A Companion to the Summa, Volume 1: Chapters 16-20

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A Companion to the Summa

CHAPTER XVI — EVE’S FAMILY AT HOME (Q. 94-103)

1. World memory of an age of gold:

    (a) Tradition and mythology of Greeks and Romans.

    (b) Place of moral factors in this tradition.

2. Philosophical versions of this original age:

    (a) A world of hate and strife (Hobbes).

    (b) A world of unrestricted individualism (Rousseau).

    (c) The modern world of mud.

3. Principles for the investigation of the original state of man:

    (a) The integrity of nature.

    (b) Cause and essential notion of superiority of the original state.

4. The individual in the Garden of Eden:

    (a) His intellectual equipment and progress

               (1) That of Adam.

               (2) That of his children.

    (b) His will his justice and his peace.

    (c) His physical nature:

               (1) His passions.

               (2) Conservation of his life:

                   a. Food drink and vital actions.

                   b. Impassibility.

                   c. Immortality.

    (d) His relation to other individuals–equality and inequality.

5. Domestic life in the Garden of Eden:

    (a) Difference of sex.

    (b) Generation of children.

    (c) Condition and care of children.

6. Social life in the Garden of Eden:

    (a) Necessity of political organization.

    (b) Slavery.

    (c) Dominion over the physical world.

7. Physical surroundings of the first man:

    (a) The situation of Paradise.

    (b) Its inhabitants.

    (c) Man’s place in it.

Conclusion:

  1. Difference from the account of Genesis:

    (a) In the pagan tradition.

    (b) In renaissance philosophy.

    (c) In modern materialistic philosophies.

  2. The significance of these differences:

    (a) For an estimation of the nature of man.

    (b) For an appreciation of the work of God.

    (c) For a determination of individual possibilities and goals.

CHAPTER XVI EVE’S FAMILY AT HOME (Q. 94-103)

World memory of an age of gold

THE statement of man’s evolution has been hurled at our minds so constantly and from so many different directions that we are apt to overlook the fact that this idea is fairly recent. Men did not always maintain that man began from a woefully inferior status and gradually worked up to his present perfection like the hero of a success story. For centuries men cherished a precious memory. They told, with poignant regret, the story of an initial happiness and perfection that was only gradually lost as men descended step by step to the present miserable state; whatever the century this “present” represented, it was always a miserable state for the old days were always best.

Tradition and mythology of Greeks and Romans

There are written records of such a memory dating back as far as nine hundred years before Christ, Hesiod’s Works and Days. According to that first of the Greek poems, the days of men were fittingly divided into ages of gold, of silver, of brass and of iron That first golden age, an age quite distinct from the age of the heroes of Greek mythology, was a moral paradise; there way no sin in it, no injustice, no moral evil whatsoever, but all men lived in a delightful peace and harmony.

Much later, the Roman poet Ovid gave evidence of the vitality of this ancient tradition by recording the fume division of the days of men, insisting again on the golden age as an age of faith and justice. Of course physically it measured up to an Italian ideal an eternal spring with gentle breezes, rich harvests springing up spontaneously, with none of the unpleasantness of cold, ice or snow. The degeneration of man goes on steadily until the iron age (the “present” of Ovid) is reached. He describes it thus: “The last age was of hard and stubborn iron. Instantly all kinds of wickedness broke out in this age, of a more degenerate turn: modesty, truth, and honor fled, in place of which succeeded fraud, deceit, treachery, violence, and an insatiable itch to amass wealth.”

Place of moral factors in this tradition

Throughout all these ages of the pagan tradition of an original state of perfection of men, the emphasis was steadily centered on moral factors. There was no question of man being driven down or up by blind, irresistible forces that left him stripped of praise or blame, even though the loss of the golden age was due to an overthrow of the reigning god, Saturn, and his replacement by Jupiter. The perfection of the golden age was seen as essentially a moral perfection; it depended on the absence of evil and was characterized by a profound peace and a harmony that echoed the deepest wishes of the human heart. In that age, men were happy because they were good; as that perfection became a memory, sin made its entrance on the stage of the world.

Philosophical versions of this original age A world of hate and strife (Hobbes)

The precious memory was definitely abandoned when the renaissance philosophers attempted to picture the natural state of man in such a way as to support a political theory. The exceedingly fearful and timorous Hobbes, championing the English monarchy’s power and protection, insisted that all men are essentially bitter enemies because their happiness consists in exceeding their neighbors. By nature, all were equal, all self-seeking; so that the natural state of man was one of terror, war and a supremacy held by might — a condition of things that was particularly terrifying to a man like Hobbes. Men finally realized the futility of all this and the necessity of a common power to keep all in awe; they ceded their rights to the sovereign, not by a contract with the sovereign but by a contract between the subjects. They are now completely subject to the king.

A world of unrestricted individualism (Rousseau)

Rousseau went to the other extreme, insisting that men did not need a government to give them peace and happiness; all they needed was to be let alone. The theory of Rousseau might well have been expected. It was one of the periodic swings of the pendulum that had been throwing its shadow back and forth from the beginning. By one swing the position was reached that man was badly damaged somewhere along the line, some integral part of his nature had corrupted so that, as he now exists, he is essentially evil. At the opposite extreme, it was insisted that man had absolutely nothing the matter with him, needed no help from anyone in any line; he was in as good condition now as he ever was, as perfect as the day he was made. Rousseau, clumsy, ill at ease in society, plagued by complexes of inferiority and persecution, not only championed an absolute individual liberty and an emotional participation of life untrammeled, he attacked all authority. It is precisely because of authority, discipline and convention that man has been ruined; these things must be done away with. In his original state, man-was good, as was nature and God. Man’s original peace, goodness and innocence have been destroyed by human institutions. Both Rousseau and Hobbes denied the social nature of man in his original state; the one picturing society as a corrupter of human nature, the other as an artificial savior of man from himself.

The modern world of mud

With the advent of a thoroughly materialistic modern philosophy, the happy memory of an original state of perfection of man was doomed. What perfection man can claim must find its source in a purely material universe that certainly did not produce effects above the material. Man was an integral part of a completely material world, to be explained, examined and evaluated as any other part of that universe. Thus man is pictured as a product of an evolving process within that material universe, a purely material product whose original state was at worst a primeval slime, at best a brute animality; his present position is not due to a degeneration or a fall, but to centuries of a steady climb that has left him qualitatively the same as his animal ancestors.

Sin, faith, justice, morality had no part to play in the origins of man, as they have no serious part to play in his present life. The change (for the better) that has taken place in man explains itself; for it was the very process of change that brought about the improvement. Man is the result of a blind necessity, of the interaction of natural forces that need no explanation. No credit can be given him for his present or past condition; no hope can be held out for his personal future. He is caught in a relentless tide of progress without a goal and without a beginning; in that progress he is an unimportant phase.

Principles for the investigation of the original state of man

St. Thomas was familiar with the ancestors of the renaissance philosophers; he knew materialism in its earliest forms; the dreams and memories of the pagans were packed away on the shelves of his memory. But when he came to treat of the original state of man, he resorted to none of these; rather he was content to go to the factual account in the Book of Genesis, examine it, analyst draw out its implications, fill in its blank spots with reasonable hypotheses to give us a full picture of man in his first home.

The integrity of nature

Before plunging into the story itself, St. Thomas lays down some fundamental principles that give his whole treatment a unity which makes its rational character stand out strikingly. The first principle he insists on is that nothing that was natural to man was lost by man’s sin. When we speak of fallen nature or of the wounds suffered by nature through the sin of Adam, we do not mean that human nature suffered a bad smash-up and was condemned to hobble through the ages a hopeless cripple. True enough, human nature was injured, but in the same sense that a man is injured when he is left naked by the roadside. Objectively, he is in the same condition as a man who has never had any clothes, though he certainly feels a great deal worse. So human nature now is in the same condition it would have been had Adam never received any extraordinary gifts; but it has been stripped of those gifts which Adam did receive. This is not a gratuitous assumption. There are sins enough in the world to give us material for a thorough check on the fact that sin, in itself, does nothing to destroy the integrity of human nature.

Cause and essential notion of superiority of the original state

By way of a second principle, St. Thomas points out that the cause of the original perfection of man was his original justice. That is, man was created in sanctifying grace with his soul completely subject to God; this subjection extended right on down so that man’s sensible appetite was subject to his reason, and the physical world was subject to man. These two, original justice and original perfection, went hand in hand in Adam. They were, however, quite capable of separation, for one was within the order of nature, though not of human nature, while the other was above all nature. So, in the Blessed Virgin Mary, there was the same supernatural perfection and perfect justice as in Adam, with the same complete subjection of her soul to God; but without the accompanying extraordinary gifts of Adam’s original perfection.

The individual in the Garden of Eden

The extraordinary gifts that went to make up the original perfection of Adam were not supernatural but preternatural; that is, they were not entirely above the powers of all created nature but they did not belong to man by the principles of his nature. The immortality given to Adam, for example, was quite different from the immortality to be enjoyed after the general resurrection; this latter is something intrinsic, flowing from the body’s participation in the spiritual qualities of the soul. While that of Adam was an extrinsic thing, supplied to the first man from an outside source. His immunity from suffering, or impassibility, was not that incapacity for injury which the blessed in heaven will enjoy because of the penetration of the body by the spiritual qualities of the soul; it was rather an escape from harm through prudence and providential care, an extrinsic rather than an intrinsic gift. Man’s dominion over the created world followed the lines of his dominion over himself: as his sense appetite obeyed his reason, so did the animals obey his command; but, as he had no power of command over his vegetative powers, so neither could he command the vegetative and physical powers of the world, but he could use their help without impediment.

In other words, while the individual man in the Garden of Eden had considerable advantages over the individual man or woman of today, he was not in any way essentially different.

His intellectual equipment and progress: That of Adam

Adam started off the human race on its long life; as its proper starting point, he represented that race in its perfection. Just as he began with physical perfection — without the bother of being born, growing up, developing his muscles and so on — so he also started off with an intellectual perfection. In fact, this latter perfection was quite necessary in view of his position as head of the race and, consequently, as teacher of all who should come after him.

As the first human teacher, Adam brought an equipment to his task that has never been equalled since by any member of that noble profession. He did not see God directly, seeing the divine essence, for that is quite super natural and, once had, cannot be lost; that is, if Adam knew God in this way, he could not have sinned. Rather, he knew God as we know Him, but more perfectly. After all, he had none of the worries about bread and butter clothing and housing, not to speaks of the family’s future, that distracts the mind of man today. Moreover, the clarity of his insight was not the least bit clouded by passion. From the effects of God, particularly from the act of the human intellect and the nature of the human soul, Adam’s mind rose quickly and easily to a knowledge of God. His knowledge of the angels was had in the same way. But it is important to notice that Adam knew these things and all others as we know them, through intelligible species.

As for his knowledge of other things, well, Adam had to teach and govern the human family and, obviously, he could not teach what he did not know. His natural knowledge extended to all those, things that men are intended to know, that is, all those things implicitly contained in the first natural principles of knowledge. St. Thomas inclined to the belief that this knowledge — an extraordinary gift not to the individual Adam but to Adam as head of the human race — was an explicit, complete and perfect knowledge. Not that Adam knew every singular thing: that this stone would fall into this river at such a time, and so on. Nor did he know future free things, like the thoughts of men. His supernatural knowledge (his knowledge of the mysteries of faith) was limited to those things necessary for the correct government and guidance of human life in that original state of existence.

We do not have a full grasp of the intellectual stature of Adam unless we look beyond the rich deposit of knowledge given him to the use he could make of it. Many a deeply learned man is the answer to a swindler’s fondest hopes; many an expert in one line is a simpleton in another. We make our mistakes through haste, prejudice, passion, insufficient evidence, in a word, because our reason is not in complete command of the situation. Adam’s reason was in absolute command, command of his own kingdom and of the world; he seas incapable of mistakes in judgment and reasoning. He was, then, a deeply learned, very wise and exceedingly clever man.

That of his children

If we were born in paradise, eve would have had all the advantages of reason in full command; but we could not have looked forward to such equipment as was given to Adam as head of the race. There would still have been school days, and plenty of them. We would have acquired our knowledge through the senses, we would have had to discover things for ourselves, be taught by others and so, bit by bit, pick up full knowledge. It would have been a much easier job, it is true, than it is today: {or nothing, either in ourselves or in the outside world, would have interfered with the process of learning — no day dreaming, no laziness, no heat, cold, hunger, thirst or stomach-ache.

His will, his justice and his peace

For all his cleverness, Adam might have been a very unpleasant person, even a holy terror in the Garden of Eden, if he were not also a very holy man. As he was created, his will was good. Moreover, there would have been no point to God’s delaying the gift of supernatural life, keeping Adam cooling his heels as he dawdled about the meaningless tasks of a purely natural life; Adam was created in sanctifying grace and, as he was destined to glory as the angels were, there was no reason why he should not have started off earning his reward immediately. In fact, this sanctifying grace and consequent total subjection to God were the foundation of the whole perfection of Adam’s state.

With sanctifying grace, he had all the virtues, though, indeed, those that implied some imperfection never flowered into action until after he had sinned. How could he be penitent who had committed no sin; or what field was there for mercy in a place that knew no misery? The virtues that did bloom into acts produced acts that, considered in themselves, were much more worthy of merit than ours are; for the perfection of his nature removed all obstacles to grace and all possible imperfection in his works, whereas with us there is the constant pull of the sensible world, the difficulty of attention, the flabbiness of our will. Still, because our acts are sometimes so difficult to place, the very doing of them indicates a much greater willingness, even eagerness, than if they were produced with an ease that made close attention entirely unnecessary.

It might seem difficult to understand how a man as intellectually and morally perfect as Adam could have sinned if we did not know that the sublime perfection of the angels was not proof against sin, and if we could scrape up any sufficient cause of our own sins other than our own free will. The sin of Adam will be treated at length in the second volume of this work under its proper title of original sin. Here it is enough to notice that we are in no position to sneer at Adam. If we had been born in paradise we too would have been born in sanctifying grace, for that original justice of Adam’s was a gift to the whole human species, it was not a personal thing for Adam alone; and grace was the foundation of original justice. We, too, would have had the fullness of virtue, as Adam had; and, like him, we could have lost it if we made up our minds to lose it. Heaven would not have been guaranteed, nor would hell have been an impossibility for us; such complete security comes only from the vision of God which is the end, not the beginning, of human life. Indeed, the odds are that some of us would have sinned even if Adam had never offended God; and our sin would have had the same tragic consequences for our children that Adam’s had for his. We would have lost the extraordinary gifts for ourselves; of course we could not give to our children what we ourselves no longer possessed.

His physical nature: His passions

During their short stay in the Garden, Adam and Eve got on very well together. Of course they had human passions; they were human, after all, and passion is an integral part of human nature. That they were buoyant with hope, alight with desire, urged on by love was entirely a matter of their own free will, for these passions were under the complete control of reason. It must be admitted, though, that only some of the passions of the milder or concupiscible appetite — love, desire, hope and joy — had any place in Eden; the other passions — anger, despair, hate, fear and all the rest — presuppose evil and there was no evil in paradise. The battle between flesh and spirit, then, did not get started until the reign of peace that was a part of paradise had come to an end. There were no gluttons or drunkards in Eden, no one cowered in fear or boiled with anger, men were not beside themselves with passion, their intellects clouded, their lives swayed by the sensitive appetite. This was not the way men were started off on their earthly life by God.

Conservation of his life: Food, drink and vital actions

It is not certain whether Adam and Eve used forks; but it is certain that they took time out, now and then, for a bite to eat and a sup to drink. They did not have glorified bodies; in all its essential actions, their human nature was not different from ours. The natural consumption of energy involved in physical activity, the burning up of cells and tissues, demanded constant repair work by way of food and digestion. Moreover in the children, if there had been any, the necessity of growth would no doubt have produced the same prodigious appetites we see in children today.

The first couple might have been vegetarians for the little while they enjoyed this original perfection; on the other hand, Eve might have been an excellent cook and exceedingly proud of her skill. There is no way of outlawing steak from the menu of the Garden, for the use of animals for his own welfare is only a vindication of man’s dominion over the animal world, not a proof of savagery. It might be argued that Eve would not have been condemned to the drudgery of cooking; but that is to overlook the fact that cooking is drudgery only to a blundering cook and to draw a purely imaginative, and false, picture of Eve languidly posed against a fitting background for all the endless hours of the long days. No woman can keep that sort of thing up all the time.

Impassibility

The natural consumption of energy was taken care of by ordinary food; but the gradual running down of the physical organism of man’s body is not prevented by food, even by very good food, as we well know. In heaven, this natural mortality is provided against intrinsically when the soul communicates to the body not only what powers it has as a substantial form but also some of the properties it possesses as a spiritual substance. In the Garden of Eden, this natural mortality was temporally staved off by a special food, a food with special properties given it by God, the fruit of the tree of life. The eating of this food from time to time was to have kept man in his prime until such time as God took him to his eternal happiness in heaven; for the gateway to heaven from paradise was not death.

Adam and Eve did not have tougher skins, arms and legs that could not be cut off or lungs that could not become infected. The thorns on the rose bushes of paradise were just as sharp as they are everywhere else; and man’s skin was just as tender. Adam and Eve were incapable of injury and sickness; but not because their bodies were somehow different from ours. Rather, this impassibility was an extrinsic gift, one that did not flow from the nature of man but came to him from the outside. In plain terms, man escaped injury and sickness by his own prudence and by the action of divine providence, just as many of us do today; only in that original state, this was the ordinary, the universal thing. In other words, man then had sense enough to keep his fingers away from thorns, to avoid the injurious things; moreover, divine providence assured him of not being taken unawares. It can be safely said that many a stranger in New York keeps divine providence a great deal busier than ever Adam did. Adam, of course, had the distinct advantage of his command over the animals; under such circumstances, it would not be much of a trick for him to maintain his seat on a horse or to cow a savage dog.

