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A Companion to the Summa
CHAPTER VI — THE FATHER OF ALL
(Q. 22-26)
1. The paternal viewpoint:
(a) Its responsibilities
(b) Its privileges.
2. The children’s viewpoint.
3. Viewpoint of the eternal Father:
(a) The fact of Providence.
(1) Direct proof.
(2) Indirect proof.
(b) Characteristics of Providence:
(1) Universal.
(2) Immediate:
a. Distinction from government
b. Relative immediacy of Providence and government.
4. The children’s criticisms — objections against Providence:
(a) Accident.
(b) Necessity.
(c) Physical evil.
(d) Sin.
5. Power of the eternal Father:
(a) The nature of omnipotence.
(b) Its “limitations.”
6. Happiness of the eternal Father:
(a) Fact of God’s happiness.
(b) Its nature.
Conclusion:
1. Answers to the children.
2. A fatherless world.
3. Children at home.
CHAPTER VI
FATHER OF ALL
(Q. 22-26)
The paternal viewpoint
AT PRESENT, the day set aside in tribute to father is a miniature, and firmly masculine, Christmas. When it escapes its present timid preliminary stage we shall no doubt erect a statue flatteringly expressive of fatherhood. Its sculptor will have to be of the stuff of genius; he will have to catch the fleet grace of motion imprison it in stone, as the Greeks did, without weighing own the swift feet of motion by the stolid strength of the stone. For the hoary jokes that swing about the traditional father pacing the corridors of a maternity hospital, are sparrows twittering on the side of a mountainous truth.
Perhaps the young father does not realize it, but those anxious hours outside a delivery room start him off on a life-long walk. All the rest of his days he will mentally pace corridors; all the rest of his days, the moments of the present, which seem so precious and fleeting to others, will be stupid strollers that block his path to the next hour, the next day, the next year upon which so much depends; year after year he will stand on tiptoe, trying to peer over today’s shoulder, craning his neck to see around the next corner, straining his eyes to see just a little beyond the horizon that limits the sure knowledge of a man.
Its responsibilities
This last might, in fact, be a better, because more universal, motif for that statue of father: the figure of a man shading his eyes with his hands, his head tilted a little to increase the range of his sight, looking up and out, far out, scanning the future with the clear, responsible, judicious eyes of a sailor standing his watch. Such a symbol, freed of the note of anxiety but made formidable by the accent of responsibility, would show the intimate bond between the fatherhood of God and the fatherhood of man.
Both are providers, taking that word, not in its limited sense of a faithful wage-earner who furnishes bread and butter, but in its more proper sense of one who sees ahead, who copes not only with the present but also with the future. The eternal Father provides, in this sense, for all of the future; an earthly father, for that little piece of the future that is of such intimate concern to those given to his care. It is that correlative of providence — the handing over of the lives of others to the hands of a man — that is behind much of the panicky flight of the twentieth century from parenthood. “Splendor” is too noisy a word to describe the steady light of that quiet courage which makes a man responsible for the care and nourishment of this mite of life during its long progress to the vigor of manhood; for the intellectual cultivation and discipline which alone can guarantee freedom to this latest citizen of earth and heaven: for the mysterious unfolding of moral character that will either be a condemnation to hell now and forever, or the violence behind the storming of heaven. We can appreciate, to some little degree, the agony of remorse that fastens its iron grip on a neglectful father of an undernourished, crippled, sickly child; unless the experience becomes our very own, we shall never plumb the depths of sorrow in the heart of a man whose child has set its feet on a path unworthy of man.
Its privileges
Paternity, in the ordinary course of affairs, richly repays a man for the responsibilities it imposes. There is a literally personal share reserved for the father in the strength, the beauty, the brilliance, the sanctity of his children. But long before these ultimate rewards are ripe for the reaping, there is a treasure too great to be risked outside the strong walls of a home; only the members of the family are privileged to peep into that treasure chest; no one has found the words to list its items. The absolute, unquestioning confidence, the unshakeable faith of a child burrows its way deep enough into the heart of a father to allow him a glimpse of what the unquestioning confidence and unshakeable faith of man does to the heart of God. It is not the appealing trick of a gesture, the impish attraction of a smile, the naiveté of a word that breaks down the barriers a man has built up to protect his heart; the child, asleep or awake, in smiles or in tears, its feet straining with excitement or dragging with fatigue, reduces the father to helpless devotion by its own joyous dependence. Neither would have it otherwise.
The children’s viewpoint
There is probably no man so consistently misjudged as a father; and there are few judges more unfair than his own children. To the very young, he has an air of indifference, of preoccupation and impatience; for they are living in the present while he is straining his every faculty in the crucial struggle with the future, a future much more crowded with possible moral catastrophes for his children than with dangers of starvation, meagre comfort or vanishing luxury. A little later on, the children will submit him to constant comparison with all his competitors who enter their field of acquaintance. Too often the rule of thumb is a purely material one. If his success, in terms of clothes, houses and cars, has been a mediocre one, he can thank God for his preoccupation with the future which blinds him to the bitterness of silent condemnation, or the even greater bitterness of pity. Only much later, too late in fact, does he get the solid judgment that comes from an evaluation of his efforts to build men and women; a few solid blows from life quickly determine whether the training, the counsel and the example of home have built enough moral stamina in the children for the facing of life, or whether the soft flabbiness of neglect will make it necessary to hide from life through all of adult years.
Viewpoint of the eternal Father
Of course the Eternal Father, Who is God, has not escaped this general misjudgment of fathers. Those of His children who are extremely young wholly engrossed with the toys of the present, find Him aloof, indifferent, preoccupied. Why does He look ahead, providing for the long future of eternity which is of no present interest to us, instead of drying our tears, repairing our toys, taking us in His lap and comforting us? He’s not a father to us at all. The older children have looked around a bit. They have seen life, the outside of it, and are complacent in the naive sophistication which that superficial view has given them. From their superior heights they pass judgment on the eternal Provider, pitying Him the miserable job He has done, roundly condemning Him as a complete failure, or even going the lengths of denying His paternity. The rough contacts of life may eventually scratch the glittering surface of that sophistication, the humiliation of failure may cut down the height of the judgment seat, memory’s journey over the long road of the years may distinguish crumbling landmarks from those that endure; if that happens, the children mature and in their maturity pass a saner judgment on the Provider of men. The comforting thing about this long tale of misjudgments is that correction does not come too late, if it comes at all; this Provider is never beyond the reach of our apologies, never out of range of the whisper of our thanks.
The fact of Providence
The denial of providence’s long vision of the future to God is a childish misjudgment. It is only by burying our head in the presents mass of detail that we can blind ourselves to that providence; it shouts for our attention, whether we focus our eyes on the world we live in or on the God who made the world and us. In the second chapter of this book we have proved the existence of the supremely intelligent Cause of the world; to deny God’s providence is to suppose that this supreme intelligence acted with less foresight than a half-wit; Look at the thing honestly in its human framework. If our ordinary actions are intelligent, we know what we are going to do, or at least what we are going to try to do, before we start. An editor of a magazine does not cool his heels at a newsstand doggedly waiting to see what his magazine looks like and what it contains; he knew before the magazine went to press. The arrangement of the rooms in the house he has designed does not surprise the architect; if it does, he has been a very stupid architect indeed.
