there can be no intellectual appetite, no will in God. Love, desire and love’s faculty of will are ruled out of the universe, above all they are ruled out of the Maker of the universe: the world and men are delivered over to a mysterious but plainly blind force which cannot be brought before the bar of reason. If, as the others say, on the other hand, God is a man-made product with an intellect cut down to human measure, obviously the will of God can wear any human cast-offs but looks ridiculous in the flowing robes of divinity.

The moderns, who make the human will and human love the source of the divine, offer men a synthetic product that was meant to be flattering but which, in fact, is as disillusioning as a candid camera shot or an impromptu voice recording. From their synthetic divine will it is obvious that some of these champions of men lose themselves in sentimentalities unworthy of even human love; they shudder at pain and evil, dream of life in terms of sweetness, soft music, gentle sighs and insist upon a god who exudes the milder emotions Others, with a frank touch of autobiography, grant God only a feeble, struggling, often failing will and love for men; with such a god they can be quite friendly, or they can even feel sorry for him. The very numerous champions of masses of men at the cost of the individuals necessarily limit the object of all will and all love to a crowd; will is a prerogative, not of men, not of individuals, not of persons but of communities. If God is to have a will, then He must, some way or another, be a crowd, a mass, a community.

A perversion of knowledge

Both the denials and the distortions have their explanations if not their excuses. There is, on the intellectual side, the same perversion of scientific findings to support unscientific conclusions, conclusions completely outside the field of science, that is to be found in the modern treatment of God’s existence and His knowledge; the same conceit which refuses to bend the intellect of man to any superior also refuses to admit any will higher than the will of man. Behind that conceit is the mistaken notion that such an admission degrades man, reduces him to the level of a slave or a puppet.

Double difficulty: human freedom, evil and suffering

On the moral side, the explanations of these modern errors have a dangerously enticing appeal. The existence of a divine will involves, on our part, a subjection which glories in truth, a loyalty that is achieved only by sacrifice, and a love which is contemptuous of caution; such things are easily shirked by an age whose theme is self and whose password is safety first. Then, too, the existence of a divine will seems to set up an irreconcilable conflict with human freedom. If this divine will is supreme, how can our human will wander where it chooses, how can we resist the divine, how are we masters of ourselves? This is a difficulty of the first order and we shall treat it at some length in this present chapter. Another difficulty, of proportions nearly as serious, is that of evil and suffering. If an infinitely good and powerful God has a supreme will, why do evil and suffering exist at all A human governor tries his utmost to overcome these things and fails because his will is limited, his power is finite; where there is no limit, no weakness, there should be no evil and no suffering. This difficulty will be met at length in the next chapter of this book. Here let it be frankly admitted that both these difficulties are decidedly real and that they have played, and still do play, a part in man’s reluctance to admit a truly divine will in God.

Existence of the will of God: The proof

Yet, in the name of common sense and evident facts, a divine will cannot be denied to God. Will, or intellectual appetite, is the mainspring, the motive or driving force in intelligent beings; in the second chapter of this book we have proved that God is intelligent, a proof that proceeded from the fact of His divine action. It is true that there can be a driving force without intrinsic knowledge; we do not insist that a hurricane plan the last detail of its destructive sally, though, as we have seen and shall see at greater length, even that last detail is marked down on the blueprints of a supreme intelligence. But it is impossible to have intelligence without will, as impossible as having being without a goal for its existence. If intellect could be conceived of without will, it would be aloof, cold, futile, sterile, barren; where, in fact, great intelligence is found complemented by a puny will we find that personification of futility, the timid soul. Briefly, whatever is has a goal of its being and an appetite which reaches out to attain or enjoy that goal; the facts of the world demand the existence of God.

Supremacy of the divine will

In view of what we have seen demanded by the facts of the nature of God and His attributes — the absence of all potentiality, all limitation, the infinitude of His perfection — it is obvious that we cannot treat the divine will as a distant and abjectly poor relation. The very notion of God is destroyed as soon as dependence is introduced into it; to attribute anything but complete supremacy, complete perfection to the divine will is to contradict the evidence of the facts adduced above in the second chapter, it is to make God not the first, not the source of all else, not the absolutely Perfect being that the world of things tells us He is. To put the fact of the divine will with complete accuracy, we must say, not that God has a will, but rather that He is His will as He is His intelligence; for the notion of “having” is inseparable from the notion of potentiality, of a received perfection, of dependence.