Immortality

Though they would be very nice things to have at the present moment, the impassibility and immortality of Adam are not to be compared with that which awaits us in heaven. Neither of these gifts totally outstripped the powers of nature. They are not to be considered as supernatural but as preternatural, that is, in the same class with such a gift as might be given to a farmer enabling him to take off after a chicken hawk by merely flapping his arms. Flying, you see, is not above all the powers of nature; it just does not belong to the nature of man.

His relation to other individuals–equality and inequality

Let us suppose for a moment that Adam had not sinned and, after all these centuries, we, as tourists, were to take a trip to the flourishing cities of these perfect men, would it be as dull an affair as standing for hours to watch a mass production gadget roll out of a factory? No, indeed; on the contrary, we would be astonished by the variety in evidence there. One person would be brighter than another, one would have a stronger will, one would be bigger, another more beautiful, of different coloring, different individual attractions, more pleasing personality, and so on. Life would certainly not be dull; particularly as the minimum of any of these things would still represent the perfection that excluded all evil, all defect. There would be no beauty parlors or plastic surgeons. A girl would not have perfect eyes and a nose that had best be forgotten. No man would be so fat as to be too fat, or so thin as to look scragged. For perfection of types, it would be a kind of super-Hollywood, with none of the bitter tragedies of disappointment lurking under the surface. Human beings would, indeed, be unequal: different in sex, different its body, different in virtue, different in intellectual gifts. But none would be deficient; all would enjoy that special equality that makes every man perfect and every man a sovereign being.

Domestic life in the Garden of Eden: Difference of sex

The diversity of sexes in man’s original state is plain from the account in Genesis. That it should have been so is plain from human nature itself: with only one sex, the species would have been incomplete, indeed, the individuals would have been incomplete as the sexes complement and perfect one another. So Eve was given to Adam as a helper, particularly in the work of generation.

Generation of children

There would, of course, have been generation in the Garden of Eden. Thomas thinks this is true beyond all doubt, though it might be argued that, since generation is for the maintenance of the species, it was unnecessary in this state where men did not die; or, at least, it would have been sufficient to restrict the generative act to Adam and Eve since they were to live forever. Such argumentation overlooks the fact that the individual man is much more important than as a mere means to the good of the species. Nature intends the enduring and each man and woman, by reason of an immortal soul, is a much more enduring thing than any species however complete. In other words, the purpose of generation is not only the duration of the species but the multiplication of individuals within that species. As for the notion of restricting generation to Adam and Eve, St. Thomas says that it is as much a part of man’s nature to live the domestic life and have children as it is to eat; so much so, that in the Garden of Eden there would have been no sterility, no perpetual virginity, everyone would have married. To this end, it would have been necessary that there be as many boys born as girls; Thomas thought that the control of the sex of the child would have been in the power of the parents, thus eliminating months of maternal anxiety and guesswork. At any rate, there would have been children born in those days, and born in exactly the same way as they are today; for, from the very beginning marriage has been a holy thing. However, the physical difficulties and pain of childbirth would have been avoided by man’s preternatural gift of dominating nature and of impassibility.

Condition and care of children

Certainly there would have been no danger of the domestic life of paradise going on the rocks through sheer ennui. Couples there would not be driven to non-existent divorce courts through the boredom of having nothing to do but look at each other. There would have been children — and that immediately accounts for many hours of work. For these children would be as children are today: helpless, in need of care, nourishment, education and training.

There would have been work outside the home, too, something to take care of Adam’s spare moments. The biblical account tells us that our first parents were to guard and work the place of paradise. Work, it seems, is not something man was meant to escape; when he succeeds in dodging it, he is inevitably miserable. This work, whether of Adam or of Eve, would have been something like the born mother’s joy in her children, the chef’s artistic pride in a pot of stew, or the book-keeper’s delight in his hobby of gardening. It would not have been laborious, distasteful and fatiguing; but rather a joyous source of pleasure. The reason for assigning work even in paradise seems quite obvious; man needs work for the fullest development of his powers and, indeed, for the full perfection of his knowledge, at least for the experimental discovery of just what man himself can do and what nature can accomplish under his guidance.

There would have been no private property in Eden; such a division of property is necessary for harmony, order and efficiency where there is the constant threat of dis order, confusion and laziness. There was no such a threat in man’s original state. Man would not have been an anarchistic individualist; social and political life would have been real necessities for man even in his state of perfection. This is apparent from the very inequality of individuals in that original state, an inequality that even Rousseau found no way to deny. That one should excel another in knowledge and virtue would be unfitting such a state if that superiority did not itself contribute to the welfare of the inferiors. In fact, it is a general principle that such superiority imposes the obligation of direction and assistance to inferiors; virtue and knowledge, in other words, are not only assets, they are also liabilities, ordained to the welfare of others.

Social life in the Garden of Eden:  Necessity of political organization

Moreover man is a social animal. His full perfection is not to be attained in a solitary state of life; true, he might succeed in existing alone, but he could not reach to the enjoyment of that full human life of which his nature makes him capable. In Eden, then, men would naturally have lived in society, that is, they would have united for a common end to be obtained by a common means; which, of course, implies common direction. Obviously ten firemen, following their individual ideas as to when and how to get to a fire and what to do about putting it out, would be a great curse to insurance companies; just so, a society without a governor would be no society at all but a cluster of individual outposts forbidding in their armament.

Slavery

The political society of Eden would always be the type that dominates a man or directs him to his own and the common good. The domination of one man over another, which we know as slavery, by which one man uses another exclusively for the proper ends of the first did not exist in paradise; indeed, such domination could not exist until the bond that kept man subject to God had been broken.

Dominion over the physical world

Man’s social, domestic and individual life was made much easier and more pleasant by the dominion he exercised over the physical universe, a dominion that was modelled on his own command of himself. He could call a tiger (if he wanted a tiger) and get immediate obedience, just as he could command his own animal nature and get immediate and complete results. But he had no such command over the plant and inanimate world. He could call a carrot (if he wanted a carrot) until he was hoarse; he would have to go to the carrot, it would not come to him. He dominated this part of the world as he did his own physical nature, using it without impediment, joyously and freely. He could not order a plant about, but he could escape the embarrassing labor of biting on hard celery in a quiet dining room.

Physical surroundings of the first man: The situation of Paradise

Where was the Garden of Eden? St. Thomas, judging from the rivers that sprang from it according to the biblical account, thought it was somewhere in the East. Wherever it was, Thomas thought it had the physical characteristics of the more pleasant part of Italy on a perfect day. He did not exactly say this; but he did draw the line at snow and ice, holding out for an equable climate, being particularly insistent of the advantages of a warm sun. It was not to be too hot nor too cold, but in between with a pleasant variety that would not call the inhabitants’ attention to their lack of clothes.

Its inhabitants

Speaking of inhabitants, it may be worth noting that Adam was an immigrant to the Garden of Eden while Eve was a native; Adam, you remember, was made outside the Garden and brought in by God himself, while Eve was made on the spot — a fact that may or may not be significant. There were to be no dogs allowed in Eden, for this was an exclusively human habitation. The only animals there, normally, came at the express command of the human inhabitants. There a man could take a siesta and not wake up to find the cat asleep on his stomach or a visiting lioness surveying his tousled condition with a critical eye. However, the life there was by no means to be a continual siesta. There was to be work, man’s work and woman’s work. plenty of it; a work that was to go on, joyously, until the “Master of all good workmen” would put an end to the labor, easily slipping man into his eternal home where he could see for the very first time what heights happiness could reach.

Conclusion: Difference from the account of Genesis  In the pagan tradition

Many of the details of this chapter are supplied by St. Thomas, arguing sometimes strictly, sometimes only plausibly, to complete the full picture of man’s original state. Putting aside those details and concentrating on the bare skeleton of the account in Genesis, it should be evident that this story is not to be shrugged off as just another myth, even though we do not take into account the infallible authority of the God of truth Who inspired it. Unlike the pagan tradition, this is not the kind of story men think up about themselves, or even about their relatives. The pagans of Greece and Rome made the original state of man one of long duration, with long accounts of the idyllic life during all those years of perfection; its loss was attributed, not to the fault of men, but to the overthrow of a god. Genesis insists that this say of men in the earthly paradise was hardly a moment in the long life of the first couple, stating baldly the hard bet that was most unflattering; for the brevity of that stay was immediately due to the wilfulness of men themselves. The biblical account tells what glorious chances man had, and of how he immediately muffed them. Having muffed them, man was left as he would have been in a state of pure nature; the trials, labor and difficulties of existence today do not offer material for self-pity or excuses on grounds of disability, man has his full equipment for life.

In renaissance philosophies  In modern materialistic philosophies

The renaissance philosophers, in defiance of the facts, denied man’s social nature, making of him a beast of prey or a paragon of virtue. Genesis makes no such mistake about our nature; God does not make mistakes. Nor, for that matter, can man fool himself about his very nature, though he may tell himself fables about himself by way of escape from reality. The materialistic philosophy that has such a hold on the world today specializes in denial of facts; it makes man merely an animal, thoroughly un-moral; it denies the undeniable facts of his immaterial, spiritual soul and even the more inescapable fact of his origin from a first absolutely perfect first cause. This version of man’s nature, like all the others, cannot afford to sneer at the account of Genesis. An air of superiority cannot gloss over the stubborn facts of God’s causality and man’s nature as we undoubtedly have it today.

The significance of these differences: For an estimation of the nature of man

Indeed, it is only by facing these facts that we get a real appreciation of man’s nature. Only thus can we see him as spiritual and physical, as enjoying a freedom that even God must respect, a freedom that can hurl him ashamed from the portals of an earthly paradise or rush him triumphant into an eternal one with God. Only by facing the facts can we see man as he is: a creature made for work, for love, for marriage and a family; made to learn, to perfect his virtue, to approach to God and ultimately to rest with Him. And only in appreciating these things can we be fair to ourselves.

For an appreciation of the work of God

Honesty before the facts enables us to appreciate the work of God, seeing Him remedying the defects that naturally follow from the very ingredients of human nature, even though such correction demanded the planning of extraordinary gifts by the all wise architect of the universe. In the light of the facts we can see that the plans were spoiled, not by the architect, not by the builder, but by man himself.

For a determination of individual possibilities and goals

The present state of man is man’s work, not God’s; even that initial tragedy was made a thing of hope and inspiration by the Son of God’s redemption of those mistakes of men which we call sins. Because of the insistent part God has played in the destiny of that nature of ours, we can hope, labor, pray, love and live life to the full; for there is a paradise to which we can attain that alone fulfills the longing of our nature, that alone gives human life meaning and purpose. The story of man’s beginnings is a sad account of what might have been; but it is also a vague hint of the glories that yet can be.

CHAPTER XVII — GOVERNMENT OF THE PHYSICAL WORLD
(Q. 103-105)

1. Nature and purpose of government:

    (a) Its essential postulate.

    (b) Its proper act.

    (c) Its condition.

2. A modern paradox:

    (a) Championship of this conception of government.

    (b) Recognition of proper act of government in the universe.

    (c) Denial of government in the universe.

3. Necessity of government in the world:

    (a) Principles of solution.

    (b) The proofs.

4. Details of the government of the world:

    (a) The governor of the universe.

    (b) The subjects of government.

    (c) The nature of government of the universe.

               (1) Its immediacy.

               (2) Its universality.

               (3) Its efficacy.

5. Effects of the government of the world:

    (a) Conservation.

    (b) Movement of creature:

               (1) Divine power and the effects of created causes.

               (2) Fact of divine operation in every created agent:

                   a. Necessity of this in general.

                   b. Necessity in particular — relative to human will.

               (3) Divine power and miracles.

6. Distinction of eternal law providence and divine government.

Conclusion:

  1. Impossibility of the denial of divine government in the universe

    (a) On modern grounds.

    (b) From its consequences.

  2. The truth of divine government.

  3. Completion of the picture of God.

CHAPTER XVII GOVERNMENT OF THE PHYSICAL WORLD (Q. 94-103)

Nature and purpose of government

AS FAR as equipment goes anarchy is a condition of affairs that is remarkably easy to set up. All it requires is a people content to live aimlessly, destructively and with what protection an individual can give himself. On the contrary, politically organized social life involves decided difficulties in its establishment and maintenance; for this men must live purposefully, constructively and under a common protective direction. In this matter, our times have not veered to the easy side; anarchy has no general appeal to the twentieth century. Government, on the other hand, may well become the idol before which all men bow. In its roots, the word government implies direction, piloting; we have held fast to that notion of pointing men at some goal, though we have at times gone too far in the manner used to achieve this pointing, even so far as to think it was permissible for a government to take all its citizens by the scruff of the neck to direct their steps.

Its essential postulate

At any rate, it is clear to our minds today that government implies something to be governed, something to be directed; so that, broadly, we mean by government the rule or direction of a community. The essential postulate of government, then, is a community and a community comes into existence precisely because individuals concur in a common end, in contrast to the exclusive pursuit of individual ends in anarchy. Anarchy means lawlessness, while government means law; the defect or collapse of law is the collapse of government, for law is government’s proper act of direction. Anarchy needs no executive or judicial elements for, by nature implying indirection, it has no law to execute, no norm by which to judge; the equivalent of anarchy can be quickly achieved in any government by the simple oversight of the fundamental character of the legislature and the attempt to supplant it by executive or judicial action. For the executive and judicial functions are consequent to law which is the absolutely fundamental and proper act of government.

The primary paralysis, followed by discord and ultimately by open riot, that would result if a dozen onlookers of a chess game were privileged to make all moves along with the players is a faint suggestion of what would be the condition of society if there were no unified direction, no unity in legislation. If the hypothesis be extended a little further to the point where these onlookers and players huddle around a non-existent game, we have some idea of the impossibility of unified government and law without the fundamental unity of a common end among the citizens; for without that unity of end, which is the source of the common life, the root of the community, the brick and mortar that holds society together, there would be no game of politics to be played.

Its proper act

With this conception of government our time, and particularly our country, has no quarrel whatsoever. Perhaps this age will be outstanding in history for its universal acceptance of these fundamental notions of government; certainly never before in the history of the world has there been such a universal championship of government’s proper act of law. As evidence of this we have the naive faith in the power of law which has led us into a kind of mass production of law for a variety of purposes that staggers the mind. We have made use of law for the correction of every kind of evil, economic, financial, physical, moral and social, and this in such meticulous detail as to make ourselves somewhat ridiculous. We do, indeed, believe in law and the power of law. As a last, if perverted, tribute to this championship of government we have the world-wide drift to the absolute in the state, even among nations who fight absolutism.

Its condition

Our modern almost worshipful attitude towards science is a recognition of the proper act of government in the physical universe and on a world-wide scale. Surely, scientific procedure and scientific knowledge has never been held in higher esteem; we are even willing to go to the length of denying validity to any other procedure or certitude to any other knowledge, reducing all intellectual efforts to the level of science. Yet the goal of science is nothing more than the discovery of law; it seeks to uncover a common way of acting, a community of activity and thus a common end. To put it briefly, science is really a demand, with full assurance, of an order in nature. The highest moments of scientific adventure are those marked by the discoveries of just such laws. Science does not attempt to reach conclusions or offer proofs; its interest is in the universal or common law which tells the story of how things act, that is, it is concerned with a fuller knowledge of the laws of nature.

A modern paradox:  Championship of this conception of government

In ordinary times we would say that law, order, a common way of acting, a common end all bespeak a community and a government of that community But these are no ordinary times. The educated man of today, holding fast to modern tenets, is in the anomalous position of championing cosmic anarchy yet of giving full confidence to a scientific search for the laws that rule that anarchy. He must insist, in an age that puts complete faith in the multiplication of laws and the power of government, that the universe must be lawless, without government since it is without a governor. The world-wide drift to the absolute in political power and state direction has for its basis a philosophy that denies direction to the world, and which upholds the attainment of world progress without direction By some mad paradox, we trace political and social ills to poor direction, poor government; while we trace perfection in the universe to a complete lack of direction, a complete absence of government.

Recognition of proper act of government in the universe

This is hardly an intelligent position. But then our age has had many a bitter quarrel with intelligence and the hard feeling has gone so far that we have decided to disown intelligence or even to prove that there is no such thing; perhaps it is expecting too much to look for intelligence in so bitter an enemy’s camp. This modern absurdity in the face of the order of the world can trace its origins back to that first attack on direction, that first positing of the principles of anarchy in religious circles that has come to be known as the Reformation. If religion could get along nicely without direction, there is after all, no reason for other things to put up with the meddlings of government. What was reformation in religion was scepticism in philosophy, running the whole gamut from humble doubts to bold denials and reaching its smashing climax in our own days when the existence of a faculty capable of valid universal knowledge is hardly taken seriously.

Denial of government in the universe

When the philosophers had finished cutting their own throats and had come to the harmonious conclusion that they could not get anywhere since there was no intellect with which to philosophize, science was ready to step into the breach with definite indications that it, at least, could get somewhere; philosophers immediately rustled to stake out claims in the territory of science; somehow they made science the foundation of philosophy, forgetting that science itself had no foundation except on the condition that the sceptical philosophers were wrong in the first place in rejecting the intellectual foundations of philosophy.

The confusion has become so much a part of modern life that today men can deny world government and uphold world law. In fact, we have become so oblivious of the absurdity of this position that we begin to feel a little superior about it, smiling pityingly on those who assert that if government is necessary for order and progress in the affairs of politics, anarchy is not the answer to order, law and progress in the universe. How droll!

Necessity of government in the world:

It may mean little to the modern that the truth of divine government of the universe is explicitly stated in Scripture and that Christ Himself hammered that truth home; but at least, in the name of rationality, the overwhelming evidence should not be passed over in silence. And the evidence is overwhelming. We saw something of it in the beginning of this book in proving the existence of God. There it was brought out that the fact of irrational creation constantly acting for its own good demands the existence of a directing intelligence; in other words, that the order in the universe demands a supreme governor.