This is what can be expected of intelligences, this is what intelligence means: the ability to act for an end intelligently, selecting the best means, having in mind from the beginning the goal and the best way to attain that goal. In denying this to God we strip ourselves of intelligence: not only because such a position is stupid, but because the divine is the only possible source of our own intelligence. Providence in God means no more than intelligent planning for divine action. It means that God acted intelligently in building the world and governing it. He knows where He is going and how, what this particular stone is for and where it belongs. To challenge this in God is to challenge the intelligence of God; and a challenge of divine intelligence is a challenge of the unquestionable facts of the world.
Direct proof
Approaching the question of God’s providence from the other side, the side of the world, we find every detail of the universe cast in the role of a friendly guide effusively anxious that we see the central truth of the fact of providence. In a previous chapter, the internal finality of the world was insisted upon, even though such insistence seemed to be laboring the obvious: the fact that the ear was ordered by its very nature to the one act of hearing, the eye to the one act of seeing and so on. It was made clear then that this internal finality demanded a supreme intelligence, that it was not sufficiently accounted for by chance, by necessity, or by a limited intelligence. Now, as a matter of fact, such undeniable internal finality forces the mind to a recognition of an external finality, that is, to the recognition of an order to an end beyond the individuals, a world order to which each individual creature makes its own contribution.
A tree sinks its roots to search out minerals and moisture; it is not the minerals who climb the tree to pick apples. It is not the grass which clips the sheep off short, but the other way around. When cows start to hit men on the head with a mallet, hang their haunches up to age and complain of the toughness of the human hide, it will be time enough to revise our ideas on the way of the world. As things stand now, it is the plant which uses the mineral, the animal that uses the plant, the man who uses the animal; that is, it is the superior being which orders the inferior to its own superior end. In other words, the external end of the plant is the internal end of the animal; the plant furnishes the appropriate material which makes possible the end for which the animal organism exists.
The obvious interaction of creatures in the world, their subordination one to another, necessarily means a subordination of their proper ends, one to another. Things do not sit glumly in this world like so many patients in a doctor’s office, aloof, detached, encased in an impenetrable wrapping of individuality, with no reference to each other. Rather, their mere juxtaposition strikes up an intimate interrelation with all the totally unselfconscious abandon of a child among interested strangers. No one thing exists merely for itself or by itself; it is bound to things above it and below it, using the one, serving the other. Things, in other words, have an order to each other; there is an order, a finality, over and above the order to the immediate end of any one creature. There is a world order; the plan of that world order in the mind of God is called providence. For, obviously, that order, like all order, is the fruit of intelligence; it does not explain itself, but is explained only by an intelligence that cannot itself be part of that which it is ordering to the end of the world.
It is quite true that we cannot always trace the lines of that world plan. We do not know, for example, why a giant shell should have crashed into the church of St. Genevieve in Paris at the precise moment when it was most crowded; a great deal of speculation on the part of the author did not clear up the mystery of the collapse of the fictional bridge of San Luis Rey with these particular persons on it. It is just as true that unauthorized interpreters of the divine mind have often invoked divine providence for reasons of personal vengeance or childish spite: to them, there is no doubt that the strained tonsils of a loud spoken neighbor or the financial failure of a bitter rival are evidences of God’s smooth ordering of the world for their convenience. One great American news magazine mocks at a Chinese earthquake as a divine solution to a problem of overpopulation.
But why must we try to understand every detail? The element of mystery in the world order is not surprising. Our naiveté in demanding a complete copy of the divine plans, a copy adapted to our intelligence, is more than surprising, it is humiliating: with a clear knowledge of the mistakes our reasoning has led us into, of the misjudgments we have made, of the natural truths that leave our minds reeling, we pout because divinity is not made plain in tabloid form!
The mystery is there. The fact that it is a mystery gives us no more right to deny the fact, forced on us from so many different angles, than a wounded man has to deny his wound because he cannot trace the source of the bullet The order of the world is a fact that has struck the intelligence of the most ignorant of men as well as the most learned, the shepherds watching their flocks under the brilliance of an Eastern night as well as the astronomer watching the stars that shed that brilliance. The providence behind this order, the plan of the order in the mind of God, has not, consequently, been a matter of esoteric knowledge; it has been a common heritage of the human mind. The existence of that providence can be rigidly proved by unaided human reason, as we have seen; but, for the benefit of those who, for one reason or another, have not such a proof at hand and whose mind might be unsettled by the sophistries of agnostics or atheists, the existence of divine providence has been revealed by God Himself. Providence is a truth much too central to human living to be left to the sole support of a mind that stumbles with the grace of long practice and falls into the arms of fatigue as into the embrace of a life-long friend.
Indirect proof
A psychologist may spin out an hypothesis that is, to him, as beautiful as a child is to its mother. But if a consequence of that hypothesis is the denial of a soul, a mind and a free will to man, he must either chuck the hypothesis out the window or admit that he is merely playing with toys. Some psychologists have refused to do either one or the other when faced with this dilemma; but, then, neither did they act the part they had written for other men — or, perhaps, quite unconsciously, they did that very thing. At any rate, every scientific hypothesis must be checked by comparing it and its consequences with the known facts, when such facts are at all available. Following the same technique with a denial of divine providence, it becomes obvious that such a denial will not stand for an instant even as an hypothesis, Such a denial would mean that a supreme deity did not exist. This would not worry the antagonist of providence; but it would mean that neither he nor the world could exist for a moment. Moreover, it would mean a denial of all intellect, even of the intellect of the psychologist; for obviously, if the first intelligence does not exist, the secondary intelligences have no more chance to exist than the baby’s squall without the baby. Imagine an expectant father walking the floor cuddling a squall while he awaits the arrival of the first child of the family! Yet we are behind the times when we protest that we cannot picture a psychologist cuddling his intellect while he awaits the evolution of the supreme intelligence.
A shallow cup held under a rushing flow of water will hardly catch more than a sip; called up on the carpet, it might argue, in the human way, that there was no more water or obviously it would have been filled to the brim. When we hold the human mind under the swift flow of infinite truth, it misses most of that truth and comes up with the truculent denial of all but what it has grasped. Under the shock of the truth that divine providence is absolutely universal, extending to the smallest detail of everything past, present and future, the mind of man is numbed. Reasoning readily shows that this means no more than that God works intelligently. Everything exists only insofar as He causes it, and, of course, He knows what He is doing. But still the truth leaves us as calm as a subnormal student in a calculus class; much more of it has splashed out of our mind than was held there.
Characteristics of Providence: Universal
There is a little more encouraging light in our eyes when it is pointed out that the knowledge of God has, roughly, the same relation to the universe that the architect’s knowledge has to the house he planned; that is, the ordering of the effects of the first Cause to the end He intended is precisely as wide as the effects produced by the first Cause. Of course it is barely possible that a plumber with original ideas might set up a sink in the living room, to the complete surprise of the architect; the plans of God cannot, however, be wrecked, nor can the divine Architect make mistakes.
The truth about providence begins to seep through the rocky outer surface of our minds when we come down to details. We cannot be altogether unmoved by the realization that the sun rises and sets in this way and no other, with this exact, inviolable regularity, that rain always wets us, or fire burns us because they were so planned by God. It is because God made them that way that a sigh lasts only an instant while an angel lives forever, that a man is born and dies in a few years while the planets swing around their courses for millions and millions of years. That a man acts freely while the physical world about him follows inexorable physical laws is because he, and the world, were made that way by God; because the freedom he enjoys is a product of the same divine causality which produced the necessity of the physical world. By this time we are beginning to see that the plan of God, like His causality, extends not merely to things that are, but to the way they are; not merely to what happens, but to how it happens. The very difference of things find their only full explanation in God.