The nature of the will of God Its objects: Necessary object

It is no reflection on the supremacy of the divine will to insist that it is not free in all its willing, just as it is no reflection on the human will to recognize the fact that a man necessarily, not freely, wills his perfection, his happiness. Rather, in man this necessary embrace by his will of its adequate object is the source of all his activity, the explanation of all his striving; that unappeasable hunger which he cannot deny gives all of his actions a nobility borrowed from the goal which the will cannot refuse to desire. In God, too, the divine will cannot refuse the one object adequate to its infinite perfection; God cannot refuse to will His own supreme goodness. Nor is this laying down the law to God; it is merely insisting that in God, the supreme Truth, there is no room for the absurdity of a contradiction. God cannot be guilty of the stupidity of thinking that there is some rival to infinite goodness, something more desirable than the supremely desirable. The supreme Intelligence cannot act against intelligence as He would have to in order to refuse to will His own goodness. Again the human parallel may help to make this clear: even in our grossest desires, we cannot tend to evil as such, though here we do make a serious mistake as to the desirable thing; we always, without exception, act in the name of the good, of the perfect, of happiness.

Free objects

In the human order, the necessary acts of the will, dealing with the goal and its essential means, make up the bare house of our activity; the rugs, furniture, pictures and the multitude of delightfully unnecessary but warmly personal objects that make a home of the house are the free acts that so crowd our every day. There is, thank God, in the very nature of appetite the inclination, not only to possess the desirable, but to give it away; not only to have the goal but to share it. When that inclination is frustrated the activity of man begins to have the bitter taste of the sweat of a slave: when, for instance, purely mechanical instruments make it impossible to put the stamp of his intelligence on his work or to sign it with the flourish of his utterly distinctive personality; or when the perverted outlook of an age makes it vulgar of him to share the splendor of his human life with his children.

Its characteristics

In God the field of these warmly personal free acts is unlimited. God is His perfection. He is His end; there is no divine striving for perfection unattained. All else other than His divine goodness is freely willed, though, of course, it is willed in reference, not contradiction, to that divine goodness. Our conviction of this divine freedom finds daily expression. It would be silly to pour our prayers over the concrete foundations of a machine; a crisis drives us to our knees, but not because God is helpless to do anything for us; our gasp for help or smile of thanks is not directed to a being who is tied hand and foot. We are convinced that God can help us.

Cause of all things

Of course this help of God is not something that has about it the embarrassed surprise of a yawn or the irritating suddenness of a stumble; in this, as in all His actions, God acts as an intelligent being. For ourselves, we have no trouble distinguishing between a thoughtless word and the malicious dig; the first slipped out on us, the second was a deliberate product of our intellect and our will. The first was stupid, the second, maliciously intelligent. For it is only insofar as our acts do flow from deliberate will, the will guided by intelligence, that we give them the name of intelligent acts. In God, then, the cause of all His effects, which is to say the cause of everything, is His will acting in conjunction with his intellect; for God does not operate by necessary determination or at the urge of a blind force but as the supremely intelligent first agent.

Infallible

The very fact of the necessary priority of divine action, and so of the intellect and will as sources of divine action, makes plain the complete infallibility of the will of God. Where absolutely everything depends on God in its causality, where will be found a cause that can hinder the divine action? What is there that escapes the divine support, the first mover, the first cause? What is there that is outside the order of the divine plan? This divine will must be universally efficacious or it cannot be divine, and its divinity cannot be denied without open contradiction to the facts of the world which proclaim the existence of divinity.

Invariable

The will of God is universally efficacious; it is not only infallible, it is invariable, not hesitating, retreating and plunging ahead, but immutable. For, as we have seen, there can be no change in God. The idea that God paces the floor trying to make up His mind is as absurd as the notion that He has His ear cocked to the latest news flash from the radio or spends eternity tearing open cablegrams on the state of the world. How, then, can we seriously entertain hope in our prayers? God is omniscient; His will is supreme, eternal, unchanging. What is the use of praying?