In treating of divine Providence, the three alleged explanations of order in the universe — chance, necessity, some cause within the universe — were examined in detail. Each of the three were rejected: chance because it was not an explanation of order but a statement of the existence of an order which, in a chance case, had been clashed with; necessity because it demanded as much explanation as the order it was advanced to explain; while the fact that the universal order included everything in the universe made it impossible for any natural cause, itself a subject of that order, to explain the existence of the laws to which it bowed. It was in that same chapter on providence that it became evident that the internal finality of things — the order of the ear to sound, of the eye to sight, of the individual to the species and so on — was, too, a created thing demanding further relation to the things around it. In other words, no one creature was an isolated being from this point of views but a part of a universal plan that existed in the mind of the intelligent first cause.

This truth of divine government has been like a haunting melody which a man cannot drive from his mind. It came up again in the examination of creation and evolution when it was brought out that God, as a perfect agent, acted quite differently than do His creatures. We must act to acquire some missing perfection, while God can only act to share His goodness since He has all goodness from eternity; the only possible end He could have, then, in creating must have been Himself, the sharing of His divine goodness, that is, the only goal to which the world could be directed was God Himself. Obviously such a task of direction demanded a supreme governor, a governor commensurate to the end for all the laws laid down would have to have that end in view.

In this chapter the melody is heard again. It cannot be silenced. Nor is this surprising. The fact of order and government in the world is so fundamental that it must arise again and again in any treatment of God or of the world. In this chapter we shall really get down to bedrock, digging deep enough to uncover the relation of the fact of world government to the very first principles of thought and being. Of course the job demands overalls, dynamite, hard labor and plenty of perspiration; but it is a job worth doing.

Principles of the solution

To allay that insidious form of fear which bears the euphemistic name of laziness, it might be well to give this task an air of ease by stating at once that the principles, upon which the proof of the government of the world rests, can be reduced to just two, namely, the principles of sufficient reason and of finality. Both of these are immediately reducible to the first and absolutely fundamental principles of identity and contradiction. Without these latter principles there could be no thought and, indeed, no being.

Taken in the concrete, the principle of sufficient reason is made perfectly clear by the fact that dogs bark and chicken bones are very bad for puppies though bread and milk is an entirely harmless diet for either mongrels or thoroughbreds. In its theoretical form the principle reads like this: “everything that is has a sufficient reason for itself and for the harmony of other things with it, either from its very essence or from something else.” Evidently those things that flow from the very nature of a dog, from the fact that it is a dog, have their sufficient reason in the nature of the dog. In this sense, the principle of sufficient reason is no more than an insistence on the principle of identity: this dog is a dog, this nature is itself, so of course a bark is to be expected from it. The things that do not come from nature itself but from outside cannot have their sufficient reason in the nature. The dog does, in fact, die; clearly, then, its existence did not come from canine nature itself. What does not come from the nature must come from somewhere else, that is, from outside the nature; and to say that the sufficient reason of anything is from outside the nature is no more than asserting the principle of contradiction. In other words, we insist that this dog is not something other than a dog, it is not a dog and a god at the same time, it cannot, at the same time, be a contingent being and a necessary being.

The principle of finality, which has the inestimable merit of brevity though it gives no rest to the world, is: “every agent acts for an end.” A penetrating mind is not necessary to see that this principle is immediately reducible to the principle of sufficient reason; it is, really, no more than a statement of the fact that there is a reason for every action. Every nature has a determined, or specific, effect; thus a dog barks, a man laughs or thinks. There is then a sufficient reason for this constant way of acting, this specific determination whether that reason be from the nature itself or from some one else who communicates it to this nature; if there is not this sufficient reason, then do not be surprised if a dog laughs in your face or your fiance sits back on his haunches and bays at a romantically full moon. A denial of the principle of finality, you see, immediately involves a denial of the principle of contradiction; this lad may be a man and, at the same time, a dog. The effect of barking could exist with no determination or tendency in the cause of all, it could just pop out of a man’s throat for no reason whatever and might change to the chirp of a canary bird just as it passed the soft palate. The same mad story would hold good for the act of which this is an effect, for the faculty which produced this act, and, ultimately, for the nature in which this faculty resides. All would lack determination, yet have it; be what they are and be something different; Alice would have a new wonderland.

In other words, an efficient cause is never a sufficient explanation for an action. The fact that a man throws a brick is by no means the whole story; when the police catch him they will be crude enough to ask a few questions, especially as to why he threw the brick. The fact that a lecturer does deliver a lecture is not a sufficient explanation of his talk; it might, in fact, be difficult at times to come at a sufficient explanation. If one act is placed rather than another (as happens wherever there is such order as we find in the world) then there must be a determination, a reason, an end for that action.

The proofs

With these fundamental principles clearly in mind, we can advance to an investigation, let us say, of a very young cabbage plant that has just been set out. It spends no time trying to find itself, reading up on vocational guidance or waiting for the mood to strike it; without going off in a corner to sob in self pity, with no search for a soul mate, it promptly drives its roots down for moisture while it reaches for the light and warmth of the sun. Moreover, all the thousands of cabbages set out each year will do exactly the same thing. Here, certainly, we have un intelligent beings acting in a most intelligent way: with constant, orderly effort to attain their greatest perfection and the perfection of their species. Clearly that order comes from the very nature of cabbages; but the determination of the nature does not explain itself, for the nature did not give birth to the determination, it did not exist before the determination. The orderliness of this procedure comes from some one outside that nature. When it is remembered that not only cabbages but all of irrational creation portrays this same orderly action, we have evidence of the existence of an intelligence that guides the whole of that irrational creation.

It may be objected that this does not argue to a world order, but merely to an order within each species; just as an orderly, affectionate family does not necessarily argue to a well governed state, or even to a state that has a moderately decent government. This is the old objection that internal finality does not argue to external finality, the modern illusion that scientific laws governing particular natures can be admitted while it is denied that nature as a whole is going anywhere. Granted that we cannot know the whole of the divine plans with our finite minds, it is impossible to grant order within the species and then deny order to the universe.

Details of the government of the world:  The governor of the universe

In the first place, no creature, no species, is isolated. They bump, clash, embrace, nourish and are nourished: they have relations to one another, which is to say there is an order between them, an order in the whole. This very order of one thing to another is a created thing; it does not exist of itself, does not explain itself, has not sufficient reason for itself within itself. It must, therefore, have that sufficient reason from outside, it must have a final cause outside itself, a goal that is not itself. In plain language, the governor and final end of the universe is something that escapes the universe itself, that is without its limits; that something is God. For, as we have already seen, everything created, everything that has not sufficient reason of itself within itself, falls within the natural or created order; only God. Who is supremely self-sufficient, is outside that order.

The same point might be argued from a different angle by pointing out that the end or goal corresponds to the beginning or the efficient cause. Since God is the cause of the world, He is its final end and the sole possible director or governor of the world to that final end. More simply, every agent acts for an end; the very first, or utterly independent, agent upon whom everything else depends must act for Himself.

Many men have been deceived into thinking the universe is without government because they have overlooked the striking difference between the government of the world and human government or human direction in any form. Just as we cannot pour knowledge into another’s head, so neither can we put a principle of action into any other being; we may train a dog to bark at intruders but we cannot claim to have instilled the bark into the dog. No matter how benign our direction or government may be, it is always a kind of violence, at least in the sense that it is always from the outside; it is never a match for that easy, flowing direction that comes from nature itself. The direction or government of God, however, is not violent even in this sense; it does not come from the outside because His causality, unlike ours, reaches to the depths of being. The particular nature itself is such because of the divine plans and the divine execution of those plans; He does put the bark into the dog. That His direction is followed easily, naturally, from the very principles of nature does not prove there is no government of nature; rather, it is a constant natural parade of the government of God.

The subjects of government

As for subjects, well, no census taking is necessary. It is as impossible to find a creature not subject to that government as it is to find a creature that is utterly sufficient to itself. God is the only self-sufficient being; from Him all depend and to Him all go as to their end. He alone is the governor of the universe; everything in that universe stands in need of His direction to Himself, that is, everything depends upon Him for its nature and for its existence. We shall see this dependence again and more fully in a few moments. Now it is sufficient to point to the universal application of natural laws as an indication of the universality of the government of God. Those laws are the proper act of His government, directing all creatures to the common end of the community which is the universe.

Its immediacy

This, of course, does not mean that if a man looks up quickly when he hears a landslide bearing down on him that he can see God slowly straightening up from the effort of putting His shoulder to the mountain. God does not have to move everything that moves in the world by a personally immediate movement any more than the President of the United States has personally to enforce every Federal law. As a matter of fact, the extreme perfection of the government of God is more manifest in His sharing of causality with His creatures. The dictator’s technique, for all its appearance of strength, is a confession of weakness; such a ruler must destroy liberty, he must execute rivals and concentrate all power in his own hands for he is not strong enough to exist otherwise.

Its universality

Nor is there any danger of some subordinate cause in this divine government exceeding orders and starting a reign of tyranny unknown to the central government. We have already seen, in treating of the knowledge of God and His providence, that no smallest detail escapes Him: indeed, it is because every detail exists in the mind of God that its existence is possible, for everything in the universe is but a reproduction of the model which is the divine ideas. A divine newspaper is an unthinkable thing; not that there need be anything wrong with newspapers, but there is simply nothing going on in the world that is news to God. Even divine patience could not tolerate a newspaper under such circumstances. Neither is there anything happening, in the universe to wreck His carefully laid plans. There is no danger of a coup d’état overthrowing the government of God, for everything in the universe is so utterly dependent upon Him. There is no cause that can impede His action, because there is no cause independent of Him.

Its efficacy

Even the case of rebellion on the part of man does not escape the order of divine governments For, while the sinner throws himself outside the divine order to the end of the universe, he hurls himself into the divine order of justice which is no less a part of the plan of the universe. The rebellion of sin itself cannot he complete; for the physical act of sin, since it has real existence, must be traced to the first cause of all reality. It is only the missing palate the defect of order, the hole in the human act, that is the exclusive property of the human will.

Effects of the government of the world: Conservation

Coming down to particulars, two effects of this divine government that must be stressed are the conservation of things in existence and the part God plays in the movement of creatures. That the hand of God is necessary for the support of things in existence is a truth of faith abundantly clear from the Scriptures and defined again and again by the Church. Its truth is clear by the power of reason alone; we need only to grasp the meaning of conservation to see its necessity. Taking the word in its most obvious sense, that of continuation of existence, these is no difficulty in seeing that a being is independent of conservation by another insofar as it is independent of an other for its existence. That means that everything in the universe is continued in existence by God.

Understand, this is not a matter of warding off a blow, or snatching a child from under the wheels of an automobile. There are things in this world that do not need touch conservation as this; it is not necessary, for instance, to put a soul in an oxygen tent nor to protect an angel from bombs. This is a question of moment to moment supply of existence somewhat like the question of moment to moment supply of air to a man to sustain his life. As we have seen in an earlier chapter, existence is one of those perfections that are not an integral part of nature, that in themselves have no limitation and that are, consequently, participated, borrowed, from the one source where they are had in their infinite fullness.

Perhaps it could be put more simply by saying that conservation is a continuation of the act of creation which first supplied existence; only that being is independent of all conservation which is independent of creation, which has the fullness of existence by its very nature — not animal existence, not human existence, not angelic existence, but existence without qualification. In other words, only a completely self-sufficient being is independent of conservation by others, that is, God Himself. Everything else that is continues to exist only because its existence is immediately furnished by God.

To ask if God could annihilate a creature is merely to ask if God could cut off the supply of existence of any creature. The answer is obvious. The production of every created thing was a free act on the part of God; of course the continuation of that act of creation is a free act on His part. Annihilation would not demand any special activity on God’s part but merely the cessation of Hid creative activity. In other words, if God were suddenly to become the static thing modern philosophers are willing to tolerate as divinity, the universe would plunge into nothingness.

It is quite another question to ask whether God will annihilate any creature, or all of the universe. We have it on faith that God will not annihilate human souls or the angels. But, putting aside the field-glass of faith and squinting at the question with the naked eye of reason we can get a reasonable view of the probable durability of the physical universe. God, in His dealings with the universe, has not, after all, so much choice; He must act either naturally or supernaturally, that is, He must operate either within the laws of that universe as laid down by Himself or outside those laws. Within the laws, or naturally, God will certainly not annihilate spiritual substances, such as souls and angels, for the very good reason that there is absolutely no natural way in which they can be destroyed, there is no natural force capable of their destruction. As for material things, well, on purely natural grounds it would seem that matter itself remains enduringly as the subject of all change; it is the subject of corruption rather than the object of corruption. But, then, that means little more than maintaining that, on natural grounds, material things would always remain at least potentialities.

Supernaturally, or by operation outside the natural laws, the answer is quite easy. God works miracles to manifest His grace; and annihilation does not manifest grace, in fact, it does not manifest anything, for in itself it is a denial so absolute as to leave not even an echo by which it might be located. It is much more a part of divine power and goodness to preserve or conserve things than to annihilate them by utterly pointless miracles.

The effect of conservation is fairly easy material of investigation, perhaps because it is so far above us; at least it is not complicated by a creature’s action, for existence is the proper effect of God. The effect of God’s government which is His movement of creatures is something else again; for here the creature enters intimately into everything but the miracles of God.

Movement of creatures Divine power and the effects of created causes

God can, evidently, produce any effect that a created cause can, just as a bishop can produce any of the effects produced by powers he has delegated to a priest. For the causality of every created cause has its roots deep in God; it is a delegation, a participation, a sharing in the divine power. In particular, God can, without a secondary cause, move matter to form, can move bodies, the human intellect and the human will. What was said above about the government of God must be kept well in mind here, namely, that the movement of God in nature does none of the violence to nature that human movement does. Consequently, God cannot force the human will for that is to do violence to it; rather, He moves it freely, according to its nature. We shall see more of this in just a moment.

First we must touch on a type of divine movement that is taken up explicitly in the opening chapters of the second volume of this work. This is movement only in the sense of attraction; it is not the effect of a push or a command but the result of an allure, an enticement, the eager rush inspired by the perfection of goodness. The attraction of everything desirable in this world is only a traveller’s tale of the wonders of the Supreme Good, leaving unsaid the ineffable delights that alone will satisfy the human will’s thirst for the universal good.

So much for the possibility of the action of God in the universe. The actual fact of His movement is the foundation for the first two proofs already given for the existence of God. In its briefest form, the reason for the fact of divine movement amounts to this: the active principles of the created world — the forms of things not only depend on the first cause for their intrinsic natural qualities, their actual existence and conservation in existence, they also depend upon God for their application to action, for that transition from mere potentiality of movement to actual movement. After all, it is not only the nature, the existence and the conservation that are real; the movement to action and the action itself are also real and so must be traced to the source of all reality.

Fact of divine operation in every created agent

This is not to make God the only cause and all created causes mere figureheads, instruments of divine causality; when a burglar strikes his victim over the head, we are quite right in blaming the burglar. Confusion in this matter usually comes from picturing God and the created cause as two horses tugging a heavy load up the steep hill of actions. God and the created cause do not work side by side in tile same order; one is the first cause, the other the second cause, that is, one works through the other. Perhaps this will be more easily understood if we remember that the action of God falls on the created cause rather than on the effect of that cause; the proper effect of God is to move the secondary cause to its actual causing, to change it from a potential to an actual cause then to continue its conservative action of the causality of that created cause.

Necessity of this in general

This divine movement of secondary causes is absolutely universal; which is to say no more than that no reality escapes dependence on the first reality. In things which cannot be moved necessarily by any created causes, such for example, as the human will, this divine movement must be immediate. Something of this has already been seen above where it was pointed out that divine movement not only does not destroy freedom but is the only possible source of it. Certainly, the will must be moved from its potential willing to actual willing if it is ever to make a choice: if it is moved by any set of circumstances, it is not free in the face of those circumstances; if it moves itself, then it is already determined, that is, it is not possessed of that indetermination necessary for freedom. It must be moved but in a way consonant with its freedom; only God can move the will freely.

Necessity in particular — relative to human will

This sounds very obscure; and it should, for it is a mystery, a great mystery. The apparent contradiction involved in it is not, however, difficult to resolve. The resolution is merely a matter of our keeping in mind that nothing real exists without the sustaining hand of God. The will is a reality that must have its sufficient reason in the first cause; the act of the will is also real and must also be reduced to that same source of reality; but the very mode of the act of the will, its freedom, is, too, definitely within the order of the real and, consequently, it is not to be absolved from dependence on God. The same note can be produced by a bird and by an opera singer; the freedom of the latter needs no less explanation than the necessity of the former. The only adequate explanation is God. How can God move the will freely? To understand this it would be necessary to comprehend the divine movement. Remembering that the divine movement is the same as the divine essence, it is clear that such a comprehension of the infinite is beyond the powers of a finite mind. There precisely, in the infinity of the divine movement, lies the mystery of human freedom. And a very good place for it, too.

Divine power and miracles

Over and above the action of God in the physical universe establishing its laws, conserving and fulfilling them, there is another type of action on the part of the divine governor which we have come to call miraculous action. That there is such action, surpassing the established order of nature, can be immediately seen from the numerous accounts of miracles in Scripture: the truth has been solemnly defined by the Church, as, for example, in the Vatican Council: “If anyone says that miracles cannot be performed and therefore the Scriptural accounts of miracles must be relegated to the class of myths and fables, or that miracles cannot be certainly known or the divine origin of the Christian religion be proved by them, let him be anathema.”

As a matter of fact, the possibility of miracles should be beyond dispute from the very nature of the government of the world. God did not tie His own hands by establishing the natural order; and a miracle is nothing more than God’s action outside of the natural order which was freely instituted by Him and entirely subject to Him. Not that God can surprise Himself by a wondrous action exceeding the whole order of nature; we have no business picturing Him as standing back amazed and a little chagrined that He had not thought of such a thing earlier. The eternal knowledge of God includes everything that will ever happen be it natural or miraculous.