Immediate: Distinction from government
The difference between the extent of God’s causality and ours becomes clearer when we advert to some of our own limitations. We can, for instance, make a dog come our way simply by pulling on the leash with sufficient strength; but we do not pretend to be responsible for the dog’s acting in dog-like fashion. We can wrap a blanket around him, but we cannot stuff a bark down his throat. Our causality is necessarily limited to acting upon things; God’s extends to the innermost principles of the natures of things. He is not merely responsible for the dog, but for the nature of the dog; He is not merely responsible for the nature, but for the way that nature acts — whether necessarily, contingently or freely. Unless He be its cause, freedom can no more exist than can necessity. This insistence on the universality of the causality of God is very much to the point here for the plan of God, since He is intelligent, extends as far as His causality.
Relative immediacy of Providence and government
The plan of God, going to this great detail, would account for the action of every creature in its rush to its own goal. Actually the universality of divine providence extends much further for the creature is not an isolated being, it lives in a world in which it plays, on however small a scale, its cosmic part. It is true that providence extends to the proper end of each being in the world; the plant and animal have the apparatus and organization calculated to accomplish their own preservation and growth to maturity. Over and above this, every living thing has a purpose to accomplish relative to the species, a duty to be done for which it is prepared with unfailing efficiency and regularity. This preparation, too, is in the plan of God. Moreover, each species is not an isolated affair. It, too, has its purpose, its taste to accomplish in the cosmic scheme of things; a purpose that may be described in a general way as the service of its superiors. Again it is prepared with complete efficiency and regularity for this cosmic end; this order to the world end in the mind of God is the plan or providence of God. Little wonder that our mind staggers under the impact of this truth. Little wonder that our eyes are dazzled whether we consider its divine attention to the minutest detail or its magnificent reach to the ends of the universe. It is as wide as the world, and wider; as wide, in fact, as the action of God. That is much too wide for the mind of man to embrace and hug to its breast.
The children’s criticisms — objections against Providence
We are children and God is our Father, our Provider. His eyes sweep the far horizons of the future, of eternity; ours are fixed on all-engrossing moments of the present. Some of us, not seeing our Father’s far distant goals, decide that He is not much of a Father; even, perhaps, that we are orphans who not only have no father now, but never did have. This order about us and within us needs no further explanation than that which is offered by necessity or by accident, that is, by chance. Still others pity the efforts of our Father, pointing out the fact of physical evil as evidence that He has made a botch of His work as Provider; others positively condemn Him as a complete failure, a condemnation based on the existence of that moral evil which is called sin. These are the childish viewpoints of spoiled children: they do not need the Father; or they do not want the kind of Father Who tolerates suffering and sin.
If they were fairly reticent in their misjudgments, as decency would demand while they are still in their Father’s house, they might be passed over in silence and left to life’s hard maturing process. Of course they are not reticent; such children never are. They are bitter, critical, hastily unfair, dogmatically indocile and, above all, blatant. They must be dealt with firmly.
Accident
In the second chapter of this book we have seen the fallacy of the explanation of order by chance or necessity. Here it will be enough to recall that argumentation by noting that the explanation of order by chance violates common sense; we are not at all as happily surprised that the constituents of the eye add up to an organ of sight as we are that a roll of the dice should turn up a seven. It is opposed to all scientific thought which refuses to admit it is unveiling a will-o’-the-wisp in discovering nature’s laws. It is opposed to philosophic thought; we investigate airplane accidents; we do not make up schedules for them because we cannot conceive of the accidental as the regular course of affairs. Any devotee of horse racing would go bail for the statement that accidental results do not follow with monotonous regularity; any orchestra leader would resent the claim, if he understood what it meant, that chance unites a number of different causes in such a way as to produce, regularly, an effect that is essentially one and perfect; any amateur gardener would scoff at the notion that chance produces multiple and perfectly connected elements from a seed that is essentially one. For, to all these men, it is obvious that mere chance does not constitute the order of things, does not explain the regularity, the harmony, the efficacy of what science calls the natural action and interaction of creatures in the world.
Necessity
Necessity, the force of nature, the emergence of new elements or adaptation to surroundings do not offer an explanation; they merely push the problem back, hoping to bluff it into obscurity. How explain the necessity? What causes the adaptations or the emergence? The problem is exactly the same; it can be solved only in the name of a supreme intelligence or of sheer chance — and chance is absurd as an explanation.
Physical evil
The problem of physical evil represents a much more serious difficulty against divine providence to us of the twentieth century. Some of the difficulty comes, no doubt, from the fact that it digs its way into our hearts as well as into our heads; and when we start thinking with our hearts we can call the product thinking only smilingly. Only a poet can talk this way without embarrassment. Much more of the difficulty comes from a faulty outlook which is peculiarly ours. A close-up view can be much too close for comfort, much too close for truth; if we take an ant’s eye-view of the world by standing on our heads we can be terrified of the things we ordinarily tread under foot, a blade of grass or a fallen leaf. When we stand on our heads to look at the world, of course the things close to our eyes will look enormous; of course we shall be blinded to everything but what is within range of our eyelashes. We might as well have no eyes at all, depending on our eyelashes as an ant depends on its feelers.
As regards physical evil, we are often standing on our heads when we make our judgments, we have our eyes glued so close to the material world that our values are ludicrously distorted. From this undignified position sickness, ill health, bodily injuries loom as major catastrophes. They are absolutely fatal to one who cannot see beyond the material world he has jammed against his eyes. They to seriously interfere with pleasure, with work, with family life. But they do not impede the central activity of human life — the meriting of heaven; indeed, they often distinctly aid it. Why do you suppose that Christ commanded men to take up a cross if suffering is a major evil? Why did He visit His saints by such diseases and physical agonies? Why did He flood the soul of His mother with sorrow? Why did He himself undergo such a terrible death at so early an age? These questions demand answers before we gamble everything on health and comfort.
To this upside down observer death has all the horror of complete and blank finality. If it means the end and collapse of achievement, the end of joy, the end of life, the end of love, it is a major tragedy. But if it is only the beginning of all these things, of all that will complete our happiness, and the end only of those things that rob us of happiness it ceases to be a dread terror stalking a man through all the byways of life. Loss of fortune, of friends the discovery of a love’s falseness, all these are major tragedies only if we have made major ends of the things we lose by them. If we have glued our eyes to earth and neglect to look over the horizon into the infinity of the world of the spirit, we necessarily carry our heart on our sleeve; it will be crushed, battered, wounded, defaced, betrayed and broken. Because, you see, that is no place for a human heart.
Unquestionably God does cause physical evil, at the very least, through the operation of the natural laws of which He is the author. Sometimes, frequently enough to assure us of His providence, we can see the reason for the evil. We can understand that the plant must die to feed the animal; that animals must die to feed men; for we can understand the impossibility of order without subordination of one thing to another. We even see, now and then, how priceless was the suffering which brought a man to his senses, toppling him from the insecure throne of self-sufficiency and setting him humbly about the business of making his way home. Of course we cannot see all the reasons, nor can we see reasons all the time. But what a tragic disappointment it would be if God’s plot could be seen by us so long before we had finished the book.
Sin
By far the most serious of the children’s criticisms arises from the existence of sin. This difficulty clears up to a great extent when the exact nature of sin is accurately grasped; but, then, so penetrating an insight is a little too much to expect from children who refuse to grow up. Sin is, primarily, a privation, a lack of order to God in some act. Or, more simply, sin is a human act with a hole in it. Just as dough is not necessary to build up the pleasing and practical emptiness of a hole in a doughnut, so nothing positive is necessary to build up the pleasing and apparently practical emptiness of the hole in a human act. The action of the first cause, God, is not demanded for this defect, precisely because it is a defect, a lack of something. The first cause must be responsible for everything that exists; the trouble with this bad human act is just that there is something that does not but should exist in it. In a word, for this defect, the human will needs no help from God.