The difficulty of human freedom: Preliminary notions

The objection has a history almost as old as the life of man; and, no doubt, a future that will stretch to time’s last instant. Its full answer will be found in the third volume of this work where the subject of prayer is treated at some length. Here we can do no more than indicate two diverse angles of that answer. The objection argues that God wills all things and His will is supremely efficacious; there is, then, no reason for our praying. We cannot change the will of God; if He wills this or that particular thing, we shall get it whether we pray or not. On the same grounds we might argue for the amputation of all human arms. We have been foolishly spending money for generations to cover those arms with sleeves, whereas the arms are totally unnecessary; why lift a cup of tea to your face if God wills you to have it? No doubt it will jump up and splash all over you. But do not sit there too long waiting for God to pour the tea down your throat. The fundamental reason why we pray is the same as the reason for our taking a personal part in the solution of the transportation problem involved in eating, namely, that God has given us a part in the great dignity of causality. God is the first cause but His causality does not destroy all other causality; rather it produces and guarantees the effectiveness of secondary causes, we are secondary causes, not only in the physical order, but also in the moral order; the bending of our elbow fulfils a condition, of our nourishment in the physical order and prayer fulfils a condition of achievement in the moral order. The precise causality of prayer is not unlike the causality of a fertilizer scattered over a field, keeping the moral and physical orders distinct; the fertilizer does not produce the grain but it does play its part, prayer does not produce the effect desired but it, too, plays its part, a dispositively efficient part in the government of the world of men.

The other point to be noticed here about prayer is the odd fixity with which we concentrate our attention on only one, and usually a lesser, result of prayer. No doubt it is our predilection for the gaudy attractiveness of the immediate and sensible that explains our lack of appreciation for the merit that is the constant fruit of prayer and that makes us take lightly the peace and strength that come from lifting the mind and heart to communion with the infinite. But all this is gone into at greater length in the third volume. A major point that must be made here is that the infallibility, the supreme efficacy and absolute changelessness of the will of God do not conflict with our freedom; they cause that freedom.

Preliminary notions to the solution

Before plunging into the discussion of the difficulty of human freedom in the face of the universal efficacy of the divine will, it is well to understand what is at stake in this discussion; it is above all necessary to understand what is not at stake. The whole discussion takes its rise from the juxtaposition of two truths. The important thing to remember here is that they are both truths; the validity of neither is under question; the effort of the discussion is not aimed at establishing either one or the other of these truths. Beyond and above the present discussion, altogether apart from it in their validity, stand the truths of the freedom of man and the supremacy of the will of God. Both of them can be proved beyond all doubt by human reason; both of them are vouched for by divine authority. Whatever the intricacies of the discussion, these two truths must not be lost sight of; they are the beacons that flash out the guiding light which alone can preserve the discussion from serious errors; they are not the rocks upon which the human mind may be shipwrecked, above all they are not the ships threatened by the tempest of the discussion.

Considerable space has already been consumed in this chapter in showing, from human reason alone, the infallible supremacy of the will of God; there is no need to repeat that argumentation here. The truth of human freedom is clear from the shouted acclaim of common sense which recognizes it in every human action. That itself should be proof enough. If more proof be demanded, that proof is readily supplied. The fact of man’s possession of intelligence is quickly seen From the most casual scrutiny of any man’s acts: there you will find a knowledge of such intangible, timeless things as relationships, of means to end, of part to whole and so on; such spiritual things as justice and love; such universal things as being, or even of divinity itself. A knowledge that escapes the limits of matter, time, sense is not the product of a sensible faculty of knowing but of a spiritual faculty of intellect. As knowledge measures and limits appetite, such timeless, immaterial, spiritual knowledge as a man possesses sets free his appetite from the appeal of the material, the particular, the sensible. It holds out to the will of man the universal good and, by that fact, enlightens man’s will to the defect of limitation in every other desirable thing.

Precision of the question

The precise question involved in the difficulty we are discussing here is not: “Can man be free if God’s will is supremely infallible; can God’s will be supreme if men are free?” Rather it is: “How are men free since God’s will is supreme and infallible; how is God’s will supreme and infallible since men are free?” The question, you see, is not one of the fact of these truths but of the fact of their harmony and the manner of this fact; whatever the answer, the fact of freedom in the human and supremacy in the divine will remain untouched.