From the point of view of the created causes, a miracle is a work of wonder; but seen objectively, it is merely a manifestation of the evident truth that the establishment of the natural order did not exhaust or limit the power of God. That order is dependent on God, not God on the order. The natural order and miraculous works do not stand glaring at each other like irreconcilable enemies. A miracle is not a violation of nature nor a destruction of natural laws; such a thing is an impossibility involving the contradiction of God acting against Himself. The nature of things is left intact by a miracle, it does no injury to natural laws; but through a miracle, a power transcending all the limits of nature makes itself known.

Distinction of eternal law, providence and divine government

For the clarity of the record, it may be worth while, in closing this chapter, to note in passing the interrelation of eternal law, providence and the government of the world. In the second volume of this work the question of eternal law must be gone into thoroughly. Here it is sufficient to point out that eternal law is the first principle from which providence and divine government of the world flow as conclusions. Providence is the plan of God covering every detail of the universe; while the government of the world is no more than the execution of the divine plan. Eternal law and providence are, obviously, in the mind of God, and from all eternity; the government of the world is, of course, in the universe itself, it began with that universe, for its proper work is to direct that universe to its final end, God.

Conclusion: Impossibility of the denial of divine government in the universe:

On modern grounds

From all this, it is evident that the modern denial of government in the world is nothing less than a denial of any end, goal or purpose for the universe; many a philosopher today will explicitly insist on such a denial. Yet modern philosophy’s own efforts seem to be directed desperately at a foundation for unity in the world, efforts that range from pantheism through the organismic philosophies to rank materialism. That is, they agree that the universe is a unity, has some common bond, yet they deny the common bond that ties that universe together, the bond that ties every community together, the bond of a common end. The reduction of the world to matter does not give us unity but disparity; nor is a common origin sufficient to explain the harmonious interaction of the universe.

Certainly, none of the modern theories explain the determined mode of action that rules the universe. This is law and law is the act of government; it is absurd to proclaim the unity of the world, to extol the discovery of its laws, to insist upon the preeminence of science, and, at the same time, to deny government. Government without a common end is a contradiction in terms; if the cosmos is an anarchy with no discoverable laws, then government can be called into question, but not otherwise.

From its consequences

If government be denied by the denial of a common end for the universe, then there is no basis for science or philosophy; there is no reason for the way things happen, for reason, the why of things, is itself a statement of end, of order, of government. Why seek laws if there is no reason for laws and no source of them? Why seek the ultimate causes of things if there is no reason for any cause? The whole intellectual game men have been playing for centuries is the futile amusement of a child. On this basis, attempts at reasonable human life and human activity are an absurdity that approaches the proportions of a cosmic joke. can there be a determined, an ordered, way of living and acting which we call human when there is no goal, no end to such a life, to such activity? Why do this rather than that, why live up to this or that standard, why differentiate between man and a clod of earth unless there be reason for that difference, unless there be determination, order, government?

The denial of the government and finality of the world sounds daring in a classroom or in a book that not too many people will read. But no one has dared to take it out of that academic atmosphere and put it to work in its destructive entirety in the practical details of everyday life except such thoroughly un-academic people as gangsters and military tyrants. Here and there a naively logical student makes a public expression of what he has been so solemnly taught, or actually puts it into practise in a concrete act — and he is crushed under a wave of horror and condemnation coming even from the very institution in which the madness was taught. This madness simply will not, cannot work in everyday life; in fact, it is the destruction of the foundation of all activity. It reduces life to an utterly insane dashing about in a circle whose only termination can be exhaustion.

The truth of divine government

The truth of the divine government of the universe answers all the yearnings which from the beginning of time have sprung from the depths of the human heart: the yearnings for unity, for activity for progress, for accomplishment, for hope, for peace, for perfection, for God. This truth gives the only solid ground for the science we prize so highly today, for philosophy, for ordinary human life. Its denial is a violation of reason, of humanity, which brings crashing to earth everything that humanity prizes. It cannot for an instant he separated from the details of everyday life without immediately ushering in confusion, anarchy, stagnation and ultimately despair. To put it briefly, this truth, as is the way of truth, meets the facts; the facts of the world and of life in the world.

Completion of the picture of God

The truth of divine government completes the picture vaguely outlined by the divine architect in the perfections of the universe. Those shadowy images, those fragile mirrorings of divine perfection, attain a clarity that alone makes them intelligible when we see their relation to the original: when we see which way they point, to what direction they go. It is from this divine harmony of the community which is the universe and its steady progress to its final end that we see God, not as the dull, static being modern philosophers frigidly embrace, but as the living intelligence Whose intense activity penetrates to the last moment of time and to the utmost depths of nature. He is not a cold, uninterested, tyrannical ruler of a world which He has forgotten, but the intimate director of the smallest actions of the world and of men. He is not the infinitely distant and humanly meaningless god that makes the modern shudder and hug himself the tighter, He is the immediately present first cause and prime mover to Whom our destiny will link us in a personal unity for an eternity. He is the governor of the world.

CHAPTER XVIII — GOVERNMENT OF THE SPIRITUAL WORLD
(Q. 106-109)

1. Communication as an essential of social life.

    (a) From the nature of government.

    (b) From difference of government.

2. Communication among the angels:

    (a) Its reasonableness.

    (b) Its double nature: enlightenment and speech.

3. Illumination and enlightenment in the angelic world:

    (a) Its nature.

    (b) Its mode of operation.

    (c) Its subject matter and effects.

    (d) Its characteristics.

4. Speech among the angels:

    (a) Its nature.

    (b) Its mode.

    (c) Extent and subject matter.

5. Angelic government in the universal order:

    (a) The notion of hierarchy:

               (1) Human hierarchy.

               (2) The angelic hierarchy.

6. Government and order in hell:

    (a) Necessity of harmony in hell.

    (b) Speech of devils.

    (c) Subjection of the devils.

Conclusion:

  1. A prescription for utopia.

  2. Place of man in the government of the spiritual world.

  3. Social life of heaven.

CHAPTER XVIII GOVERNMENT OF THE SPIRITUAL WORLD (Q. 106-109)

Communication as an essential of social life 

From the nature of government

POLITICAL action consists in working together to the common end under a united direction. Notice the word “common”; for every time the note of common is struck in the field of politics, the fact of communication is solemnly announced. Men do not get very far in political union if they are enemies so bitter that they have built an impenetrable spite fence between their minds. For government supposes an end common to a multitude, since it consists in directing the many to that one end. That there must be a goal over and above the individual one is brought out by a contrast of anarchy with government, for anarchy is the acme of complete self-interest, the pursuit of an individual end to the exclusion of all else; logically, anarchy reaches its full maturity in a solitary inhabitant of a desolate island, at least a desolate spiritual island. A common end among men who cannot communicate with each other is unthinkable.

Try to imagine men existing with absolutely nothing in common — neither race, species, ideals, thoughts — and you have a picture of loneliness so desolate or of savagery so intense as to give the woes and wars of men as we know them a merry air. If, by an impossible hypothesis, government did exist among such men, it would be a sterile, stagnant, dead thing; for the proper act of government, the means by which that common end is reached, namely, law, is itself a communication from the governor to those governed, the flagship’s flash to the fleet. Such a government might look well under glass or mounted on a signet ring; certainly it could serve none but a decorative purpose.

It is essential, then, that we investigate the matter of communication for the rest of this book will be engaged with the question of government. In the last chapter, we saw something of the government of the physical world in general and what God can and must do in the movement of creatures to their end; in this chapter and the succeeding ones, we shall investigate the part played in the government of the world by creatures — angels, men and irrational creation.

From difference of government

Before plunging into the question of communication among the angels, it might be well to dispose of the inevitable objection against the necessity of communication for government. It will unquestionably be pointed out, it always has, that chemicals and trees do not communicate with each other or with members of the same species, yet they follow immutable laws thus giving incontrovertible evidence of government. The objection is well worthwhile in that it brings out clearly the two distinct classes of creatures which are directed by the divine law governing the universe.

One class is governed and in no sense governs itself, that is, the inanimate world, the plant world and the world of brutes. Plant and inanimate creation is completely devoid of communication; yet in that creation there is perfect unity of action, of end and of direction. The point to notice is that this direction is all one-sided. This plant and inanimate world is like a world of slaves whose slavery is so abject that their end, their direction, the very response made to direction comes from the governor. These creatures are passive participants in divine providence. The brute world has some kind of communication; at least there seems no hesitancy on the part of a mongrel in reading rightly the confidently low-pitched growl of a bull dog, a cat and her kittens succeed in making known their mutual needs and anxieties. Here the crucial fact is that the brutes have no communication as between subject and governor; that is, they have no recognition of nature’s commands as commands, no knowledge of laws as laws, but only a necessary response to an extrinsic principle which has stamped its directions in the essential principles of brute nature. This is but another form of passive participation in providence.

The other class of creatures are governed in the strictest sense of the term. They are not only governed, they take an active part in that government and, in a very real sense, govern themselves. They share in divine providence passively by obedience to physical laws and actively by acting as a principle of direction for themselves and others. These are the creatures of the rational and intellectual worlds, men and angels.

These creatures can do what they are told; but they know they are being told and why they are being told. If the reason for the command remains obscure, there is certain to be some discussion, sharp criticism and even open revolt. These creatures not only have communication among themselves but also with the governor and his government: they know the common end and the different means to that end, they are consciously aware of the laws directing them to that end. All of this has been said effectively in what has come to be an American symbol: the general store, with its cracker barrel and homespun politicians, is a declaration of the sharp difference between the role played by men and by the rest of the physical world in the divine government; when such gatherings become popular among fleas or birds, we can begin to feel uneasy about the reality of that distinction. Until such a time, men will proclaim that truth even though they gather to deny it.

Because of our intellectual nature, the angels and ourselves are free, we have a choice of means to that common end. That freedom establishes beyond question individuality of thought and action; it thus gives rise to the infinite variety of social life and, at the same time, makes absolutely essential the communication we call speech if there is to be any social life. For speech is the means by which those strikingly different individualities are moulded into one social whole which works coherently through government to its common end. The very first evidence of group action comes with the first evidence of communication in the brutes; but they are a physical whole rather than a moral unit, they are pushed by the will of another, rather than united to govern themselves to a consciously recognized common end. However, even such group action as they have would be impossible without at least a minimum of communication.

Communication among the angels

We must establish communication among the angels, then, before there can be any talk of government among them: and, since they are a part of intellectual creation and should have an active part in governing themselves, their communication must be not merely of subject to subject but also of subject to governor and government. The establishment of communication among the angels is exceedingly simple. For angelic nature is not the type to sit sullenly in a corner without a word to say, feeling all alone in the world. The angels are one step higher than men in mirroring the divine perfections; in comparison with their intellectual powers, our own minds are cripples, limping along on crutches. They are intellectual natures, which means that they must have a knowledge of the end for which they were created and for which they act, as well as of the means by which that end is to be obtained. In other words, by the very fact of being intellectual, they must know the purpose of government and the laws by which that purpose is achieved: if this be denied them they have been changed from angels into something considerably less than men.

On the same grounds of intellectuality, as we have seen, the angels must be conceded freedom, the choice of means to their end, for appetite follows knowledge and an intellectual appetite can be satisfied only by the universal or supreme good. Even though there are no vicious temperaments among them, they are strikingly different personalities who necessarily demand communication as a means of moulding the multitude into a social and political whole. Anarchy, you will remember, cannot happen among the brutes; it is knowledge and freedom that makes anarchy possible and that also gives rise to that active share in government — but only on condition of communication.

One comforting thing about intellectual nature is that every individual has something to communicate all the time. The hushed silence of patients in a doctor’s office is a ghastly thing, whereas the effortless chatter of women on a streetcar has a comfortable human air about it; it is true that we have nothing to say only when our minds, hearts and imaginations have been utterly inactive, it is never true that we must search desperately for an original thought, for any thought that is ours is original. The personal element that colors every thought, every emotion is so distinctively original that it has never been seen before in the world and never will again; no one can possibly get at it until we have brought it out and made a gift of it to the world. For all these things are not the result of response to mere external stimuli but the totally incalculable and utterly secret results of highly individual activity.

Unlike other creatures, members of the rational and intellectual world cannot reach their fullest perfection except through others, that is, through the medium of social life. Society, whether among men or angels, is not a luxury of civilization but a necessity of nature. The rest of creation has an elaborate equipment for life and needs it badly, for life there is a solitary, pioneer affair; man has only his reason, his hands and other men, the angels have only intellect, will and other angels. To deprive such as these of communication would be much more serious than pulling a lion’s teeth or making a cat wear leather heels.

It is not only angelic nature but the whole scheme of the universe that cries out for communication among the angels. As we approach the perfection of God, the imaging of divine perfections is more perfect; we come up the steps of perfection through mere being, then life, sense knowledge, rational or human knowledge to the heights of the intellectual life of the angels. Each of these grades of perfection has its own proper activity flowing from, and in full harmony with, its particular nature. So the supreme and necessary divine action is that substantial communication which is the Trinity; its closest image is the communication of thought and its consequent awakening of love; then, running down the scale of perfection, there is the communication by generation in the brutes and plants; and, finally, only a faint vestige of the Trinity is to be found in the mere existence of the inanimate world.

It is only the man who is conscious of his weakness who dares not share his strength, the frail man who must conserve his health, the ignorant man who must be niggardly with his knowledge, and the fool who has nothing of wisdom to offer; for it is a universal law of perfection that it seeks to scatter itself, to communicate itself to others. A miserly man of great wealth is an object of contempt even to himself for, in a sense, he is so dull he has not yet realized his wealth; his heart is still the heart of a street gamin who must use teeth and claws in the acquisition and defense of every penny. Without any other argument than the perfection of angelic nature, communication between the angels is an obvious truth; such perfection must be scattered, must be shared and in the only way possible to an intellectual nature, that is, intellectually, by the revelation of a concept or truth to another mind.

Its double nature: enlightenment and speech

In general, this intellectual communication among the angels corresponds to communication between men; it may be described as the manifestation of the angelic concepts to another angel. Among ourselves communication takes the double form of teaching or just talking, of revealing a concept as dependent from the first and supreme truth or as dependent from the individual will of the talker; we can demonstrate the freedom of man or we can mention our love of the opera, a favorite restaurant and our preferences for the company of certain people. In the angels, this distinction is much more sharply differentiated than in us; to its parts theologians have given the imposing names of illumination (or enlightenment) and speech.

Enlightenment is nothing more or less than what we call teaching, understanding teaching, of course, as the manifestation of truth and not as the exposition of wild theories of a man bent on being different or the Panicky wanderings of an unprepared professor. The concept revealed in enlightenment or illumination does not depend on our will but on the first truth; that is, it corresponds; to things as they are. Obviously, we are not teaching others when we bore them with our dreams, impress them I with our good intentions or wheedle them with our wishes. Teaching among the angels is quite a different procedure than it is among men. For angels do not teach one another by unwinding a long chain of reasoning to drop the anchor of truth in another’s mind; reasoning is a human necessity for a human weakness, the crutch on which our minds hobble to the truth. The angelic teaching is not flavored by a liberal sprinkling of images, illustrations or contrasts; these are products of imagination and imagination is totally lacking in the angels. For them, the task of teaching is one of complete simplicity; they bring about the knowledge of truth in another angel by fortifying the inferior intellect and then manifesting the concept they wish to impart, taking the lower angel by the hand and then turning on the light.

It is true that the fortification of another intellect is a somewhat mysterious action. It cannot be by any direct action on the intellect of the angelic disciple, tightening its bolts, throwing up a few supports, or pouring in distilled strength; only God can act directly on the intellect and will. It seems rather to be an indirect bringing out of a little better than the best that is in a disciple, spurring the pupil on to actions that would not be possible to him alone. St. Thomas gives an invaluable clue in his use of the word “comforting” to describe the superior angers action on the inferior’s intellect. With this comfort, the inferior angel understands much better, as a small boy sleeps much better in his mother’s bed on a stormy night though he must do his own sleeping, or as an infant walks with assured help handy but falls instantly when that help is not in reach; so boys are bolder and more mischievous in the comforting presence of the gang.

The real sense of Thomas’ carefully carved word is even stronger than this. For the inferior always works better in union with the superior, as vegetable life in animals is superior to that in plants, and sensitive life in man is superior to sensitive life in animals. Though the parallel is not exact because we are specifically equal, this same thing can be vaguely seen in the activities of men: a man plays better golf when his rivals are his superiors at the game, a man does better thinking when he is wrestling with an intellectual opponent who has him outclassed. On the contrary, a few years in the gutter will be no help to the finish of a cultured woman, there is a distinct intellectual deterioration in the thinkers of the Church in the absence of real opposition, muscles that are not strained become flabby. Just the fact of working with a superior intellect is itself a strengthening, a comforting of the inferior angel’s mind.

The second step in this teaching, the manifestation of the concept, is accomplished by simply breaking it up. We have seen that a superior angel understands by fewer and more universal concepts; to hand down these concepts unchanged to an inferior angel would be like giving a child his father’s clothes. They might be much better clothes, but are much too big for the child; so, in themselves, these superior concepts are much better concepts. but they are too big for an inferior intellect and result in only a vague, confused knowledge. They have to be cut and shaped to fit the intellect of the angelic disciple, made more particular, their universality shrunk.

None of the angelic doctors can really be called specialists. The subject matter for their teaching embraces the universe of created things. It has not to do with the essence of God or the beatific vision of that essence; after all, every angel sees the divine essence to its full capacity and, anyhow, that essence cannot be manifested through teaching for it cannot be contained within the limits of any concept however universal. This angelic teaching concentrates on the divine works which are in God as in their cause, that is, with the plans of the divine architect, the ideas of God, and their execution. Naturally the superior angels possess those plans in a way most like the divine possession of them, being more perfect images of God and closer to the source of those ideas.

Perhaps the best example of this manifestation of truth among the angels would be a ray of light speeding from its source, broken up into its different colors here and there, but never stopping until it had reached the limits of creation. Just so the manifestation of a superior angel sweeps on, not merely to one angel but to all inferiors. accommodating itself to the mind of each, but never stopping until the lowest angel has been enlightened. The ray of angelic light cannot penetrate the will of any other angel; that is sacrosanct. Not even the angels can do more than coax the will of another to act, enticing it with a lovable thing, but never exerting that infallible allure that is proper to the Supreme Good itself.