Secondarily, there is a positive element in sin — the physical act itself; just as in the doughnut there is the positive element surrounding the hole. For this positive element we must go back, through the human will, to God. Look at it in the concrete. All a pickpocket does is put his hand into a pocket and extract a wallet. We do the same thing several times every day, though with none of the eager excitement enjoyed by the pickpocket. Physically considered there is nothing wrong with the acts indeed, from this physical point of view, the thief’s extraction of a wallet is far superior in its smooth grace to the honest man’s grumbling fumble. The difference is that the pickpocket puts his hand in someone else’s pocket to take a wallet that is not his own. This is the precise defect of order. God is certainly the ultimate cause of the physical act in sin; He causes it by moving the human will freely to it. The defect, the formal element that makes sin, sin, is not caused by God; it is merely permitted, tolerated.
That brings us sharply against the problem of freedom. Why does God permit this defect? Why does He not make it impossible to sin? The answer to those questions is very, very simple: because this permission is demanded by the nobility of man.
God could have made us physically incapable of violating the laws by which we are led to our goal; in such a case we might be beasts, or vegetables, or minerals. We would certainly not be men and women. He could have created us in possession of eternal happiness, but it would not have been so divinely generous of Him. For He would thus have robbed our lives of loyalty and victory, of the stubborn courage that drags us to our feet after a severe beating; of merit, responsibility, personal accomplishment, of faith and hope and the whole life of virtue; of the light of the life of Christ and the exquisite joy of fellowship in His sufferings. It has been well said that it is the possibility of sin that made possible the lives of the saints. Because men can lie, cheat, steal, kill, make beasts of themselves there is great merit in truth, honesty, justice, and chastity. Because we can hate so bitterly and live so selfishly, human love is the precious thing it is. It is only because the gates of hell are wide open for us that we can batter down the walls of heaven with our own fists.
Briefly, the terror of evil in the world springs from the heart of a coward. It is the normal echo of that effeminate attitude towards life that holds out, as life’s ideal, uninterrupted coddling, endless days of petting, coaxing, protection. This is the view of life that shrinks from sharing the weariness and discouragement of struggle, the glory of personal victory, because of the possibilities of failure.
Power of the eternal Father
In this investigation of divine providence, we have simply been looking facts in the face. The direct glance of facts now push us one step farther along in our scrutiny of the nature of God, the further step to the acceptance of the rather terrifying truth that yet lies at the roots of our hope, the truth of God’s omnipotence. Lest our wavering intellect, in spite of facts and irrefragable proof, should hesitate, trembling before the awfulness of such a concept, we have again the bolstering declaration of in fallible authority. Strictly speaking, however, authority is not necessary in this matter; our reason can handle this alone. In fact, once we understand what is meant by omnipotence, the intellect holds out open arms to embrace it.
The nature of omnipotence
Power is not attributed to God in the sense of the power of a canvas to be turned into a masterpiece. Such a principle of passive reception is an open confession of perfection not yet had; a thing inconceivable in God. Nor is divine power to be taken in the sense of the power of a painter to produce a masterpiece. Great as such power may be, it, too, is kept humble by its necessary confession of imperfection; it, too, implies a change, a motion, a passage from potentiality to actuality. It is a clear statement of help received, of dependence on another mover. God is completely independent, altogether unmoved.
Power in God must be understood in a sense that is unique: the sense of a principle of action on others, in itself implying no imperfection whatsoever. No example of it can be given for it exists nowhere outside of divinity. The power of creatures is no more than a shadow recording the presence of divine power.
However, starting from the world we know so well, we can rise up to some knowledge of divine omnipotence. In our world, creatures are principles of action, that is they have power, in exact proportion to their own actuality, their own realized potentialities. Thus, for instance, I cannot teach others the art of ballet dancing because I have not that knowledge; I can teach others only what I myself know. A man can put the stamp of intelligence upon his work only in the degree in which he possesses intelligence; he cannot generate angels, even if angels could be generated, because he does not himself enjoy angelic life. God, as we have already proved, is pure act, complete perfection. His power, then, is complete, as unlimited as His perfection, almighty.
Its “limitations”
Divine omnipotence, then, means that God can do all things. The jocose objections that are offered against this divine attribute are harmless things as long as we understand that they are meant to be funny and are not objections at all but contradictions in terms. With this clearly in mind we can, with the somewhat weary patience that is our only defense against a punster, sustain such questions as: can God make past things present? Can God make an object so big He cannot move it? And so on. In a way, these objections are an aid to a clear notion of omnipotence. They bring out its real meaning, namely, the power to do all that can be done, to make all that can be made; or, more simply, to do whatever does not involve a contradiction. What does involve a contradiction is not to be classified as impossible to some created cause, not to God’s power, but impossible to itself. A circular square cannot be made; a soulless frankenstein can never escape from the pages of fiction; a creature can never be infinite; for in all these there is contained an open contradiction.
Happiness of the eternal Father: Fact of God’s happiness
There is one last question to be investigated in this analysis of the nature of God. a question that comes to us naturally as involving the high point of existence: is God happy? The question has seemed in very bad taste to the gloomy religionists of the past few centuries, the men and women who identified godliness with stern frowns or resigned sighs. To speak, or even speculate, on happiness in reference to divinity was as vulgar as gossip about the king’s indigestion. On this basis, heaven should be pictured as a dreary front parlor exuding dignity with the angels tip-toeing in terror down the halls in dread expectation of the roaring anger of a God as wrathful as a victim of gout.
Its nature
How such a notion ever came into being is totally inexplicable on rational grounds. A simple analysis of happiness shows that it demands an intellectual nature, the possession of a good, and a consciousness of that possession. Consequently a dog or a cat can never know happiness; it can be satisfied, its appetites quieted, but it cannot know that these appetites have been satisfied. The animal, in other words, is incapable of that reflexive act that enables us to look at ourselves. Obviously, a man may have much good and yet be thoroughly unhappy by the simple trick of concentrating on the things he does not have, or by cultivating a kind of unconsciousness of the goods he does possess. But it is utterly impossible for God to be unhappy: He is supreme intelligence, He is supreme goodness, He knows Himself, His goodness, perfectly with an eternal, uninterrupted act. Our happiness, then, like all our other perfections, is but the faintest rejection of the full, infinite, ineffable happiness of God. Gloom, grouches, bad temper or blues simply cannot have a place in God for sorrow, defect, imperfection are excluded by the very notion of divinity.
Our little share in that overflowing divine happiness makes up the eternal happiness of heaven. In fact, the happiness of God includes all other happiness; whatever desirability there is in any other happiness, whether that happiness be true or false, Preexisted complete and in a much more eminent, a divine, way in the happiness of God.
It seemed so important to St. Thomas that men see God as a happy God that he drew up a table of extremely rough parallels, in the hope that some little glimmer of the smile of God would light up the darkest days of human life. He made the parallel between the clear, penetrating, translucent beauty of human contemplative happiness and God’s continuous contemplation of His own infinitely perfect divine nature and of all other natures; between the solid, substantial, creative happiness that belongs to the activity of men and the happiness of God’s creation and government of the world. From what might be called earthly happiness — pleasure, riches, power, dignity, fame — he looked to the infinite joy of God in Himself and His creatures, to the infinite sufficiency of divinity, the divine omnipotence, the eternal kingdom of God, the universal admiration of the created world. The parallels are clumsy; but they should rule out of the minds of men the horrible caricature of a gloomy God.