One of the chief difficulties in the solution of this question is not unlike the chief difficulty moderns find in marriage. To the man or woman who expects marriage to produce an unceasing honeymoon, marriage is a complete failure; really the failure is on the part of the human agents, for marriage by its very nature was not meant to produce an unending honeymoon but to produce children who would live forever. To the man who approaches this discussion expecting the supremacy of God’s will and man’s freedom to be established or rejected, the whole discussion will be useless; it is not intended to establish or reject these truths but to show they are not in conflict.

In fact, even if the precise point at issue is adhered to and we were to come up with a completely satisfactory answer harmonizing the two truths, we would have every right to be as astonished as a boy who opened his fist to find the whole of the universe rolling about in the palm of his hand. For a completely satisfactory answer in this matter involves a comprehension of the infinite; it demands no less than that we fully understand the divine action. That a human mind can comprehend the limitless divinity is a contradiction much more absurd than that a boy can hold the universe in his hand. What we can expect, and attain, in this discussion is just this: the manifestation of the fact that these truths do not contradict each other, that their mutual truth is not against reason, that the difficulties offered against them can be answered. One last word of caution. The explanation which will be offered here is a theological one, and so a solution offered by human minds. It is reason doing its best with a difficulty; but its results are not to be compared to the validity of the two truths of the freedom of man and the supremacy of the divine will.

Solution: Definition of freedom

To come to the point of this discussion, we may describe the freedom in question as the choice, devoid of necessity, of the means to an end. If there are a hundred theatres in town, I am free to choose to go to any one of them; if there is only one, I am still free in the matter of theatre-going for I can choose either to go or stay at home. This free choice, therefore, is a change, a motion from the capacity to choose to actual choice, from indetermination to determination. Obviously the capacity remains under its determination, that is, I can leave the theatre any time I like; but I cannot be determined to a choice and free to choose at the same time, I cannot leave the theatre and stay there at the same time. All attempts to explain this fact of human freedom on grounds other than divine action destroy that freedom and establish fatalism.

Proof that the divine will is the cause of freedom Indirect Proof

Take, for instance, the possibility of this determination to a choice coming from the inside, the possibility of the will moving itself to the choice with no other agent having any part in the affair. If the will moves itself from the capacity to choose to the actual choosing, three possibilities, all fatalistic, are left open. 1) The will is at the same time undetermined (as freedom demands) and determined (as choice requires); that is, the will is at the same time potentially choosing and actually choosing. This is the same contradiction as that involved in identifying the marble block with the statue it can become, or the medical student with the doctor he can become. All that this possibility asks of us is that we agree that determination comes from indetermination, that nothing, of itself, produces something. 2) or the will is always determined, man is moved by some necessary instinct; and so all possibility of freedom is ruled out. 3) Or the will is never determined and so all possibility of action is ruled out. Take your choice; you may have any one of the three, but you cannot have freedom too.

If, on the other hand, we decide to try the possibility of the will being moved by some outside agency other than God, what have we? The will is moved or changed from mere capacity to choose to actual choice by some external object or set of circumstances; then, obviously, in the face of this object or of these circumstances, it must necessarily move. It is bound by the merciless chains of the external world, determined to this object or these circumstances; so it cannot be free.

Since the will cannot move entirely of itself or be moved by any thing outside itself short of God and remain free, yet it does move and is free, it must be moved to its choice by God. There is nothing else left to explain the facts.

Direct Proof

That proof is, however, indirect; and indirect proofs are as unsatisfying, though adequate, to the human mind as an indirect compliment is to human pride. The direct proof has nothing unsatisfying about it. God is the first cause; every movement, every reality depends upon Him. Take such an unassuming reality as a cough. We have not told the whole story, by a long shot, when we say that the cough depends on God. The cough might have been coldly deliberate, completely free; a cough, for instance, that substitutes for a sneer, that bridges the gap between thoughts, that throws down a smoke screen for embarrassment or waves a flag of warning. Again it might have been completely outside our control, a necessary thing, like the whoop we have been trying to choke down at least until the dramatic point of the sermon was passed. In each case, there was a cough; but in the one there was freedom, real freedom, in the other there was necessity, real necessity. Not only the cough but its freedom or its necessity must come from the first cause, from God, for this freedom and this necessity are also realities. In other words, not only the act but its mode, its freedom or its necessity, depends on God. The real modes of freedom or necessity, like all other realities, do not spring from nothingness. The causality of God, the first Cause, extends not merely to the act we perform, but to the mode of that act, its freedom or its necessity. Unless that freedom be caused by God, it cannot exist.