But that angelic ray of light does sweep over all the intellects of the inferior angels, illuminating them, purifying them of all nescience, perfecting them, like the rays of the sun removing darkness, giving light and revealing the object of vision to the sight. Of course, the sweep of this ray is always from the top down, from the superior to the inferior; for only those who know more can teach, at least among the angels. Here there is no question of one being more expert in one line and less in another, a potential teacher of one, a necessary disciple of another: for in the angelic world, the superiors are always closer to God, they are pre-eminent in knowledge and sanctity and thus know more of all things than those beneath them.

There is no slightest stinginess in the doctrinal illumination of the angels. The superior tells all he knows, fully shares his superiority with all other angels in response to that urge of goodness to diffuse itself; this is a constant spiritual generation, an intellectual begetting that is absolutely unstinted. Nor is the superior any the worse for it; he remains superior for this greater knowledge is proper to him, these intellectual clothes fit him alone. All others can participate in that knowledge, but imperfectly, each in proportion to its intellectual ability. Eon after eon this angelic teaching goes on; with no night to interrupt, the angelic suns pour their rays in an eternal day for always there will be new things revealed about the world of created things, revelations that come first and best to the superior angels. Even after the world has passed and judgment has been pronounced, there will be a constant necessity for this illumination, the inferior minds will always need the comfort and manifestation of the superior angels, for this angelic learning is only participated, borrowed, as the air borrows a note from the throat of a singer and cannot maintain it without the constant support of the singing throat.

Speech among the angels

Not all angelic conversation is of this solemn doctrinal type; among the angels there is that intimately personal speech that runs gaily through the days of human life in the bright garments of chatter, gossip, hopes, dreams, wishes and experiences. For each angel has all that prices less treasure of richly original and mysteriously individual knowledge that is an inalienable possession of personality.

Its nature

St. Thomas calls this type of angelic conversation “speech.” Both illumination and speech run none of the hazards and labors of voice production, enunciation and articulation, not to speak of lisping and stuttering, that do such strange things to human conversation. Both these types of angelic communication are accomplished effortlessly and with absolute accuracy by a simple act of the speaking angel. With the angels, the mere fact of a concept being directed to another assures the understanding of that concept.

We possess a concept in three distinct ways: habitually, as we hold to the multiplication table, not using it oftener than is necessary; actually, when we consider it here and now and, in a sense, talk to ourselves; finally, as ordered to another, as when we put an idea to work building a house, revealing a truth or unveiling the privacies of our personality. It is by no means enough for us to ordain a concept so the mind of another; a gag will keep our thoughts tightly imprisoned within ourselves, deaf ears are barriers that keep us circling the mind of another, indeed, even words themselves conspire against us, refusing to bear the heavy burden of intense concentration or clumsily spoiling the fine shadings of a thought too fragilely perfect to suffer transportation. Our concepts can be hidden from others either because we refuse to reveal them or because the very grossness of our bodies make ineffable the beauties that so captivate our minds; we are obliged to use external words and signs, and, often enough, the very externality is a positive impediment. It is precisely this obstacle that is missing in the angels.

Its mode

How does the listening angel know it is being spoken to? To us this seems decidedly mysterious, though se have hints of the answer when, now and then, we feel someone’s eyes upon us, we grasp a thought before it has been uttered, a word before it has been formed. St. Thomas says, quite simply, that just as our senses are moved by sensible things, so the intellects of the angels are moved by intelligible things; just as sensible signs excite the external senses, so through concepts the mind of the angels can be excited to attention.

When we consider that one angel can talk to another across the whole width of heaven, it might seem that heaven Would indeed be an eavesdropper’s paradise. It is true that distance has no part to play in angelic conversation, for the intellectual operation of angels abstracts from time and place that so enclose matter, the impediments that cling to our conversation through its phantasms and external words. Yet, as a matter of fact, heaven would be hell for an eavesdropper; for, though all of heaven be between the two, one angel can talk to another in perfect privacy because the sole excitant to attention is the will of the speaker. In fact, no one need ever know that these two were talking at all; there is absolutely no way of plugging in on the conversation for it passes through no switchboard.

Extent and subject matter

In the case of illumination, it is the superior angels who do all the talking; but the same is by no means true of the intimately personal conversation of the angels. Interiors can talk to superiors, and have something to tell them, or even to God Himself; this speech, you will remember, depends on the will of the speaker and the personality that is proper to him alone. What does one of the lower angels say to God? Well, there is a colloquy with God that is uninterrupted, a lovers’ chat, a constant expression of admiration, adoration and awe at His excellence; now and then there will be an occasional conference as regards the things to be done in the ordering of the universe.

Angelic government in the universal order The notion of hierarchy

The perfection of angelic communication, with its necessary exclusion of the misunderstanding and emotional prejudice that so mars human social life; indicates something of the perfection of the angelic principalities. These have been given the name of hierarchies, a name that is defined by St. Thomas as a “sacred principality” with the full implications of a prince, his subjects, the community or multitude directed by the prince to its end. God, the supreme prince, as the first cause, lord and governor, is prince of all the angels, as well as of all men and indeed, of all creatures. The universe itself is a principality whose prince is God, whose subjects are all creatures and whose common end is God.

Human hierarchy

But hierarchy is a sacred principality, that is, it is a term reserved for a community capable of participating in the holiness of God, capable of virtue and victory or of sin and defeat, a free moral community. Of these free moral creatures whose common prince is God not all belong to the same state within the great divine empire; the mode of government of each group follows the nature and activity of the subjects governed, for God is a very wise prince. The human hierarchy receives the government of God under sensible similitudes and is a separate state; the angelic hierarchy receives this divine direction in its intelligible purity, without the medium of sensible things.

The angelic hierarchy

Since government, political and social life follow the natures and activities of the subjects, particularly when the governor is wise, it follows immediately that the social and political life of the angels is vastly different from our own. It will involve no temperance or uplift societies, there will be no athletic clubs or sewing circles in it; plays, games, sports will all be ruled out. All of these presuppose bodies and the angels have no bodies. They have only that double operation of a purely intellectual nature, the type of operation that is God’s own, the operation of intellect and will. Whatever differences there are within that angelic state will have to be based on these operations.

Each angel is an individual species, since there is no way of multiplying individuals within a species that excludes the individuating principle of matter; yet we find three main lines of intellectual activity within the angelic state, three grades of universal understanding constituting the three angelic cities or the three hierarchies of angels. The first knows the reasons of things as they exist in the absolutely universal cause, God Himself; they stand in the vestibule of God. The second, with a less perfect, less universal knowledge, knows the reasons of created things as they exist in the most universal created causes. The third knows the reasons of things as dependent on their proper created causes.

Just as in any city not all men can be traffic policemen or stenographers, so among the angels there must be a distinction of offices and duties if general confusion is to be avoided. So in each of the three angelic cities, three different orders are distinguished. The first angelic city centers its activity on God Himself, contemplating the essences of things in God. Within it are the Seraphim, the highest of all the angels, who excel in their immediate union with God and their flaming love for him; from this fiery love comes their name. Next are the Cherubim with the plenitude of wisdom which their name indicates, excelling in the knowledge of the divine secrets, the wisdom of divine providence; they have a clear vision of the first operating virtue of the divine model. Last in this order are the Thrones who have a perfect knowledge of the end of all things and so of the disposition of the divine judgments. The Thrones have the note that is common to this whole order; the Cherubim retain this and add a special note; the Seraphim possess the note of both Thrones and Cherubim and add another still higher note. Indeed, this interrelation within each hierarchy is universally valid: the lowest order has the common note, which is possessed and surpassed by the immediate superior. The orders of this first hierarchy can be compared to men, all of whom are friends of a king: but one has the right to enter familiarly into the presence of the king: another knows the secrets of the king; the third is united to the king in a perpetual companionship.

The second angelic city, engaged with the universal created causes, has for its proper object the general ordering of means in view of the end and therefore demands the distinction of three orders. The first is made up of the Dominations to whom pertains the distinction of the things to be governed; then the Virtues to whom belongs the faculty of fulfilling the things to be done, imparting to general causes the necessary energy; and, finally, the Powers who are busy with the details of how things to be done or commanded are to be carried out in detail.

The work of the third angelic city is primarily one of execution for its object is the particular causes of created things. The leaders in this city, the Principalities who deal chiefly with the beginnings of actions, are the leaders in that angelic work of execution which consists of announcing divine things. Next are the Archangels whose work is the announcement of great things to men and the care of goods that are at the same time general and particular, such as the truths of faith and the divine cult. Finally come the Angels who announce the ordinary things and take care of the particular, individual goods.

Within each of these orders there are many, very many, individual angels. If we knew them perfectly we could distinguish all their proper actions to the last detail. But, knowing them only imperfectly and vaguely, we cannot know that each has this particular work and this particular place within his order, just as meeting a strange factory worker in an exclusively textile city, we can know no more about him than that he works in a mill. It is to be noted that the foundations of these orders are the different natural perfections of the different angels, perfections which we have seen are carried over into the realm of grace; consequently they endure even after there is no world to be directed to its proper end.

It would be a legitimate question here to ask how much of this doctrine on the angelic hierarchies is of faith. There is, in fact, very much of it that leaves no room for doubt. It is clearly of faith that the angels speak to one another and to God from the varied and numerous statements of such conversations in Scripture. The Council of Lateran has defined the existence of three hierarchies of angels in each of which there are three choirs; the names of these choirs are all contained in Holy Scripture. To this may be added the evidence from the liturgy of the Church: the Te Deum, the offices of the Guardian Angels, of Michael, Raphael, and so on. The detailed development and philosophical explanation are the work of St. Thomas, drawing upon the rich tradition of the Fathers, especially Gregory and Pseudo-Dionysius, the biblical functions of the angels and the philosophical tradition of movers of the heavenly spheres. He gives a new organic structure to the world of separate intelligences by his arrangement of them on the principle of lessening intellectual illumination, perfectly assigning their place in the universal order and keeping in perfect harmony the grades of participation of the divine perfection.

Government and order in hell 

Necessity of harmony in hell

A treatise on the government of the spiritual world would be incomplete without a word on hell. For, of course there is government and some kind of order in hell; as a work of God, hell cannot escape the plans of the divine architect. There is a kind of perverse harmony in hell, a concord of wickedness such as we might find among thieves or murderers. It is a cooperation, not of friendship or social leanings, but of viciousness aimed at a common goal, not of achievement, but of destruction. The basis of that concord, that order of hell, is the natural gifts of the fallen angels, just as the natural gifts of the good angels make up the basis for their hierarchies. Natural gifts are not lost by sin precisely as sin, so a natural superiority and inferiority was carried over into the realm of sin by Lucifer and his followers. There Lucifer is supreme because he is naturally the most perfect of all the devils and because his sin was the greatest.

It cannot be much comfort to him, for there is no more potent cause of misery than the commission of evil, especially for a clear intelligence; to be a leader, to be supreme, in sin is at the same time to be the greatest in misery. What little satisfaction might be had from a sense of power is turned to ashes by the fact that the greatest of the devils is subject to the least of the good angels, for all order and dominance is originally in God and is participated by creatures in proportion to their propinquity to God. Indeed, often a little vinegar is added to the ashes as when, for instance, a mere man like the Curé of Ars is given complete superiority over the whole horde of hell.

Speech of devils

Conversation is not lacking in hell, though it is undoubtedly far from edifying; for the devils still have their angelic wills and concepts. There is no illumination, no teaching, in hell, and not only because the devils are so wholly evil that they give no help whatsoever to another; the fact is that illumination is always in reference to the order of the first cause and they are completely in disorder relative to that first cause. However, now and then, the good angels tell the devils some things that it may be necessary for them to know for the working out of the plans of divine providence.

The perfect social life of the angels is not to be attained by men this side of heaven; but that does not stop men from dreaming. Perhaps it is because we are such close kin of the angels that even a momentary consideration of their lives afflicts us with a traveller’s nostalgia; they seem like big brothers who have beaten us home by many a weary mile. We envy them a little, dream our dreams of homecoming, and try to make the shelter of the moment look something like the home at the end of the road That family yearning for perfection that drives men restlessly on has made itself felt no less strongly in his social life than in his individual life. Men have dreamed their dreams of the perfect society, put those dreams down on paper apologetically or belligerently, and tried, with an inevitable futility, to make the dreams come true within the walls of an earthly city.

It is not strange that some shadow of the angels should hover over those dreams and those gallantly conceived theories; the tragedy is that not more of the angelic pattern was woven into the plans; the stark fact is that all of the angelic prescription for utopia can never be filled by men. As a rule one or two aspects of the angelic society have been fastened on to the complete neglect of the rest. The community of goods among the angels, For example, has seemed a splendid ideal to men: that the wealthier should dispense all of their goods, unstintingly, constantly, joyously in a blaze of beneficence as life-giving and as dependable as the warm smile of a spring sun, that would make the ideal state among men. Or that the superiors should always be superior, that those who have most should continue to have it: that the more intelligent should always be rulers and the less intelligent always subject without a murmur of discontent — either of these would make for utopia among men.

Conclusion: A prescription for utopia

AS a matter of fact, the angelic utopia is not made up of one or the other of these factors. It is true that there is a complete community of goods, an unstinted generosity on the part of the superiors; but that community of goods does not involve a classless angelic society, that generosity on the part of the superiors in giving is perfectly matched by the generous subjection of the inferiors in receiving. In this society, superiority is measured rightly by propinquity to God; the greater are those who most closely image divine perfection in being, knowledge and love; the generous are those who have most to give and the goods they scatter so freely are not lost to the givers though they are received by others. Superiority here involves a responsibility of constant teaching that others might be helped, subjection involves a constant docility that help might be received; order is thus perfect and government a benignly indispensable help.

Place of man in the government of the spiritual world

That perfection has not yet been seen on earth; nor will it be seen, if for no other reason than that men are not angels but fallen men. The angelic hierarchy is, by its nature, distinctively different and more perfect than the human hierarchy; but it is not so different that the gap between the two cannot be spanned by a bridge of the supernatural. For in heaven, men will be like the angels and, indeed, will close up the ranks broken by the sin of the devils. The high dreams of men have roots deep in the plans of God; they are not to be pulled from the minds of men by disappointment, disillusionment or a failure so constant as to be habitual. Men will dream on; and, eventually, the dream will come true — and stay true.

Social life of heaven

However, the angelic doctors will have a teaching task of the first magnitude on their hands when men take over their part in the social life of heaven. We shall have much to learn, so much that we shall spend an eternity in the learning of it; not that we shall sit in absorbed silence drinking in knowledge while not daring to betray our ignorance by so much as an unguarded word. We shall have plenty to say and the angels will have plenty to learn; for each of us brings a mysteriously rich personality with us, a personality that yields to no explorer of truth but ourselves. In other words, the lines of communication between ourselves and the angels will be wide open; it would be neither human nor angelic if immediate and constant advantage were not taken of such an opportunity to get a word in.

CHAPTER XIX — THE ROLE OF THE ANGELS
(Q. 110-114)

1. The heavenly movers of the material world:

    (a) A modern denial.

    (b) An historical affirmation.

2. The fact of angelic activity in the world:

    (a) Its proof.

    (b) Its limitation.

    (c) Its consonance with the dignity of material causes.

3. Angelic action in the world of men:

    (a) Indirect action: on the intellect and will.

    (b) Direct action: on the sense faculties.

    (c) Relation to human dignity self sufficiency and freedom

4. Angelic ministers to the material world:

    (a) Assisting and ministering angels.

    (b) Place of superior angels.

    (c) Limitation of ministering angels.

5. The role of angels in the world of men:

    (a) Of the good angels — guardianship:

               (1) Subject of this guardianship.

               (2) Dignity and distribution of the guardians.

               (3) Effects on the guardians.

    (b) Of the devils — attack:

               (1) The fact and causes of hostility.

               (2) Its limitation.

               (3) Physical attacks of devils:

                   a. Infestation.

                   b. Obsession.

                   c. Permission.

               (4) Moral attacks.

Conclusion:

  1. Role of the angels and scientific thought.

  2. Role of the angels and philosophic thoughts.

  3. Role of the angels and moral thought:

               (a) Appreciation of supra-human aid.

               (b) Value of this appreciation.

CHAPTER XIX THE ROLE OF THE ANGELS (Q. 101-114)

The heavenly movers of the material world

THE modern rejection of the idea of angelic activity in the material world is a fact that need not be argued, least of all to the moderns. They are rather proud of it as evidence of the happy transition of the world from infancy to maturity, putting away poetic and mythical notions to subsist on the solid meat of facts. In reality, this denial of angelic activity is not due to the world’s having grown up so much as it is to the world getting childish.

A modern denial

It is expected that a child will take a fable as a fact and miss the moral it makes, so the moral is carefully pointed out at the fable’s end. Just so some delightful phantasy is taken seriously today and ridiculed; a Christmas card portraying tiny angels going about with tapers to light the stars or playing violins to put music in the wind is smiled at as a pitiful relic of a superstition that is long in dying. As a matter of fact, no one seriously supposes that the stars are like street lamps to be lit at night and extinguished in the morning by sleepy or yawning angels, nor that music is injected into the wind by a kind of super-broadcasting station; even if some men did harbor these fantastic notions, they would not be nearly so close to madness as those who suppose the light came from darkness and the wind from a vacuum. The phantasies, however, are not philosophical expositions or theological tracts; they are phantasies, beautiful phantasies that a normal child is quick to appreciate.