The home over which so happy a Father presides is a grand place to live in. Wherever He is, is home. Now, while we are on the road, it is a makeshift affair, a tent thrown up for the night, but still home; when the journey of life is done with, that happy Father will give us the full happiness He has been planning for us all along the road, His eyes looking far down the future to eternity. It is, however, extremely difficult for the most provident, the happiest of Fathers to give happiness to carping, critical, unfair children. If they insist on misjudging their Father in the light of their childish minds and distorted information no one can do much of anything about it.
A little faith, a more docile acceptance of the long view of the Father, makes all the difference between happiness and misery. To accept that long view of providence does not involve a denial of that weakest of all intelligences, the human mind; it is not a slavish surrender of man’s supreme faculty. True enough, the intellect of man has rights, rights which cannot be denied without a denial of our own manhood, of our claim to superiority to the irrational world. It has the right to demand that it be not violated, that these truths about the nature of God be not against reason not in contradiction to it. It also has limits, limits which are definitely those of a finite creature. It is violating itself when it expects or demands the comprehension of the infinite; it is being childish when it demands that the Father see no further than the smallest of His children.
Conclusion
The intellect is forced to the conclusions we have discussed in this chapter, forced by fact, by simple adherence to the fundamental laws of thought and of being. Those conclusions, moreover, are bolstered by infallible authority’s crystal-clear pronouncements. The difficulties urged against these conclusions do not show there is any contradiction involved; there is nothing contrary to reason here, merely something above it. For there is mystery here, as there is mystery wherever the divine movement is involved; the comprehension of the mystery is possible only to the mind that can comprehend the infinite. We do make those difficulties seem more forceful, not by further argumentation, but by standing on our head, holding the world so close to our eyes that our whole scale of values is inverted; the difficulties seem enormous only when we blind ourselves to the truth.
Answers to the children
A fatherless world
It is fortunate for these ungrateful children that the violence of their misjudgments cannot destroy the benevolent paternity of God. The make-believe world they construct for themselves is a horrible habitation; but there is always the comforting knowledge that it is only make-believe. Pushing the Father aside as utterly incompetent, they take on their childish minds His work of running the house of the world, and break down before that work, as a man always breaks down before a job that is too big for him; they end up trying to escape from the house of the world to which they have denied all doors and windows. Some of them will deny the very existence of the Father, the very framework of the house of the world, pulling the walls down on their own heads to escape into a chaos without order and without meaning. They are unbalanced children who insist that the toys of life are life’s essentials; they are frightened children to whom despair is a playmate; they are children at war with God, with the world and above all with themselves, a war that breeds a hatred that looses its most deadly venom against the children themselves. They are the children of a Fatherless world.
Children at home
It is, thank God, only a world of their own distorted minds. In reality God’s children are at home even during this rough passage to heaven. The walls of the house of the world are rough, unfinished, crude things; but within that home there is the serenity, the courage, the peace and self-respect that is the right of children, the product of a provident Father. In place of panic in the face of chaos, there is the calm quiet of children with perfect trust, for here is a Father whose provident eyes search the long horizons of eternity. Here there is no fear, no despair; for here the intelligence and power of the Father are assured. Failure, misfortune, discouragement, sickness, even sin itself have their meaning in the divine scheme of things. Here there is that sane balance that recognizes success, praise, high position, good fortune, health, as only steps in a divine plan, steps which are perhaps no more significant than their opposites. Here is peace for here is order; and the supreme self-respect, the supreme helpfulness to neighbor, that comes from sharing in that divine providence, from partaking in the dignity of causality, from being in command of our own souls with the future what we care to make it.
CHAPTER VII — THE INNER LIFE OF GOD
(Q. 27-43)
1. Perception of life:
(a) The sign of death.
(b) The mark of life — activity:
(1) Transient activity — root of a modern mistake.
(2) Imminent activity
2. The scale of life:
(a) The principle of gradation.
(b) Concrete gradation of life: plant, animal, human, angelic.
3. Divine life:
(a) As seen by man:
(1) The fact of it.
(2) The manner of it.
(b) As seen he God.
(c) As told to man by Cod:
(1) Statement of the mystery of the Trinity.
(2) Sole source of this knowledge.
(3) Validity of this knowledge.
4. Reason and the mystery of the Trinity:
(a) in generals
(b) in particular:
(1) Basis of the distinction of persons — the Processions
(2) Reality of the relations set up by the processions.
(3) The classical illustration.
(4) The divine persons.
Conclusion:
1. Parodies of the Trinity:
(a) Horror of death.
(b) Fear of life.
2. Thirst for life.
3. Climax of life.
CHAPTER VII
THE INNER LIFE OF GOD
(Q 27-43)
Perception of life
QUIET is a calm refreshment of the soul if it is not too hushed. There is reason behind a city boy’s panicky restlessness in the stillness of his first night in the country; to him, whose days have been so crowded with clamor, no sound is audible. Though he may never admit it, he is frightened by such absolute quiet, as are all those whose ears are not attuned to the workings of their own souls; as frightened as all men are by those occasional moments of mental blankness that seem to dissect life with a stroke as ominously quiet as the blow of death.
The sign of death
Completely motionless waters, waters with no hope of activity in them, leave us uneasy; they are dead, or so close to death that the air above them is tainted, the depths beneath them unclean, their surface already in preparation as a breeding ground of unhealthily lush growth. We have, quite rightly, associated life with activity; we demand activity of anything that lives, we are disturbed at lack of activity or even at the lack of signs of activity. For we know that inactivity is the herald of death, the advance guard of decay. Perhaps it is the depth of our appetite for life that makes the signs of its opposite so repulsive. At any rate the fact remains that a corrupt vegetable pollutes our hands, destroys our appetite and speeds our departure. We cannot pass a dying tree unmoved unless we wear the equivalent of a blindfold; a man who is going to seed mentally or physically misses much of the distress and repulsion he awakens only because heroic virtue is not nearly so rare as the cynic thinks; a man who is corrupting morally is a source of contamination as obnoxious to healthy cleanness as a leaking sewer. Stagnancy, decay, rottenness anywhere, in any form, is repulsive; it sets up an unmistakable sign of the end of activity, it is the sign of death.
The mark of life — activity
On the other hand, a brisk wind off a choppy sea injects new life into us. A buoyant step, the sharp, decisive click of a heel, or a laugh that skitters across the room and back like a scampering child, dissipates the fog of our sluggishness and awakens us from lethargy to a lighter, brighter, quicker life. Youth, with its vibrant life, has a beauty of its own, a clamorous, insistent beauty that will not be ignored. Freudian experts, who explain all light by darkness, would have it that thousands gather each fall to watch “a scampering boy with a ball” by way of enjoying vicarious thrills and triumphs; they forget that youth still preens itself before a glass and age enjoys the pleasant sadness of nostalgia. Age, too, has a beauty of its own, a quiet, penetrating, burning beauty that sets roaring fires in the heart of youth. A pair of eyes alive with ceaseless thought’s clashing battle are not pushed from memory with a careless gesture; they are glowing coals that give comfort only to those who seek a flame. The lines and depths written on a man’s face by the winds, storms and far horizons of long journeys over the seven seas of life offer wisdom’s refuge to fellow travelers. The sure judgment, hand carved with weighted words, is the masterpiece of time and patience.