The universal efficacy of the divine will is not an obstacle to nor a destruction of human liberty, it is that liberty’s sole explanation; just as it is the sole explanation of the necessity of a sunrise, the contingency of a laugh, so is it the sole explanation of the freedom of a prayer. To put the whole thing briefly, we may say that God is the cause of all existing natures and He is also the cause of all the acts of those natures. He, the First Mover, moves things according to the natures He has given them; it is man’s nature, because he is rational, to move freely. How can God move man freely? Well, certainly nothing else can and the fact is there, testified to by our reason and God’s own word. This is the solid fact of the harmony of these truths, As for the manner of the fact — how it can be done — to know that is to understand the divinity, to comprehend the infinitude of divine action. There precisely lies the mystery of the manner of the reconciliation of these two truths, a mystery that will forever be beyond the powers of the mind of man.

The love of God

Perhaps the best approach to the act of God’s will which is love can be made through the love with which we are so intimately familiar, our own human love. Let it be said here, that the present brevity of treatment is by no means to be taken as an underestimation of human love; as a confirmation of this claim, let me point to the exhaustive examination of love in the second and third volumes of this work. For the present, it will suffice to point out the double love which runs through the life of a man: one, a movement of the sensitive appetite, is common to all the animals; the other, the movement of the will, is proper to intelligent beings. Evidence of the first is to be found in the movement of a man’s appetite to food. In this sense love is the first of the passions and the foundation of all others; its characteristic note is one of assimilation, of absorption, of taking to one’s self. It is properly called love for it is a movement of appetite towards its object, the good.

Rational love, which so sharply distinguishes man from the animals follows intellectual knowledge, whereas sense appetite primarily follows sense knowledge. This rational love extends to all the objects of human appetite, though its proper object is the universal good. Sometimes it approves and embraces the movement of the sense appetite, as when a man deliberately walks into a restaurant and orders a dinner; at other times it glowers at the sense appetite, as in the case of the smoker who so obediently follows the doctor’s orders; again it may be quite independent of sense appetite, as when it insists that justice be respected, that love of God be cultivated or that sacrifice be made in love’s name.

It too can be assimilative; the astounding thing about it is that it can also be utterly self-sacrificing. In this latter form, the form which commands our immediate and complete respect, it means no more than to wish good to another and to do something about that wish if possible. It really amounts to an identification of wills between the lover and the one loved to the point of considering the loved one as another self. Hence the language of love is sacrifice, generosity; the norm by which its depth can be judged is the extent of its unselfishness, the extent of its willingness to sacrifice. All of this is said succinctly when we say that this kind of love is a consecration to some one other than ourselves.

Since God has no body, there can be no question of passions in Him, none of that animal love whose management takes up so much of our time and energy. But there is indeed question of the first act of the will following knowledge, that is, there is question of rational love in God. The fact of love in God should be immediately evident. We have shown, in this chapter, that God has a will and wills Himself, who is all goodness, and all other things; which is to say that God loves Himself and all other things. Moreover the fact of this love in God follows immediately from the fact of His possession of a will.

Abstract discussions of love usually leave us unmoved and reasonably so; we do not expect love to be lazy, vague or distantly impersonal. It should be endlessly busy, intensely thoughtful, deeply interested. Knowing this so well we ask, if we are of the modern sceptics, where is the evidence of God’s love for men; or, if we are not sceptics but spoiled children, we wonder why God so often neglects to give us concrete tokens of His divine love. In both cases we are insisting that if God does not overwhelm us with fur coats, jewelry and tickets to the opera He clearly does not love us; the bread and butter of everyday existence does not count; they, in some mysterious way, are taken for granted as rightfully ours.