More often this denial of angelic activity is not so much a matter of conviction as of aversion, like a child’s fight against an afternoon nap because it interrupts his play. This modern rejection is not a result of a conviction of the impossibility of the supernatural (absurd as such a conviction may be) but of an aversion to the suprasensible because it interrupts the game of exclusive concentration on the glitter of the sensible world. In speaking of the angels and angelic activity as such, there is never a question of the supernatural, for the angels, as created substances, are part and parcel of the natural order; but there is always question of the suprasensible, for the angels are pure intelligences, devoid of all corporal qualities and characteristics. It is precisely because of this suprasensible character of theirs that the angels have fallen out of favor with the modern world. A suprasensible creature automatically puts a limitation on man’s engrossment with the sensible world, it puts a stop to his childish pretense of having everything in his hands to make or unmake at his scientific hat. As soon as an angel comes in, man has to stop playing God; and he likes to play God.

It was just this absolute devotion to the game of materialism that turned modern philosophy so sharply away from the intellect and that now leaves that philosophy high and dry as neither philosophy nor science but only anti intellectual.

An historical affirmation

Historically, this modern position is an infant in arms. Angelic movers of the universe immediately found their place in Oriental philosophy; Plato placed a spiritual substance over every corporal thing as an integral part of his doctrine of self-subsistent ideas; Aristotle, while disagreeing with the Platonic doctrine of separated forms, admitted the angelic presidency over the material world, though he restricted it to the more universal agents of the corporal world, the heavenly bodies. The Arabic philosophers, with Avicenna, held to the Platonic teaching but made those spiritual substances a conglomerate whole which was called the active intellect. The Fathers of the Church and the scholastics placed different corporal substances under the presidency of different angels, not because of any peculiar affinity in the angels, but because of a definite orderly arrangement on the part of divine providence. But all retained the central notion of spiritual activity in a material universe. It was when the modern world went back to the childhood of Greek philosophy with the re-birth of materialism in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries that all activity was centered in the material world itself; all existence, all life, all being were centered in the material world when that philosophy reached the full flower it is enjoying today.

The fact of angelic activity in the world: Its proof

The angelic activity in the material world is stated plainly in Holy Scripture; to take just one instance, when the travelling eunuch had been baptized, Philip was moved across the country with the easy speed with which a man’s mind moves from one thought to another. As a matter of fact, this state of affairs is eminently reasonable, indeed, it is demanded by the order of things all about us. In the political world we insist that particular power be ruled and directed by the universal so we carefully distinguish the gradually mounting powers of cities, counties, states and federal government. The idea was not a brilliant inspiration unheard of before in the universe; it was merely another case of man’s genius copying the artistry of nature. In the physical world the particularity of a form is a declaration of its subjection: minerals are subject to plants by reason of the plant’s power to assimilate other forms to their destruction; the plants bow to animals which can assimilate forms by particular knowledge; all physical nature is beneath the dominion of intellect and its power to assimilate all forms.

Its limitation

Every material form is, by the fact of its materiality, particular, limited to the here and now while the angelic forms are universal precisely because they are free of matter. Just as in the material universe the less particular directs and administers the more particular, so the universal spiritual forms should direct the determined and particular forms of material creation. In fact, such administration on the part of the angels seems to be demanded by the effects which, in an earlier chapter, we have called accidents, that is, the effects that are not the direct result of any one material cause but that come by way of surprise from the clash of material causes. In other words, there are things happening in the material world not wholly explicable by material causes alone; and this is particularly evident when we keep in mind the universality of the order in that material world.

Its consonance with the dignity of material causes

This does not mean that the angel’s equipment for government includes an Aladdin’s lamp. An angel cannot change a horse into a cow by a wave of a wand, or by a wave of anything else; in fact, an angel of itself cannot produce a single material composite, not a tree, a rock or an animal. The information of matter by its form is not an angel’s work; that belongs to the material causes or to God Himself. We can think ourselves into a fit of sickness, or drive ourselves on by will power long after the point of exhaustion; but an angel can do no such thing to the material world. The difference is that our soul is immediately united to matter as the form of matter; the angels have no such connection with matter and so have no means of effecting a formal, intrinsic change. What changes they can produce in matter must be made from the outside, by extrinsic causality.

Of course, they can produce some changes in matter. After all, the superior has all the power of the inferior; if a bird can charm a man or a shark can take off his leg, these things are not to be denied to an angel. Indeed, the angel, being superior, has the power of all beneath him in a superior way; he will move corporal agents more smoothly, more efficiently, more powerfully than any material cause. There is no real reason for surprise when the angel produces effects with a material cause that the material agents themselves could never produce; we are not particularly surprised that a cooks working with such clumsy materials as a fire, a barnyard fowl and some stale bread, can produce a beautifully browned roast chicken stuffed with dressing, though we know well enough that the fire, the chicken and the bread could never achieve such perfection left to themselves.

The angels can move bodies with a corporal movement; nor should this have to be argued very seriously. We grant the power to a bull, particularly if the matador is a little slow or clumsy, and surely an angel is superior to a bull. lt is inconceivable that a bull should toss an angel, but quite within the realm of possibility that an angel should toss the bull. Really, this angelic movement of bodies is just another case of the beautifully interlocking hierarchy of being in which the lower, in its supreme activity, touches the higher order. For local movement, as we have seen in considering the grades of life, is the supreme activity of a purely material composite and the activity which should naturally be immediately subject to a higher, a spiritual, nature.

What difficulty there is in this truth is a difficulty of imagination rather than of conception. We can easily understand men throwing a ball with their hands or bumping into doors with their noses; but the activity of the angels in regard to such things seems not so easily grasped. It seems a distinct disadvantage to lack a body, particularly in a game like baseball or football. The difficulty arises from our insistence on carrying over the imagery of human activity into the world of the angels. We argue that because a man cannot throw a ball without hands, of course an angel is just as helpless. The fact is that a body limits and contracts the activity of a spiritual substance rather than aids it; because of its union with the body as its form, our human soul cannot move other bodies except through its own body. The angel, not suffering this limitation to a particular body, can move other bodies freely, without the use of a corporal medium; the very absence of a corporal medium makes it impossible for us to draw imaginative pictures of the process, such as an angel getting set for a blow or swinging in a graceful arc before hurling a ball.

It must be constantly insisted that this angelic activity is within the natural order. It in no way conflicts with nature or the causality of secondary material causes; it is itself a part of nature and a secondary cause. The one thing it does to material causes is to make their operation more perfect through union with a higher cause.

It is completely certain that the angels, of themselves, work no miracles; that is God’s proper field, for a miracle must exceed the whole order of nature. They do things that may seem wonderful indeed to a particular material cause; but then it would seem wonderful to a stone, could a stone enjoy wonder, that so small a boy could impart On it the preternatural gift of flying through the air.

Angelic action in the world of men: Indirect action: on the intellect and will

Coming to the world of men, it should be immediately apparent that an angel can no more pour knowledge into a human brain than can a human professor; for the intellect is one of those intrinsic accidents, inhering directly in the substance of the soul, that no created agent can get at directly, either to read the thought hidden there or to put new thoughts alongside the old ones. If a man wants his guardian angel to know what he is thinking, he must speak out; not even an angel can read one’s thoughts.

Direct action: on the sense faculties

Angels can, of course, teach men in somewhat the same way in which they illuminate inferior angels. The process, however, is not exactly the same. There must be the same comforting or strengthening of the intellect and the cutting of the angelic concept to fit the inferior mind; but this is not quite enough. The human intellect cannot digest raw intellectuality. Its natural way of knowing is by abstracting the idea from the sensible image or phantasm; the angelic idea must be given a coating of the sensible before it can be swallowed by the human mind. It is not necessary that we know an angel has enlightened us for the fact to have taken place: though we must, of course, realize that we have a new idea. Much the same thing happens in human affairs and we think nothing of it; how many employees have dropped a thought on the boss’s brain, then sat back patiently waiting, letting the idea sink in to such a depth that the boss will take it for his own and push it to the limit. Many of the good thoughts we have, the inspirations, resolutions, hopes, kindnesses are not the result of our innate goodness but of the patient labor of a teaching angel, thanklessly repeating the lesson over and over again.

Relation to human dignity, self-sufficiency and freedom

Our will is no less sacrosanct than our intellect. No natural agent, angels included, can force that will to action or move it directly. What is done with a will is done indirectly: coaxing, presenting lovable objects, desirable actions, threatening it, as we wheedle a child with a piece of cake or frighten a criminal with the threat of the electric chair.

The dreams that warned Joseph against Herod were quite ordinary operations of an angel. Not that all dreams are angelic in source or material; but it should not be hard to see that the angels have the power to impress images upon our imagination or to present our senses with external stimuli. We can hurry, shivering, into a theatre in the dead of winter only to have the blistering summer day pictured on the stage so affect our imagination that the air seems sultry and perspiration pours from us. A fairly moderate stomach-ache can start our imagination off on the most woeful series of images; a single buzz of a mosquito is sufficient for us to imagine whole chunks of our legs being bitten off. If the necessarily clumsy make-believe of the stage, a bodily indisposition, or the faint stirring of one of our senses can so vividly affect the imagination, we can be very sure that the angels can do a better job with it.

Both the senses and the imagination are corporal, organic faculties, powers we have in common with the animals and so, of course, under the presidency of the spiritual world, open to spiritual activity. The exercise of angelic activity in these fields demands nothing extraordinary on the part of the angels; if they can move material things locally, they can stimulate our senses and imagination. Unlike the intellect and will, our senses and imagination can be got at from the outside.

Angelic ministers to the material world

Nor is this angelic activity in the world of men an affront to our self-sufficiency, our dignity or freedom any more than the activity of a professor is an infringement on the dignity or freedom of his students. Rather, it opens up a much greater field to human minds, strengthening and uplifting them; this activity is a perfection of human nature within the purely natural field which human nature of itself could not attain.

Assisting and ministering angels Place of superior angels

While there is no work to be done in the material world so great that the least of the angels could not take care of it, there is an orderly distribution of angelic activity according to divine providence that leaves the first hierarchy of angels exclusively engaged in the courts of heaven. St. Thomas makes the comparison with the regime of a temporal kingdom in which not all of the counselors of the king are ambassadors, some remaining permanently at the court as participants of the secrets and counsels of the king, others receive the royal commands and plans and pass them on to the actual messengers.

Limitation of ministering angels

In the court of heaven, the highest hierarchy (Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones) are members of the divine household whose whole activity is centered on the divinity itself. The first choir of the second hierarchy (Dominions) serve as the medium between the heavenly court and its messengers; while the last two choirs of the second hierarchy (Virtues and Powers) and the third hierarchy (Principalities, Archangels, Angels) have the actual administration of the material world. From the supernatural point of view, inasmuch as all enjoy the beatific vision, all the angels are said to be assisting angels, assisting at the throne of God; but from the natural point of view, the first four choirs (Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones, Dominions) are assisting angels; the last five (Virtues, Powers, Principalities, Archangels and Angels) are administering angels. Of the two groups, the assisting angels are far more numerous, a conclusion reached on the grounds that what is more perfect in the world, what is more directly and fully an image of divine perfection, is more directly the intent of nature and nature’s author. Just as there are many more angels than there are corporal species, so there are many more of the higher angels than of the lower.

The role of angels in the world of men: Of the good angels — guardianship

The particular role of the good angels relative to the world of men is one of guardianship. This may sound a little insulting to the adult human for it implies protections direction, inspiration, comfort and encouragement. Why should all this be necessary? Isn’t man able to take care of himself; why treat him like an infant?

Subject of this guardianship

The assignation of guardian angels to men, a fact completely certain from abundant places in Holy Scripture, is not a peculiar exception for the case of men by way of precaution against their infantile debility; it is merely an insistence on man’s integral place in a perfectly ordered universe. In that universe, the lower is ruled and regulated by the higher, the movable and variable by the immovable and invariable, the lower material things by the higher material things, the corporal by the spiritual. Certainly man, through his free will, can avoid evil but not perfcctly as the constant victory of passion eloquently testifies so also the universal knowledge of the natural law can guide man to good, but the application of that law to particular cases gives man too frequent an occasion for a bad mistake. In spite of the help that comes directly from God, the help of grace and the virtues, there is plenty of room for the work of the angels in the practical perfection and application of these virtues. There is no need for pride stiffening our necks at the mention of guardianship; look at the human record.

Dignity and distribution of the guardians

Angelic guardianship is not limited to a group, a class or a race; it extends to every individual human being. If we find it hard to believe the extravagance of divine generosity in delegating a heavenly prince to every human being, it is principally because we so consistently underestimate the dignity of the human individual in the scheme of the universe and the plans of the divine architect. On the same grounds, the crucified Son of God was a stumbling block to the Gentiles.

In the material world, divine providence, while extending to the smallest details, evidently intends and extends particular care to that which is enduring. Thus, for example, we see the extraordinary precautions taken by nature to preserve the species and its seeming carelessness towards the individual when it has a spawning fish lay millions of eggs that a few might come to maturity. The human individual, from the point of view of perpetuity or endurance, rates higher than any material species; for his rational soul is by nature destined to an eternal existence. The enduring individual of the human species is the particular care of divine providence, a care which ex presses itself with at least the same emphasis as is given to the material species. Tile individual human being has a particular guardian angel because he is immensely important in the plans of the divine architect.

As a matter of fact, there is probably no man who does not have the help of more than one of these guardian angels because there is no man who is not a part of some larger body, some social organism. As these social organisms, like the laws that govern them, are of their nature perpetual, they have their own guardians; there is an angel guardian of a kingdom, a state, of a city, perhaps even of a diocese, a parish, a religious order or a monastery.

The angelic guardians of individual men are drawn from the lowest choir of the third hierarchy, the choir of the angels. Each angel, of. course, differs from all others as much as a stone differs From a tree; for there is the gap of species between them. Within the choir which furnishes guardians for men there is the same graded order of perfection that is to be found in the whole universe; and that graded order is made use of in the actual assignment of guardianship. The more perfect angel is given the greater work, thus preserving the proportion between the perfection of nature and the perfection of function; for example, the more perfect angels are given as guardians to those men from whom more is demanded in the line of spiritual perfection, such as the saints, of intellectual labors, as the men of genius, of work for the common good, as statesmen, and so on. Where the object to be guarded is more universal, the guardian angel chosen is of a higher choir; so, going up the list of city, state, kingdom and so on, we pass up the line of the angelic choirs destined to guard the world of men.

Coming down to particular cases, St. Thomas denies that Christ had a guardian angel because He was, from the very beginning of His life, in possession of the beatific vision; and it is the work of a guardian angel to lead men to that vision which constitutes their eternal happiness, so the individual man has no guardian angel in heaven or in hell, but rather a companion reigning with him in heaven, or a persecutor punishing him in hell. Christ rather had an angel ministering to Him than a guardian protecting him. Man in the garden of Eden had a real need of a guardian angel, even though he could suffer no danger from the rebellion of his sensitive nature or from the material world in which he lived. As the event proved, there was always the supreme danger of attack from the devil. The infidels, the thoroughly wicked, even anti-Christ himself will have guardian angels, as follows from the general ordering of the universe and of men. Nor is this guardianship in vain; without it, these men would be very much worse. In fact, the loss of a guarded soul is not to be laid to negligence on the part of the guardian angel but to the wickedness of the individual soul which is always free to plunge itself into hell.

The guardianship of the individual soul begins, in the opinion of St. Thomas, at the moment of birth, not at the moment of conception. While it is true that the child in the womb is certainly possessed of human nature, it so intimately belongs to the mother as to be almost a part of her, as the fruit is a part of the tree; during that time, the child is guarded by the guardian angel of the mother, not by its own guardian. Beginning at the moment of birth, that guardianship continues up to the moment of death when human nature is disintegrated by the separation of the body and soul. At no time during the span of human life is a man deserted by his guardian angel, at no time is he without the protection of that heavenly prince. No matter what he does with his life, no man suffers the loss of that unrelaxed vigilance and untiring patience of his angel.

Effects on the guardian

How does the angel feel about it ally Would it not be entirely reasonable if the angel of a first class sinner were to throw up the whole job in disgust? At least the angel would seem to be entitled to a little disappointment or even chagrin at the total waste of his magnificent efforts. As a matter of fact, the angel’s peace of mind and happiness in no way depends upon the activities of man; it is not wearing its heart on its sleeve, that heart has been given to God. The guardian angel is in possession of eternal beatitude and so impregnably protected from all sorrow; its will is in perfect accord with the divine will so that whether man follows the order of merit to an eternal reward or the order of justice to eternal punishment, he cannot cause sorrow to an angel by stirring up a conflict between God and His messenger. There is, however, a real possibility of conflict between the guardian angels of different individuals or of different principalities, as for instance, in the case of war, when the aims or needs of these different subjects of guardianship are diametrically opposed. Here again the conflict is more apparent than real and certainly cannot result in bitterness between the angels involved. Both angels are perfectly united to God, in complete harmony with His divine will and, of course, that divine will is in harmony with itself; the conflict comes from an incomplete knowledge of the divine plans and ceases as soon as those plans are revealed. The angels know this; during the interval preceding such a revelation, they do not sever diplomatic relations, refuse to speak to each other, or contaminate the air with nasty innuendoes. Each does his utmost at his own task, satisfied to be fulfilling the task assigned by the divine Master.

This doctrine of the guardian angels is by no means merely a popular sentiment in the Church, as Calvin thought. The fact of guardianship is absolutely certain and of faith from the Scriptures themselves. That every one of the faithful has his particular guardian angel is quite clear from Holy Scripture and is the universal doctrine of the Fathers of the Church. That not only everyone of the faithful but every human being has his own guardian angel is the common teaching of the Doctors of the Church; that every kingdom, province and city has its own angel seems quite clear from Scripture. St. Thomas thinks that public persons, destined to work for the common good, have another angel commissioned as guardian for these specifically public works. That every parish, order, monastery and so on has its own angel is a probable opinion that seems to follow immediately from the principles behind the general guardianship of the angels.

Of the devils — attack

Besides the good angels there are also fallen angels; which fact would immediately lead one to suspect that angelic activity in the material world is not exclusively of a beneficent nature. These devils harbor no love either for God or man; their very nature gives them the power to act on the senses and imaginations of men, to coax the human wills and to feed human intellects with the material for knowledge. They have the motive for acting and the power to act; the fact is that they have acted in the material universe from the days of the first man.