Life and activity are too intimately bound together for either to exist by itself. There may be some solid truth in our suspicion that life is activity, at least some kind of life. It is strange that the suspicion has not driven us to a closer inspection of activity; instead, we have neglected the vista opened by it and seized upon the most obvious activity, the activity involving change, as the synonym of life. As a result we have made change the cardinal virtue and placed becoming, the acquiring of perfection, above being or the having of perfection. We have described life as a process; no wonder so many pass it on the street without a nod of recognition.
Transient activity — root of a modern mistake
It is not strange that the magic of the craftsman should fascinate us. The child sits spellbound as the pies and cakes take shape under the deftly sure fingers of a cook; years later, the adult stands gaping as a building springs into being at the urging of steel-workers and masons. We have always had a personal pride in the human art of making things, even though our role be no more than that of a spectator. It is something to be proud of; but it is not the sum total of activity, this working to the perfection of something outside the worker himself. It is tangible, vivid, fascinating: but it is only transient activity, the least of the things life does.
Imminent activity
There is another kind of activity that remains within the very agent who produces it, an activity obviously superior to that which passes outside and beyond him. The very purpose of the pies and cakes is precisely to furnish material for one such activity, the nutrition and growth that remain within the child who so eagerly devours them. The structure of steel and stone was made precisely to enclose a world of intricate plans, daring hopes, of knowledge and love and desire; it is no more than the servant of these things that yet remain within the head and heart of a man.
It is this latter activity which is living activity, immanent activity, activity from within and remaining within the agent. In a thousand ways we testify to this truth; but, on the crucial point, we throw out the testimony. The difference between the growth of crystals and the growth of a plant is admittedly the difference between the activity of the non-living and the living. A leaf stretching out to its full development on a tree is not nearly so active as the seared leaf buffeted by November winds; but the one is alive, the other is dead. our very metaphors are confirmatory witnesses to the depth of this truth: a dead house is not lifeless because something has happened to the outside of it, but because something has gone out from within it; a dead face is a lantern without the inner flame; a dead heart is an empty one. It is immanent activity that is the mark of life.
The scale of life: the principle of gradation.
This is so true that the scale of life can be accurately drawn up only on the basis of immanent activity, only on the principle that the greater the immanency of the activity the greater the life. In the concrete, this principle is immediately obvious. A plant’s perfection of life consists precisely in the fact that its growth is from within and its three operations — of generation, growth and nutrition — are immanent operations. Its imperfections, which place it on the lowest scale of life, are precisely its defect: the material of its actions comes from the outside, the term of its activities continues apart from the plant; it may be moved from place to place, but will surely not stroll off for itself; and any arranging of means to its end will not be accomplished by concentrated study or agonizing worry on the part of the plant, it will come from the outside.
Concrete gradation of life: plant, animal, human, angelic
An animal has all the perfections of a plant, but, in addition, has locomotion and sensible knowledge, these two being exactly proportioned and marking out the difference, say, between an oyster and an eagle. On the side of the imperfection of life, there is the fact that the term of the animal’s activity is never within: it cannot reflect on itself, look to the goal over the head of the present; the term of its generation, its offspring, is always distinct in essence and operation; the determination of ends and means, things worth having and ways of getting these things, is always from the outside.
Going up a step higher, we find human life possessed of all of the immanent activity of plants and animals, with the inherent limitations of this activity; and, in addition, the marvellously immanent activity of human knowledge. The term of this activity, the fruit of a man’s thought, is not to be wheeled about the park in a perambulator; it is immanent, taking up permanent residence within a man’s own head. It is the man himself, not something outside of him, that determines the things worth having and the means of getting those things. But even this is not perfect life. The material of a man’s thought comes from the outside, it is measured by the world of reality outside a man, and, while a man’s thought stays within his own head, the term of a man’s thought is still not the mind of a man. The emphasis of imperfection, here as all through the scale of life, is on the notion of external as opposed lo internal; what comes from the outside or goes to the outside is not so much from life’s fullness as from its limitation. A clumsy example of our realization of this fact is to be had in the difference between our attitude towards a frail intellectual genius and a stalwart but moronic athlete; our pity goes, not to the one man’s frailty but to the other man’s lonely strength.
But obviously, from the very essential perfection of human life, there is room in the universe for yet more perfect life, for there is room for yet more perfect immanency of action. That next step lifts us to the angelic level where there is no question of growth, development, process or change; but where there is indeed question of vital activity. Here change ceases but the intensity of life increases. The world of the angels will be treated exhaustively later on in this volume; for the purposes of this chapter it will be enough to point out that an angel is as nearly an independent world in itself as it is possible for us to conceive within the world of nature, which is to say, within the essentially dependent world of creatures. Its movement from place to place is not to be compared to the effortless glide of a bird; it has about it the agile speed of thought, the closest approach among creatures to an illustration of the omnipresence of God. The angel does not have to endure the long, slow days of schooling, the back-breaking labor of thought, the tenacious effort of memory that so mark the progress of man’s mind to its maturity; the angel does not gather ideas, it is created with them. There is no progressive accumulation of knowledge; knowledge is full and immanent from the first instant. The angel knows itself, not through some other medium, even so intimate a medium as its own acts as we do, but directly, immediately, immanently. Like man, the angel has its determination of ends and means from the inside not from the outside.
But this is still not perfect life, there is still the element of the outside marking beyond all doubt a definite limitation of life’s perfection. The angel’s ideas still come from the outside, not from beneath it but from above it, for they are infused by God; it still moves from the consideration of one idea to that of another, a kind of passage from potentiality to actuality; its knowledge, while not measured by reality, is measured by something outside the angel, by the mind that measures reality, the mind of God; it is still dependent in its being and its activity on an outside source, the source of all being and all activity, the first Cause. The angel’s knowledge, while intensely immanent, is still distinct from the mind of the angel; it is not so immanent as to be identical. There is, in a word, room for perfection far above that of the angels.
The rungs of the ladder of life are clearly marked. The lowest is that of the plants, for this is the least immanent in its activity; up a step is animal life; still higher is human life; nearing the top we come to angelic life. But this is still not the peak of lifer for this is still not the peak of immanency; the mark of life still has some of the dross of externality in it. it is not absolutely pure. For that supreme degree of life, we must look to the divine.
Divine life
From what we have seen of the existence and nature of God, it is plain that there is a divine life. God is the first cause Who sowed life so prodigally in the world; He must have it to give it. He is the supreme intelligence and intelligence is the highest form of immanent activity, that is, of life’s activity. Again, life is one of those limitless perfections that is not had in its fullness by any creature, that can only be shared, participated, received in a definite mold by anyone less than God. It is not to be discovered in an analysis of the essential characteristics of any creature; only God is life.
As seen by man: the fact of it
It is to be understood, of course, that divine life is infinitely superior to created life; that life is spoken of in God and in creatures only in an analogical sense, it is in God in an altogether eminent way. With that precaution in mind, a consideration of divine life in the terms in which we have been speaking of life in this chapter brings out sharply the perfection of divine life by focusing attention on the immanent activity of God. Here there is no question of the power from within to move from place to place; by His divine nature God is everywhere. There is no question of growth, nourishment, gradual attainment of perfection; God is eternally perfect. There is no dependence on things below Him, as there is in man; nor on things above Him, as in the angels. His mind is measured by no other mind, no other thing; He does not consider first one idea, then another; there is no distinction between the divine idea and the divine mind, for God is utterly simple. Divine activity, in other words, is absolutely immanent; which is to say, that divine life is absolutely perfect.