The love of God for men, and indeed for all things, passes even such cold-blooded tests as these with high honors even though we are not given a Bethlehem or a Calvary for every birthday. If love means to wish good to another as effectively as possible and God is the cause of all things, then obviously every individual perfection to be found in the world, in every thing in the world, is the kind of concrete proof this calculating lover demands. Perhaps the truth of this will be more evident if we keep in mind the striking difference between human and divine love. In our love we are like lovers of the beautiful, haunting art galleries. We do not cause the goodness we love; we discover it and sometimes, in our blindness, the search is long, even futile. God does not roam the world searching for someone worthy of His love, someone whose goodness He can recognize and honor by His love; for His love is a creative love, He causes all goodness other than His own. In a word, ours can be an extremely generous love, but it is always a love called forth by the goodness of the one we love; it can never, therefore, compare with the generosity of the divine love by which God, from His inscrutable goodness, calls into being from nothingness the very goodness that He loves. By His love He not only gives Himself to us; He gives us to ourselves.

Still using that concrete and extremely hard-headed test of love, it seems clear that God does not love all things equally. If He did, there would be no difference between the perfection of the things of the world, between an angleworm and a humming bird, for the perfection of the world is the precise effect of divine love. It should be equally clear that God loves men with a love altogether different from the love He has for animals. A woman, or anyone else for that matter, cannot have friendship for a Pekinese; no matter how tenderly she cares for the dog, what money she lavishes on his special food, how becoming the ribbons with which she adorns him, the dog is still only a dog and so incapable of returning intellectual love, incapable of becoming another self to this delicate lady. In fact, even the omnipotence of God cannot make a friend out of a dog. That privilege is reserved for men and angels; they can, and do, become the other selves of God.

The justice and mercy of God

While we do not find it at all difficult to focus our minds on the friendliness of God, there is often a real fear of even a momentary consideration of His justice, as though the two were somehow bitterly opposed. Yet a moment’s consideration should make it evident to us that justice is not to be eliminated from the divinity; that, indeed, it would be tragic for us if God were not just. For, if justice means anything, it means the refusal to deny to anyone what is his due. The individual justice which is called commutative lies between equals, giving a man what is his own and towards his individual end; the social justice which is called distributive lies between rulers and their subjects, giving a man what is his own as a social being in order to his end as a part of the community. As man has this double end, so every creature, in a larger sense, has a double end: one as an individual, the other as a part of that community which is the universe.

God is certainly just in the first sense of justice, that is, giving every creature what it should have by nature, the natural equipment to carry that creature to its own end; of course there can be no equality, and of course the benevolence of God is inextricable from even so large a conception of justice as this, for how could we lay claim to rights until we were first brought into being? Carrying the parallel further, we see that God gives every creature what is its due as part of the universe, that is, what this creature needs to play its part in that external order of the universe to God. More simply, God acts according to the divine wisdom and goodness by which the order of the world was laid out. Here again there is a gift behind the very notion of the divine justice; here again justice and love are inextricably mingled. If we keep that intermingling of justice and love well in mind, we can say that justice in God is nothing more or less than the truth; the living up, on God’s part, to the divine model, the plan of the divine architect by which the nature and natural rights of everything were determined.

That act of love which lies at the root of divine justice, if we were to single it out from the divine activities and give it a name, would be called divine mercy. Mercy, it must be understood, is not to be confused with sentimentality or that vague insult to man which goes by the name of humanitarianism; it means that, moved by the misery of another, we take steps to alleviate that misery. It does not mean that we encourage a man in his crimes to keep him in good humor, that we pamper his weaknesses for fear he will pout, or that we hide him in a crowd so that his misery will be less disconcerting to our own dreams of a utopia. Perhaps one of the reasons for our confusion about mercy is our confusion about the nature of misery. In its most general sense, it means the privation of a perfection; as far as human misery is concerned. quite obviously we cannot recognize it if we consider man as merely an animal, merely a comma in an interminable sentence, or merely a child who never reaches maturity. Under such circumstances, we cannot know what perfection is lacking to a man because we do not know what perfection is due him.