The fact and causes of hostility

Of course such activities are definite attacks on men, attacks whose history has its roots deep in the beginnings of the universe. There is first of all that terrifying hatred and envy of God that so consumes the devils now. Pride led them to ape the self-sufficiency of God; pride can not now let them forget the shamed exposure of their insufficiency. As it led them to ape the divinity itself, so now it leads them to ape the divine government of the world; Satan’s kingdom sends its own ambassadors into the material world to work to the ends of evil that divine beneficence might be thwarted. Over and above this pride and envy of divine things, there is a definite hatred and envy of men as participants of the divine life and divine happiness, an envy that drives the devils on to every effort to impede that union of God and men.

Its limitation

The devils are not stragglers from a once proud army, plundering where and when they like; they are not guerilla bands that have escaped a pursuing army; nor are they an army of evil that has fought the legions of God to a standstill. They are by no means out of control; rather they are definitely and completely subject to God. The extent and power of diabolic attacks on men are themselves subject to divine ordination; the divine government is wise enough to fit even such things into the working out of the perfection of the universe, for it knows how to use evil by ordering it to still greater good.

Physical attacks of devils: Infestation, Obsession, Possession

Now and then, but rarely, the devil makes a spectacular display by attacking men physically. This might be of great importance for advertising purposes, if the devil needed advertising; it has little importance from any other point of view. Three classes of these physical attacks have been distinguished by theologians, ascending to a climax of impotent fury. The first, called infestation, consists of an attack centering on the surroundings of man rather than man himself; noise-making, throwing things about, breaking articles of furniture, mysterious knocks on doors and walls, and so on. It was this sort of thing that plagued the Curé of Ars night after night for so many years during the pitifully few hours he could set aside for sleep. Obsession, on the contrary, is a personal attack, but essentially an exterior attack directed to physical injury and so to the instilling of terror; in its effects, it does not go beyond the attack that any man might make on another by blows or kicks.

The real crescendo in these attacks is reached in what is called possession. Here the devil approaches internal domination of the person involved for he takes over almost complete control of the lower faculties of the possessed person: imagination, senses, even purely vegetative and animal operations. So much is this true that during the time of possession, the one possessed has no control over these faculties. It must be remembered that this attack is also no more than physical, that it has no moral significance and is without the power to sway the will or act directly on the intellect; that is, it is incapable of forcing a person to commit sin. Sometimes possession is permitted by God with no fault whatever on the part of the one possessed; at others, there are definitely assignable causes from the side of the victim: such, for instance, as openly selling the soul to the devil, weakening the will by constant practise of hypnotism, flirting with the devil, or openly inviting him in, through spiritualistic seances, frequentation of astrologers, fortune tellers and so on.

Moral attacks

The moral attacks of the devils are really much more serious; but because they are much more commonplace and not at all spectacular, they are much less feared by men and women. We call them temptations. It is a mistake, of course, to comfort ourselves with the thought that all temptations come from the devil. As a matter of fact, temptations have entirely efficacious causes in the appetites, habits and companions of men; indeed, some of them may come from God Himself. For, after all, a temptation, strictly, is nothing more than an experiment, a trial, to determine the powers of the one tempted. It is this nature of temptation that shows so clearly the difference between temptation as it comes from God, man or the devil.

The temptations from God are rather to show a man himself and others of what stuff this man is made and of what he is capable. Thus, the terrible temptations and trials of the saints were evidences to the saints themselves and to others of how great things they must suffer for God and how utterly dependent they are on God. The temptations that come from men are normally for the purpose of the tempter, to discover things for himself and, perhaps, to obtain things for himself. Thus, for a man to tempt God is a sin because it proceeds from doubt or incertitude of God’s power; a man may tempt other men either to help them or to injure them. When the purpose is injury, the spiritual seduction of others, the tempter is doings the devil’s work for this is precisely the aim of the devil’s moral attacks, to seduce man, to lead him into sin. The passions of man and the world about man are said to tempt man, but only materially, offering him the material for sin. Obviously they have no conscious purpose of temptation behind them unless they are used by a conscious agent such as the devil or another human being, as indeed they often are. Indirectly we might blame all sins and temptations on the Devil insofar as the exemplar of all sin and the corrupter of human integrity came about through the temptation of Eve by the devil. For the most part, however, we get along in sin very well without the devil, even without the help of anyone but ourselves. We cannot do the supernatural work required for heaven without supernatural help; but we suffer no such insufficiency in the order of evil, we are quite capable of sins that damn us to hell without any suprahuman aid. Not all sins are traceable to the devils; but there is no class of sins to which the devil does not tempt men and women.

In the course of such temptation, it is quite possible for the devil to work marvels, just as it is for the good angels to work marvels; but not miracles. The devils have lost none of their natural powers through their sins; but neither have they gained any supernatural powers as a result of their fall. The works of the devils are marvels only from the point of view of the material causes with which they are worked; the serpents produced by the Egyptian magicians, the fire from heaven that consumed the herds and family of Job, the crash of the house which killed his sons — these were not tricks but stern realities with the devil for their author. They were certainly not miracles.

It would seem, granted the natural cleverness of the devil and the clemency of God, that once the devil has been thoroughly beaten by a human individual, he would pretty well abandon that manner of attack on that individual. Usually it works out that way. After all, there is no sense in throwing armies against a fort that has proved invincible. On the other hand, once a weak spot has been found by the devil, it is fairly certain that there will be many future attacks on the same place and along the same line.

Conclusion: Role of the angels and scientific thought

The role of the angels in the government of the material world is not likely to be the subject of a scientific paper within the next few years; it is to be devoutly hoped that no conscience-stricken American millionaire leaves a legacy to set up a laboratory for such an investigation. The results would be doomed beforehand to a most unscientific character. Science has nothing to offer by way of proof of the angelic governors for such a matter is simply not subject to scientific methods of inquiry. By the same token, there are no grounds for scientific attack on the role of the angels in our world. Science and the suprasensible cannot come to grips. If science thinks, at any time, that it is attacking or destroying the notion of angels and angelic activity, it is in the throes of a nightmare. Don Quixote was much more sane, attacking windmills with a lance, than is a scientist attacking the invisible, intangible, immaterial substances of the angelic world with a scalpel or a microscope.

Role of the angels and philosophic thought

Nor can the role of the angels be disproved by philosophic thought. Some philosophers have thought they found a way around this by first strangling the outer guard of the angelic world, the human intellect; unfortunately, with the death of the intellect, philosophy ceased to breathe and the former philosophers were stripped of all but scientific equipment. Facing the facts of the existence of man’s intellect, the order of the universe and the hierarchy of being, the angels and their activity in the material world are demanded; a demand that was recognized as genuine by generations of philosophers.

It is true that the activity of the good angels cannot be demonstrated by the human reason alone; any one of these effects could be produced directly by God Himself. Yet the activity of the devils seems to present us with definite proof of the presence and activity of spiritual substance. It is to be remembered that philosophy and science do not exhaust the possibilities of certain knowledge for man. He can still be told truth by one who knows all truth; he can still receive knowledge in unadulterated form directly from the first truth by way of revelation on the authority of the first truth, Who cannot deceive or be deceived, the role of the angels in the material universe is indisputable.

Role of angels and moral thought: Appreciation of supra-human aid

The moral thinking of men offers an added source of conviction of the activity of the angels, for it brings home as nothing else can, the need of man for suprahuman aid. Our own human weakness is a splendid reason for the strength and help of the angels. The realization of the hordes of far superior beings on the alert for the downfall of man makes the doctrine of the guardian angels a necessity if terror is not to hold sway over the human heart. With our eyes open to the weakness of man and the strength of the forces of evil, the way is clear for a full flowering of virtues essential to the living of human life. We are quite willing to exercise a healthy caution, not at all resentful of the truth of a wholesome humility; concretely, we are much less likely to flirt with sin, temptation or the occasion of sin on the false assumption that nice people like ourselves do not succumb to the things we are hardly likely to develop, in the moral order, that careless confidence that sends a veteran steelworker hurtling to his death; we shall cultivate a sound, rational fear.

Value of this appreciation

The comfort and courage of the presence of the guardian angels is not an invitation to sluggish mediocrity of effort but an inspiration to outdo ourselves. The importance of man in the universe, underlined by the fact of angelic guardianship, is something to be held fast to as the solid ground of self-respect and evident refutation of the slimy theories that would sink man in a mass. Purity is not nearly so difficult in the presence of angels who stand continually in the presence of God. All of these virtues are obvious conclusions from a man’s admission of the truth of the angelic government of the physical world. Perhaps the most obvious of all is the one that will be most slow in its growth, that graciously human virtue of gratitude. If the angels would only frown at us by way of reminders or stand conspicuously till we were forced to think of a tip, if they would cough, but no, they are entirely unobtrusive. It is entirely up to us to murmur a word of thanks, or go haughtily on taking their indefatigable service for granted.

CHAPTER XX — THE ROLE OF MEN AND OF FATE
(Q. 106-109)

1. A fundamental truth — integrity:

    (a) The view of the slave.

    (b) The view of the coward

    (c) The view of a man.

2. Fact of the activity of corporal creation.

3. It The mode of this activity:

    (a) Philosophic explanations.

    (b) Principle of this activity.

    (c) Influence on human actions:

               (1) Distinction of human action and acts of man.

               (2) Direct influence on human action.

               (3) Indirect influence.

    (d) Influence on the spiritual world.

4. Fate:

    (a) Its definition in general.

    (b) Its harmony with and distinction from providence.

    (c) Its inevitability and universality.

5. The role of man:

    (a) Physical action on the material world.

    (b) Strictly human action:

               (1) of man’s intellectual powers:

                   a. On the minds of others.

                   b. On the material world.

               (2) of his generative powers.

               (3) of his nutritive powers.

6. Man’s place in the government of the world:

    (a) Relative to divine and angelic action.

    (b) Relative to the material action of bodies and of other men.

    (c) Man’s own power and place.

Conclusion:

  1. Summary of this volume.

  2. The Lord of the world.

  3. The divine architect.

CHAPTER XX THE ROLE OF MEN AND OF FATE (Q. 115-119)

OLD things may be best but if so they are badly cheated, for we give them nothing like the proper attention excellence deserves. Old things become so familiar, so comfortable that they seem to mould themselves to our shape, abandoning their own, as though at the same time to wrap their arms about us and proclaim their surrender of themselves to be merged with us. They do really become a part of us to such an extent that we see as little of them as we do of ourselves; it is almost shocking to have an old thing brought sharply to our attention, as confusedly embarrassing as a suddenly realized excess of introspection. These are to be taken for granted, as we take our hand, our eyes, our minds for granted; which is to say, they are to be persistently overlooked.

A fundamental truth — integrity 

All through this book a fundamental truth has cropped up again and again; it is no surprise to meet this old friend in this final chapter we are so accustomed to this familiar truth by this time that it seems like an old friend; and, like an old friend, we can easily take it for granted, pass it by, overlook it, sure that there will be no recriminations, no enduring enmity as the result of our blindness. Perhaps we can best express this familiar truth by pointing out that a coward multiplies the dangers he must face and dies a thousand times; or that one lie must always be patched up by several others The reason for both of these is that one fact cannot be dodged without a hundred others crashing into us head on, one stone of truth cannot be crushed without an instant need for extensive repair work to prevent a collapse of the building. In other words, a man cannot toy with any part of the divine plans without defacing the edifice.

If through cowardice, aversion from unpleasant truths, ignorance, pride or any reason whatsoever, we take away any least thing from God, the universe, or any part of that universe, we reduce the whole to chaos; undoubtedly because the whole is so perfectly ordered on the model of divine truth that it is not patient of the least error. The fact remains that if we try to run away from the omnipotence of God, we throw ourselves into the remorseless maws of a heartless machine; if we exalt man above all else, we destroy him; if we attempt escape from the bitterness and struggle of a material world by fleeing from it, we become lost in a shadowy world of phantasy; if we exalt the material world, we are helpless before a monstrous divinity fabricated by falsehood.

In a word, there is no substitute for truth, the whole truth. There is no corner of the universe so distant that in it we can bury an unpleasant fact of that universe beyond all discovery. The facts must be faced, all of them. The truth must be admitted, all of it. In spite of himself, man cannot turn his back on a fact, a truth, a detail of the plans of the universe; he can only pretend to, shouting his pretensions the louder as the ominous tramp of truth’s boots pounds down the avenues of his mind.

The view of the slave 

There is no cause for astonishment, then, in the fact that the view of men on the activity of material creation in the affairs of the universe profoundly affects their views of God and of man, particularly when the original view has something in it of fact-dodging. In the concrete, the interrelation of our views of the material world, man and God is startling. Take, for example, the view that is almost universal among modern philosophers today, the view that cedes supreme activity to matter, in fact, insists that there is nothing else, no other source of perfection. This is a slave’s view of the world, of man and of God; in such a world, man is just a part of an unthinking aggregation or process, without significance in his beginning, without hope in his life, with no goal to crown his death. God, in such a world, is non-existent.

The view of the coward 

This picture is so monstrous it is no wonder men have turned coward in the face of it. It leaves no room for God or moral responsibility, thus apparently releasing man from burdens; but at the same time it leaves no room for order, for intelligence, for purpose, for value or for meaning. That is too much for a race whose first question is “whys”, and whose constant quest is for happiness. Some men of today have tried to run away from this horror by denying its existence, much as a frightened boy on a lonely road will try to still his chattering teeth by assuring himself there are no ghosts. There is no material world: or, if it does exist, its activity is not its own in any sense but that of a spirit, preferably our own human spirit. Other men have not had the energy for even this much of a gesture of protest against the horror. In them, cowardice reached its supreme goal of abject surrender in the suicide of humanity when men said that while material creation did not exercise the only activity, its particular action was wholly irresistible. Material creation operates, they say, with a necessity and inevitability that admits of no control, no interruption, no escape; men, in the face of this inexorable movement of the material world, are helpless pawns.

The view of a man 

In contrast to this distorted view of the plans of the divine architect, there is the human view which, since man is a shadow of divinity, is also the divine view. It sees in the material world a real activity, operating at the command of physically necessary laws; but an activity that is only a part of a world activity, a subordinate causality with its definitely subordinate place in the workings of an orderly universe. The material creation is subject, above all, to the supreme mover; it is controllable by those shaven in divine providence, the intellectual creatures we call men and angels. True enough, this is a hard view: it demands courage, insists upon responsibility, on action, on persevering effort, but it also gives room for meaning, for hope, for success, for human life. It is a view that has all the brilliance, the inflexibility, the suavity and peace of the whole truth.

Fact of the activity of corporeal creation 

If it is remembered that the activity in question here is not that of living things but of inanimate creation, the fact of material activity can hardly be seriously questioned. The activity of living things has already been treated at some length in this book. Here we are interested, not in that immanent activity that is within and for the agent, but in the transient activity that passes from the subject to the outside; the kind of activity that we see, for example, in a chemical reaction, radio-active substances, in the long, graceful sweep of the wind, the rush of the rain or the hushed falling of snow.

A few men deny the existence of such activity; but not many, perhaps for the very good reason that such a denial is much more than open violence to common sense. The denial is itself a reflection on the power of God, as though He were a weakling tyrant Who did not dare share any of His power, guarding His causality in niggardly fashion lest another, sharing it, should discover His fundamental weakness; to protect Himself, He made all creatures merely puppets of His omnipotence. The denial, if sustained, would mean that the whole order of cause and effect had absolutely no existence in the material world; with the result that the investigations of science were sterile, empty gestures fruitless of result, that the whole field of human activity, of moral responsibility and purposive action were no more than the hazy illusions of a mind too long locked up in solitary confinement.

Indeed, it would have results even wider than this. For it would mean that the material world had absolutely no reason for existence. The perfection of substance is in its function, that is, the reason for activity on the part of creatures is the attainment of perfection lacking to them or, in other words, they exist for the attainment of their ends. Deny this activity and you blast out the rational foundation for the existence of the material world. To put the thing in modern words, you destroy the dynamic character of the world, reduce it to stagnation, to decay, to ultimate nothingness.

The mode of this activity: Philosophic explanations 

By far the greater number of men readily admit the fact of the activity of the material world. In trying to explain this evident fact, philosophers have offered a variety of opinion that pretty well exhausts the possibilities and the impossibilities. So true is this, that practically every vagary of modern philosophers is reducible to the three following explanations of older philosophers. According to the Jewish philosopher, Avicebron, material activity was only an apparent activity; really that activity was the result of a spiritual power that penetrated all bodies. Plato and the Arabian philosopher, Avicenna, (with considerable difference of detail) explained this material activity by saying the part played by matter was only a preparation, a stage-setting, a disposition; the real activity was due to an immaterial, spiritual principle. The Greek materialist, Democritus, would have it that the action of the corporal creatures was merely a case of the flow of atoms from one body into another.

Aristotle and St. Thomas went deeper into the question and solved it by answering the question why bodies act at all, rather than the question of how they act They decided that the principle of activity was the individual perfection of the acting body; and very reasonably, too, for few men are seriously hurt by being struck by an imaginary automobile, it is only a real body that can act, and only insofar as it is real. The proportion, in other words, of the activity of a body corresponds to its possession of perfection, to the actualization of its potentialities; it can act on other bodies only insofar as these other bodies lack perfection, that is, have unfulfilled potentialities. To put this into the ruthless brevity of scholastic terminology, we would have to say that a body can act insofar as it is an act and according to the potentialities of the subject upon which it is acting.

To Aristotle and Thomas, this immediately brought to the fore a continuation of that hierarchy of being we have seen so often; for there will be a scale of activity in bodies corresponding to the scale of their perfection. If there exist bodies which have completely realized all their potentialities, whose form has completely exhausted the possibilities of their matter, then these will be the supremely active bodies, the first corporal movers. The science of their times offered Aristotle and Thomas just such perfect bodies in the celestial bodies; these were then placed at the top of the scale of material activity, influencing all other corporal action.