The manner of it
This is a far cry from the modern blindness that sees the Christian God as too static, imperfect, stagnant, divorced from life, principally because there is no advance, in divine life, from the stage of short pants to long pants, from hair down to hair up. The argument, in its absurdly simple form, is that there is no life in God because there is no change in God. The real conclusion, of course, from the absence of change in God is that there is no imperfection in the divine life. This is life at its highest, most intense, most perfect degree; intellectual life, activity perfect in its immanency.
Thus far reason can take us, and no farther. This much man can see of God with his own eyes; and no more. By these steps man comes to the edge of the abyss that lies between the finite and the infinite; there he is halted by the very limitations of his nature. This is the threshold of the inner life of God; the inner secrets are God’s and God’s alone.
As seen by God
To divine eyes, the mysterious inner life of God is completely clear; God can comprehend all its ineffable perfection, for the infinite alone can comprehend the infinite. This is knowledge that has been God’s from all eternity and that will never belong to any other though all of an eternity be given to its contemplation and all the graciously tender thoughtfulness of God be exerted in unfolding the story to lesser minds.
We are humbled before these inscrutable truths, but not humiliated; rather we are exalted as a man of mediocre virtue is exalted by contact with heroic sanctity. What a tragic thing it would be if his paltry virtue were the highest peak to which the heart of man could aspired What a traffic, desperate thing it would be if our paltry minds could encompass all truth! What an inspiring thing it is for the heart of a man to know that there is inexhaustible beauty beyond the faint shadow that he can perceive; what an incredibly gracious thing it is that man should be given, as far as he can be given, the eyes of God to see beyond the shadow into the infinite reality!
As told to man by God
Statement of the mystery of the Trinity
For God has not spoken of His mysteries in guarded whispers behind the locked gates of heaven; He has shared them, as far as they can be shared, with the least of intellects, the intellect of man. He has told us something of that ineffable inner life of His; and that something is almost too much for our minds to bear, like a joy that crowds the heart to the breaking point. The mystery of the Trinity, as God has told it to us, is the mystery of three divine persons, really distinct, in one and the same divine nature: coequal, coeternal, consubstantial, one God. Of these persons, the Second proceeds from the First by an eternal generation; the Third proceeds from the First and the Second by an eternal spiration.
Sole source of this knowledge
There is absolutely no way in which we could have come to this knowledge of ourselves. It had to be told us by God. It is told vaguely, dimly in the obscure words of the Old Testament, as though to prepare the mind for the terrific impact of so great a truth; then, in the New Testament, there is the clear statement both of the trinity of persons and their identity of nature; finally, in the declarations of the Church, the mystery is stated with a clear-cut brevity that staggers the mind. This is the only source of our knowledge of the Blessed Trinity — – the authority of God — only God could know of it, only God could tell of it; He has told us and we bend our minds in humbly grateful belief.
Validity of this knowledge
The modern cannot understand why we accept a truth we cannot verify by our own intellects. To us, it does not seem a wisely superior thing to doubt that God, Who gave us the intellects by which we pan out flakes of golden truth, should give us nuggets beyond the capacities of our laborious panning process, indeed, beyond our wildest dreams of rich strikes. From whatever point of view we take, it is the doubt of these mysteries that needs explanation, not their belief. We can prove, and have proved, that God is supreme intelligence, the first truth; that, consequently, He is incapable of deceiving Himself or others, of being deceived by others.. Why then doubt His word? Knowledge of God arrived at by reason from the world of reality is undoubtedly valid, as we have shown; should knowledge of Cod be less valid when it comes directly from God Himself? Or, to put the same truth in simpler terms, is first hand knowledge necessarily to be classed as inferior to second hand knowledge? Yet surely the knowledge garnered from the effects of God in the world is second hand by comparison with knowledge coming directly from God. No, the fact that this knowledge comes to us as a completely free gift from God is not a reproach to its validity but a guarantee, a divine guarantee, of it.
Reason and the mystery of the Trinity
In general
The Trinity is a mystery; no doubt about it. Unless we had been told of its existence, we would never have suspected such a thing. Moreover, now that we know that there is a Trinity, we cannot understand it. The man who attempts to unravel the mystery is in the position of a near-sighted man straining his eyes from the Eastern Shore of Maryland for a glimpse of Spain. We cannot probe the depths of the ocean of divinity with the foot-rule of the human intellect.
It may feel grand to adopt a righteously indignant attitude against mysteries, snatch up a hatchet and sally forth as a crusader dedicated to smashing the dark windows behind which mystery carries on its revels. But why not start the crusade at home? Long before we have finished in nature, our hatchet will be dulled, our arm fatigued, our soul humbled enough to see that there are undreamed of truths in this world; undreamable truths in the world of divinity. What, for instance, do we know of electricity beyond the fact that it works and something of how it works? There is very much to be explained about radio beyond the mysterious selection of the dogged entertainers who use it as a medium of slipping into our houses. Over and above the realization that a red light gives us a choice between stopping our car and accepting a ticket, we know that it involves some 130,000,000 vibrations a second; but that is not much help. A culture developed from the brain or spinal cord of a mad dog will arrest the development of rabies; but no one knows why. And so on. yet we are surprised, indignantly surprised, that the divinity should propose truths beyond the capacities of our minds!
Ordinary common sense should tell us that this is a natural concomitant of the inevitable limitations of our nature. A small cup can hold only so much water; not the whole ocean. Our eyes can see only so much of the spectrum, not all of it, they can take in only so much light under pain of blindness; there are rays of light invisible to our eyes, sounds inaudible to our ears we take these limitations for granted. As our eyes are only human eyes, our ears only human ears, so our intellects are only human intellects; there are truths we cannot know by those intellects.
When such truths are made known to us by a superior intellect, there is not much we can do with them. Certainly we cannot prove them; we have little result from attempting to probe them; we can show they are not violations of reason, that is that they do not involve contradictions, and we can dig up a few clumsy illustrations. Thus, for instance, we can show that the idea of three persons in one nature is not inconceivable, it is not the contradictory statement that the same thing is at the same time one and three. As a matter of fact, the exclusion of this often alleged contradiction against the truth of the Trinity is absurdly simple; all it involves is the manifestation of the fact that there is a distinction between person and nature. In the construction of a cross-word puzzle, the principle by which the puzzle was drawn up is a human nature, but the principle who drew up the puzzle was John Jones. The first answers the question why such a thing was possible — – no other nature engages in such activities; the second answers the question who did the work involved. The distinction is fairly obvious from a normal man’s resentment of the inference that he is any less identically human than any other man as contrasted with his assured knowledge that there is no identity between his person and the person of any other man who has ever existed.
In the mystery of the Trinity, the persons are distinct from each other; but each one is identical with the divine nature, Here the question is not one of conceptual possibility — – assured by our perception of the distinction of person and nature in the world about us — but of fact. Is this not a violation of the mathematical principle that two things equal to a third are equal to each other? The Father is not distinct from the divine nature, the Son is not distinct from the divine nature: therefore the Father is not distinct from the Son. The revealed truth is that though Father and Son are not distinct from the divine nature, they are distinct from each other; nor does that truth violate the mathematical principle in question here. Perhaps we can see the root of the confusion if we reflect that the qualities of action and passion are the same as immanent, but not the same as each other; for example, a blow in the face as given and the blow as received are the same as immanent, i.e. at the point of contact, but they are certainly distinct from each other under their own proper and formal conception. The Son, precisely as Son, is distinct from the Father, precisely as Father; though both are identical with the divine nature.