In a very real sense, then, the most complete misery would be the most complete lack of perfection. The act of creation which brought things into existence is by that simple rule a supreme act of mercy. Divine mercy, then, is not contrary to but fills up and overflows the cup of divine justice. Divine mercy does not detract from or destroy divine justice; it lies beneath and goes beyond it. Wherever divine justice is found, divine mercy is there at the root of it; more than that, it is present tempering divine justice by giving much more perfection than any creature could justly lay claim to.

Conclusion: The erroneous views of the will of God

Our age is not the first in which men tried to do strange things to the divine will. Centuries ago the attempt to rule divine love out of the consideration of men and of the world resulted in the pessimism of India and Persia; quite logically, such an attempt held out to men the supreme goal of personal nothingness and the supreme act of self-destruction. Quite logically, this attempt made human life a term of suffering and indignity to no personal goal. Centuries ago men tried to make gods, and the will of the gods, out of human stuff. The result was the cynicism and brutality of the late Roman decadence, the foul degradations of a pagan idolatry. Centuries ago men tried to make sentiment and softness supreme, tossing out the rigors of reality to make cloying love the highest value; out of this attempt came, not men, but delicate beasts.

Their significance for men

We have the parallels of these attempts present in our own time. We too have thinkers who deny the divine will; we too have thinkers who make divinity out of human stuff. The results of these attempts do not vary from age to age; they can be predicted with complete assurance — despair, brutality, effeminacy.

Their common bond

From the individual man or woman’s point of view, these attacks on divinity are not nearly so disparate as they seem at first glance. At least there is one common bond which ties them into intimate unity as far as the individual man or woman of any age is concerned; for all of them without exception, destroying God, obliterate His image. All of them, without exception, are violent attacks on the individual man as man; they push him aside, over the abyss of oblivion, with the crushing blow of despair, the mailed fist of brutality, or the subtly enticing gesture of corruption.

Significance of the truth of the will of God For freedom

This is not what men want. They want their individual freedom, the surrender and incredible labors of love; they cannot exist without justice; they cannot hope without mercy. These things are not to be found by abandoning God but by holding to Him at whatever cost. Here, in America, we are dedicated to the ideal of freedom and freedom is unintelligible without God, the real God Who is the sole cause of freedom. A world looking for freedom is a world looking for God. A world that looks for absorption in a life stream, in a process of change, in an absolute state, a “holistic” organism or the future of a race is not looking for freedom but for slavery; it is searching, not for God, but for oblivion. That, most likely, is precisely what such a world will find.

For love

There is no hope for the love of men if there be no love in God; there can never be the destruction of love’s solemn consecration in men as long as there is love of God. To trace love’s roots to irrational depths of the subconscious, the biological necessity of an animal or the mistaken sentimentality of a fool is to obliterate human love. This sort of thing does not give birth to sacrifice, generosity, thoughtfulness, undying consecration. The divine love gives rise to all these things in its image in human life. Men can love, and love in precisely this divine way, because by their very manhood they are images of God; without that divine love, man’s tireless search for an object of love is doomed from its inception, for there is no goodness which is not the fruit of the creative love of God.

For justice

Where will justice find a home if the divine will be non-existent, if it be made of human stuff, if it be unjust? For justice is truth and like truth it is immutable; like all truth, it is intimately, immediately dependent on the first Truth which is its source. Where there is no truth, justice is a fanatic’s wishful dream; where there is a first truth, justice is a reality against which the crimes of men dash themselves and are destroyed. Men can live if there be justice, though they fear it; if there be none, as there must be none without God, their fear becomes a reign of terror and human life an impossibility.

For mercy

There is mercy among men because there is mercy in God, for there is love in men because there is love in God and mercy is love at work in a crisis. Nor is the bountiful mercy of men ever enough for the crises of men’s lives, if for no other reason than that men can scratch only the surface of other men’s lives. The crises that enter human life are not confined to the surface of life; indeed, the most tragic crises are those that take place in the depth of a man’s soul, for there are his richest perfections, there he can sustain the most serious losses. Only a mercy that can plunge its caressing hand into the depths of man’s soul can relieve the misery that must be relieved if men are to face the long days of life; that is, only a mercy that extends its help as far as the love of God extends its beneficence Freedom, love, justice, mercy, these are things indispensable to the men and women of any age these are the fruits of the will of God.

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