Principle of this activity 

The scientific basis of this conclusion has long since gone into the discard; it has been decided scientifically that the stars and planets are not bodies of a different kind from those that exist here on earth. But the metaphysical principle explaining the activity of the material world — the principle of individual perfection — has lost none of its validity. The seeds of material activity are the potentialities, realized and unrealized, whose interplay works steadily to the ordered perfection of the material universe.

Influence on human actions 

Though he believed the heavenly bodies were the first corporal movers, directly playing their part in the activity of every lesser material thing, Thomas made it plain that the influence of these bodies did not upset or destroy the field of human activity. These heavenly bodies, after all, were but another part of a well ordered universe, as also is man; they have their specific nature, as has man. One does not destroy the other; rather, both take their proper, orderly place in the divine plans.

Distinction of human action and acts of man 

To see the exact influence of material agents of the human order, it is necessary to understand that there is much about man that is outside his control; the growth of his beard, for example, his size, what he says in his sleep, the blunders he makes in his absent-mindedness. All these, as distinct from specifically human acts, are called “acts of man.” The distinctly human acts proceed from man’s intellect and will; of these man is the master. The distinction could be put simply by saying that the spiritually controlled acts of the human race must be distinguished from those that escape the spiritual control and which are material in their origin and fulfillment.

Direct influence on human action 

Stated in these terms, it is not difficult to see that human acts have no direct relation to the activity of the material bodies, much less any direct subordination. This is no more than saying that the material cannot act upon the spiritual, that a dust storm cannot soil an angel, a star cannot affect the free will of a man, nor can a planet pour ideas into a human mind. If it were otherwise, there could be no human actions. Man would act like the rest of material nature, following necessary physical laws; that is, he would have no free wills no Choice of action, no responsibility, no control over himself or anything else. In a word, the human world would no longer exist.

The direct action of the stars on the human intellect or will is a metaphysical impossibility and is in flagrant conflict with the unquestionable facts of humanity and human activity. Nevertheless the belief in the subordination of man’s life to the stars has been for centuries a cowards refuge from the struggle of being human, and never more so than today. Thus, a famous American newspaper columnist, recently dead, could write that today astrology is no longer a dubious calling practiced by and for the shabby inhabitants on the fringe of the underworld. Today especially it is a straw for a sinking world whose following is in the highest stratum. One reader of the stars could leave a quarter of a million dollars at her death; another, of distinctive lineage and social impressiveness, makes her engagements for February in Palm Beach; for March, April and May in New York; for June, in London.

Indirect influence 

That the stars, or any other bodies, might well have an indirect influence on the actions of man is self-evident from the very nature of man. He is material as well as spiritual and his material side can, of course, be acted upon by any other corporal force; undoubtedly, his material side has an influence on his spiritual actions. This is news to no one at all. lt has been no secret that a full moon and a smooth sea have done a noble part in arranging human romance.

Coming down to the particulars of the influence of these things on the intellect of man, it is evident that a man in physical agony does not do his best thinking: that the disturbance of his sense faculties by the racket of a boiler factory, the stormy arousal of his passions or the churning of his imagination all upset the workings of his intellect. The same things have an undoubted part in influencing or upsetting man’s free choice. But no matter what the disturbance on the organic side of man’s nature, the fact is that it is on the organic side, not on the spiritual side There is no question of direct action on the intellect and will; nor can the will be forced to act, disturbance or no disturbance, precisely because it is a free will. Its action is forced only by the universal, supreme good: anything less may present a seductive appearance, but never an utterly convincing one.

Influence on the spiritual world 

Of course the angels or devils do not have to scurry for cover in April showers or sigh sadly under a spring moon; floods or blizzards, stars or suns can have no influence, direct or indirect, on the activities of spiritual substances for there is no point for material contact. As a matter of fact, material activity is limited even in the material world. Even if there were such supremely perfect corporal movers as the ancients visualized, their action on purely material creation would not proceed with nearly such inevitability and necessity as astrologists would have us believe it does in the human field; for there still remain inexplicable from the point of view of order those accidents or clashes of material causes which cannot be reduced to any one natural physical cause.

Fate 

The astrologic enthusiasts must be enrolled among the rationalists and modern fatalists who rather indignantly deny the idea of a divine providence as unworthy of either God or man and then, paradoxically, turn wholeheartedly, for a solid foundation of the world and of life, to a juggernaut called fate. If for no other reason than that the idea of fate plays so large a part in the lives of so many men, it is worthy of examination.

Its definition in general 

Generally speaking, fate might be defined as a hidden cause from whose activity nothing can escape. Actually, this definition is capable of widely different interpretation. In one sense, this hidden cause may be taken to be the disposition of the stars; from this disposition absolutely everything comes about necessarily, even the most intimate acts of knowledge and love. This is the sense in which the fatalist takes the word; and the sense which has been roundly condemned as heretical by the councils of the Church.

Its harmony with and distinction from providence 

Another, and perfectly sound sense, identifies fate with divine providence: either with divine providence immediately or with the effects of divine providence, that is with the orderly disposition of all creatures and their activities in view of the end of the universe. In this sense, fate is no more than a restatement of the Catholic doctrine which we have already seen in treating of divine providence; and, in this sense, there is no question of an inescapable necessity that destroys human freedom, whatever be the infallible efficacy of divine ordination.

The attempt to read our fate is the mighty task of trying to read the mind of God; for, if we are looking for the reason of this orderly arrangement of the things of the world, the reason, the ultimate answer, is not to be found in the stars, in the entrails of chickens, in the turn of a card, in the leaves of a teacup or in any of the rest of the trappings of the readers of the future. It is to be found in the plans of the divine architect of the universe. The actual execution of those plans is to be found, of course, in the universe itself; that is, the formal carrying out of the divine plans, the formal disposition of creatures which is the effect of divine providence and might be called fate in a Catholic sense, is all about us. In foretelling the weather, then, we are not trying to climb inside divinity; in a very real sense, however, we are reading the plans of God as they are executed by secondary causes.

Its inevitability and universality 

If we keep in mind the distinction between causal fate, which is divine providence, and formal fate, which is the effect of divine providence, the degree of inevitability in fate (taken only in the Catholic sense) is easily and rightly understood. That causal fate which is divine providence is, of course, completely infallible and certain; God makes no mistakes and receives no news from the world. But it is the mysteriously omnipotent infallibility of an infinitely good God, whose every action is a guarantee of the integrity of every created nature. The formal fate, which is the effects of divine providence or the disposition of secondary causes and their activity, has no metaphysical inevitability in itself. Secondary causes are interfered with every day in the week; in fact, it is precisely to thwart a secondary cause that we carry umbrellas on rainy days and laugh at the rain. The purely material world produces its effects with a physical necessity; while the human world suffers only the moral rule of the law of God.

On the basis of this same distinction, it is not hard to determine the subjects of fate and the extent of its kingdom. For absolutely everything is subject to causal fate, the plans of the divine architect which are divine providence. To formal fate, or the action of secondary causes executing divine providence, only those things are subject which are naturally subordinate to secondary causes; that is, God Himself, the angels and the spiritual faculties of man must be excepted.

The role of man: Physical action on the material world 

Coming now to the last phase of the government of the world, the part man plays in cosmic activities, it is clear that the material side of man needs no special treatment. He cannot lift up a mountain, though he may lift up the baby; he can be drowned, shot, run over, suffocated or done away with in thousands of other more or less artistic ways. His material being and activity is subject to the same laws, the same limitations and enjoys the same possibilities as the rest of material creation. His distinctive activity is an intellectual one. A question of distinctively human activities in the workings of the universe it a question of what man can do about that universe with his mind.

Strictly human action: Of man’s intellectual powers. On the minds of others 

Let us restrict the question still more and ask what man can do with his mind to the minds of others. More simply, can one man teach another? The fact of man’s ability to teach another by sharing with them his ideas is solidly established by the routine experience of human life; if this teaching ability is not a fact but an illusion, then it is the grand illusion or modern life on which untold hours and incredible fortunes have been totally wasted. What is not so clear in this matter is how this transfer or communication of ideas takes place.

One explanation, that of Averroes, declared that one man taught another by giving the student the teacher’s own ideas, much as one plane refuels another by giving away its own gasoline. The sense of this explanation was not that only the thing known was the same, that the subject matter of ideas was identical, but that the very intelligible species of both intellects were one and the same. Plato made education a kind of alarm clock; its purpose was merely to jog the memory of the student. For the ideas are all in every mind from the very beginning and have only to be aroused to be converted into actual knowledge. Aristotle, and Thomas after him, insisted that every man starts life with a blank mind; that each mind is a distinct, personal faculty to be perfected by distinctly personal ideas. This blank mind has potentialities; education is nothing more than the actualization of these potentialities, the reduction of the power to know to actual knowing. The teacher, in this case, is not a refueling plane, not an alarm clock, but a hod carrier bringing the materials to bricklaying students.

Moreover, as we have already seen at some length, the channel through which knowledge enters the mind is that of the senses: for the human mind, short of direct action by God, can gather ideas only from the phantasms of the imagination which, in turn, are the product of sense activity. The teacher’s work then is not directly to place ideas in the mind of the student, that would be too much to ask even of an angel, but rather to furnish the material for ideas, to offer the sensitive and imaginative approach, or, as St. Thomas puts it, to take the student by the hand and lead him slowly, carefully from what is known to that which is as yet unknown.

Consequently, the very first condition for the teacher is knowledge of what he is trying to teach: he must know where he is going if he is to lead others to a goal of definite knowledge. His actual procedure, like the procedure of all art, must be modelled on the procedure of nature for, as St. Thomas points out, a man, left to himself, proceeds from the things he knows step by step to what he has yet to learn. He goes from the naturally known principles to the conclusions that follow from those principles. Nature is always the principal cause as well as the model; art takes the tricks of nature and then by them helps nature along.

To put it still more concretely, the teacher takes his student in hand, leading him on to the things to be known from the student’s own slender stock of knowledge by proposing sensible examples, similitudes and contrasts, stepping up bit by bit from the less universal to the more universal truths, or stepping down the same way from the first principles to less universal conclusions. But his particular job as teacher is to show the connection between the principles and conclusions. In the trenchant phrase of Aristotle: proof (demonstration, teaching) is a syllogism causing knowledge.

The limitations and extent of this ability of man to teach are evident from this process of teaching. A garage mechanic, as such, cannot teach a statistician to play with figures; nor can the statistician, as such, enlighten the mechanic on the inner life of an automobile. Yet there is no man however wise who cannot learn something; nor is there any man, however ignorant who has not gathered some knowledge that another lacks. In fact, this can be pushed a little farther by saying that the humblest child with the use of reason can tell things to the greatest of the angels, things that the angel, of itself, could not knows for the mind of man is an inner sanctuary where only God enters freely, so that the thoughts of our mind can be known to another only through our condescension in revealing them. It would undoubtedly be presumptuous for the most learned of men to attempt to teach an angel natural truths; for one of the precise notes of angelic superiority over human nature is their absolutely perfect knowledge from the first instant of creation.

On the material world 

The power of our mind over matter not formally joined to the human soul amounts to absolutely nothing; we can blow out a candle with a whiff of breath, but no amount of mental concentration will snuff out the flame. Even relative to our own body, the effects we can bring about by the use of the mind must be through the instrumentality of the material faculty of imagination; an imaginary ocean crossing can make us sea-sick or a broken thermometer make us shiver with cold in an overheated room. But imagination will never break one of our legs; nor will any amount of mental effort coupled with imagination knit a broken leg. This instrument of the imagination, in other words, has very definite limitations. It is possible for intense mental concentration to render us impervious to sensible stimuli; so St. Thomas could have an ulcerated leg cauterized and be quite unconscious of the pain and the cauterization. It is to be noticed, however, that the concentration does not destroy the external stimuli it ignores; Thomas undoubtedly would have been a joy to a very poor cook, but the spoiled food would still have been spoiled food.

Death’s separation of body from soul, rather than increasing the power of man’s mind and will over material creation, naturally speaking decreases that power; by death, man loses his one medium of contact with the material world. From that time on, even such a relatively simple activity as local movement, like pushing an enemy downstairs, is beyond human power.

Of his generative powers 

As for the other powers of man, well, they naturally have the same limitations as the physical world of which they are so intimate a part. Thus, the generative powers of man can have only physical results. In the lower animals, the sensitive or animal souls are directly caused by generation; after all, they are no more than material forms and are produced, as other material forms are produced, by the action of material causes. But man’s soul is spiritual; and a spiritual substance can be produced in only one way, by the direct creative action of God. Certainly it cannot come from material causes, for it far exceeds them; nor can it come from the spiritual, which, by their very nature, are utterly simple, incapable of division, increase or diminution. To claim that human parents produce the soul of their offspring really amounts to a denial of the spirituality and immortality of that soul; which means, really, a denial of the humanity of that soul, putting it in the same class as the souls of plants and animals coming from material, dependent on material and corrupting with the corruption of matter.

The human soul, then, comes directly from the hand of God. However proud a young father may be of his child, he must give God credit for the greater work; the child is more God’s than the parents’. The work of the parents is to dispose the material of the body, prepare the home for the reception of the immortal guest which is the human soul.

Of his nutritive powers 

On the side of nutrition, man, in common with every other living thing, has that extraordinary and mysterious activity by which food and drink are changed into integral parts of his nature. As the individuals of the human race increase, the original deposit of humanity is not split up or spread thinly to make it go farther; there is a definite and substantial conversion of nourishment into the human material which makes up the human bodies.

Man’s place in the government of the world: Relative to divine and angelic action 

Before concluding this final chapter, it might be well to sum up the forces of the government of the world precisely as they affect men and women. We have seen that man is completely subject to the government, the movement of God. That movement, far from being an affront to his nature, is its guarantee and, indeed, the sole cause of man’s existence, his life, his soul, his liberty, his fulfillment. The angels cannot directly act upon our intellects or wills. Whatever their power, they are helpless before the individuality of man’s free will. The good angels exercise their power in guarding man, protecting him from external evils, teaching him subtly, anonymously, working effectively on his senses and his imagination, encouraging and comforting him. The devils use that same angelic power to tempt man or, sometimes, to attack him physically, but always within the limits placed by the mercy of God.

Relative to the material action of bodies and of other men

Man’s own power and place 

Physical creation cannot get past the barriers of man’s spiritual nature any more effectively than can the angels; his intellect and will stand supreme in their privacy. But, of course, man’s animal nature is open to the influence of material action; and so, indirectly, his intellect and will can be affected to some degree by this extrinsic, physical activity. The efforts of his fellow men leave a man serene in his independence; again his intellect and will acknowledge no master save God. His fellows can teach a man, ministering the materials of knowledge: they can act upon his physical nature; but no one, no thing, can take away his mastery over his own life and the consequent responsibility he bears for the failure or success of that life.

Conclusion: Summary of this volume 

The work of this volume might be stated with extreme simplicity by saying that it was devoted to a study of God and the world; broken down to its full significance, that certainly means that it studied almost everything. Obviously that is too much for any one volume to do; nor did this book attempt to study everything in all its details. Rather it kept a steady eye on the universal harmony of the world and its Creator, concentrating on the broad outlines of the plans of the divine architect, lest the beauty of the plans be hidden by a mass of details. Even those broad outlines of the architect and His plans are awesome. There was, for example, the question of the existence of God, then a study of His nature and attributes, as well as a glimpse into the inner divine life which is the Trinity, the distinction of the three divine persons in one divine nature.

The next step was the processions of creatures from God, which included the production of these creatures, or creation, and their distinction into angelic, corporal and human. A study of the natures of each of these culminated in the question of their conservation and harmonious interaction by the universal government of the universe.

From this study two facts stood out in bold relief as a sharp challenge to modern thought: the fact of the importance of the human individual and the fact of the orderly planning of the divine architect.

The Lord of the world 

These two are a challenge to modern thought. For the first is a sharp denial that man must reconcile himself to existence on a purely material plane where he it individually, totally unimportant; a part of a process, a moment in cosmic development, a unit in a mass whether of race, class, party or mere earth. It is a flat repudiation of the cowardice that would surrender rights, hopes, ideals, success, independence and control in order to escape responsibilities, disappointments, failure, labor and self-control. It is an indignant attack on the theories that urge a man to resignation, cynicism in all the fields of distinctively human endeavor: in knowledge, love, controlled action, attainment of a goal worthy of manhood. For from this study it is clear that man is indeed lord of the world and lord of himself; a provider for himself and for others, a governor of himself and others, a giant on the earth who, with no more than his reason and his hands, makes use of all the material creation and cannot be made use of by anything in the world. He is intelligent, he is free, he is responsible; his life has meaning, it is going to a definite goal that is intimately personal. And he alone, of all creatures in the material world, can say that he will or will not go along the path that alone will lead him home. He is the master; the rest, his servants. He is the lord of the world.

The divine architect 

The second fact is an even more fundamental challenge to our times. It is an open revolt against the madness that holds for a world without meaning, a god without intelligence and a man without purpose. It refuses to keep submissive silence in the face of absurdities such as the assumption that order came from disorder, something from nothing, progress by chance or without explanation and government from anarchy. It challenges the modern world to attempt to put these absurdities into concrete living of human life; and scorns the intellectual dishonesty that preaches one doctrine and lives another. For from this study, it has become apparent that God exists, a supremely intelligent, completely omnipotent, infinitely wise, utterly perfect God. The imaging of the perfections of divinity in the world of creatures was nowhere seen more clearly than in the orderly hierarchy of perfection and limitation; on the basis of fact, of authority, of reason the order and wisdom of the divine planning and government stood out. While, on the same basis, the attempt to deny divinity, to explain the world without God, science without divine government, or philosophy without first truth was shown to be impossible. In other words, from the irrefutable evidence of His edifice of the universe, the existence and nature of the divine architect was shown to be visible to those images of His divinity to whom He consigned the lordship of earth.

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