By way of illustration we hit upon such clumsy things as the merging of three flames into a single flame; the light of a candle, which is red, yellow and blue, yet one light; or the trunk of a tree springing from the roots and the fruit coming from both root and trunk, yet all three make up one tree. These are clumsy examples, examples that limp so badly that they are a hindrance, rather than a help, to the tranquillity of our restless intellects. As has been insisted throughout this chapter, human reason cannot get much done with truths that are entirely proper to the mind of God. Perhaps the best procedure, in dealing with the Trinity, would be to single out the basic theological terms, subject them to analysis and illustration, so that we might be able to achieve an accurate statement of the mystery and maintain our slender intellectual foothold on the flowering truth of three divine persons in one divine nature.
Basis of the distinction of persons — the processions
These basic terms, which enter into the very revelation of the mystery, can be reduced to three: processions of origin, subsistent relations, and person. Examining each of these in order we shall at least come to a knowledge of what the mystery of the Trinity does not involve and of what, therefore, we are precisely to believe in believing that mystery.
By faith we know that the Son proceeds from the Father, the Holy Ghost from the Father and the Son; that is, the Father is the principle of the Son, the Father and Son are one principle of the Holy Ghost. To have distinction we must have difference; and, since there is no difference whatever on the side of nature — – the three Persons having the numerically same divine nature — – the sole possibility of difference lies in the processions of one person from another. To our way of thinking, a principle is the cause of a thing. We cannot comprehend how one Person can proceed from another without depending in some way or another. This is precisely the heart of the mystery; this is precisely what we shall never understand. But we can understand the meaning of the statement: the Father is not the cause of the Son, nor are the Father and Son the cause of the Holy Ghost. This is what we are to believe. There can be no relation of causality between the divine Persons for this would destroy the truth that they are all divine. The word “principle” is used because it signifies an order of origin in an absolute way, without determining a particular mode that would be foreign to the origin of the divine Persons. In a word, this term “principle” is invaluable because of its indefiniteness, because it hides a truth we cannot understand, shading our eyes from its splendor; it does not distort that truth.
Procession, here, is not to be understood in the sense in which a word proceeds from a man’s mouth to wander up and down the world, but, analogically, as an idea proceeds from the mind of a man but stays in his head. The divine processions are not processions to the outside but within divinity itself, with all that perfection of immanency that is uniquely God’s.
Procession, then, in God is not as it is in the lowest creatures, that is, either by way of local movement or by way of cause proceeding to exterior effects. Rather it is in the order of the most perfect activity in its most perfect form, intellectual activity. In this order, what proceeds is not necessarily distinct from its source; indeed, the more perfectly it proceeds, the more closely it is one with its source, for the more perfect it is, the more immanent it is. The faith teaches us there are two of these processions in God: that of generation, by which the Son proceeds from the Father; and that of spiration, by which the Holy Ghost proceeds from the Father and the Son as from a common principle. We shall touch upon these again at a somewhat greater length later on in this chapter.
Reality of the relations set up by the processions
The point to be noted here is that these two processions set up relationships in God: the double relationship of paternity and filiation arising from generation; and the double relationship of active and passive spiration arising from the procession of the Holy Ghost from the Father and the Son. In our human order, a relation arising, say, from the anthropological classification of a man as Alpine, Mediterranean or Nordic, is purely a thing of the mind, a relation of reason; for it does not arise from the principles of the same nature. On the contrary, a man’s relations to his end, to his acts, to his Creator are all real relations, arising from the very principles of his nature. A visitor to Washington, however short his stay, will certainly see the massive pillars of the Supreme Court building. By his glance at those pillars, a relation is set up between him and the pillars; on the side of the pillars that relation is a relation of reason, for the nature of pillars does not give rise to the relation brought about by being seen. In the divine order, the relations of paternity, filiation, active and passive spiration are real, not rational, relations, arising from the numerically same divine nature. As real they are distinct terms: paternity is not the same as filiation, nor is active spiration the same as passive spiration. They are real, they are intimately opposed, and, as entirely distinct from any relation in the created world, they subsist. The opposing relationships constitute the three divine persons: Father, Son and Holy Ghost. Only by such opposition of origin is there distinction in divine things; there are then, not four, but three divine persons since there is no opposition between active spiration and the relations set up by generation.
All this is, of course, impossible to understand. The whole purpose of this exposition was not to make the mystery intelligible but rather to make clear wherein the mystery lies that our faith might embrace it. Nevertheless, our intellects are a restless, rowdy, independent lot; they chafe under the restraint of the incomprehensible, even though that restraint in reality be a release from the chains of the natural into the unsuspected freedom of the truths proper to God. The irritation is far from logical; but it is none the less quite universally human. If we can get some little grip on a mystery, even though it is by no more than our finger-nails, we feel very much better. It was perhaps in recognition of this childish stubbornness which is so common a human weakness that God moved men to conceive the most celebrated illustration of the trinity.
The classical illustration
It is to be remembered, however, that this is only an illustration; it is not to be taken literally, univocally. It limps because it compares the divine to the human; but it does give us that finger-nail grip so necessary to pride. It goes like this. Life is activity. In the created world, it is a process of change, a process of attaining perfection or of using perfection attained. But throughout its keynote is immanency. The more perfect the immanency, the more perfect the life. The highest life, and consequently the most immanent activity, we know is intellectual. Coming to the absolutely perfect life of God, we can expect activity, the highest, the most perfect activity; hence activity of the most sublime immanency. Both from the fact of the perfection of the immanency of this activity and from the fact that God is pure intelligence, we can expect that His activity is intellectual activity, of which there are, to talk in our human fashion, only two principles: the intellect and the will.
The entirely immanent activity, then, from the side of the intellect of God, will be the knowledge of God, God knowing Himself. This knowledge depends in no way on anything or anyone outside of divinity, it is not measured; it proceeds to a term — – God known — – which is utterly perfect because utterly immanent. God knowing Himself is the principle from which proceeds the eternal Word of God, God known.
On the side of the will, which in us follows on knowledge, there is the eternal and immanent act of God’s love. God, eternally knowing Himself perfectly with sublime immanence, generates the eternal Word, the Son, the perfection of the Father; the eternal and immanent breath of love of the Son for the Father and the Father for the Son is the Holy Ghost, the sign of divine love that subsists. The perfect immanency of these acts insists that no one of these three is distinct from the divine essence but entirely identical with it; the opposition of the relationships insists that they are distinct one from another. They are one God and three divine persons: consubstantial, coeternal, coequal.
The divine persons
Father, Son and Holy Ghost are not called persons by a kind of poetic license; this is not figurative speech. They are persons. This is one point we can see clearly by clarifying our own notion of what a person is, shearing away the accidentals that the essential might stand out. A person, to put it as briefly as possible, is an individual intellectual substance, whatever kind of intellectual substance or in whatever way distinguished from other persons of the same nature; thus there are human persons, angelic persons, divine persons. The human person subsists in a human nature and is distinguished from all other human persons in the way proper to human nature, that is by signate matter; an angelic person subsists in an angelic nature and is distinguished from all other angelic persons in the way proper to angelic nature, that is, by a specific distinction; a divine person subsists in a divine nature and is distinguished from other divine persons in the way proper to divinity, that is, by the opposition of the relations of origin.
Sometimes we give these divine persons names that belong to them by reason of their divine nature; such names, for instance, as almighty, good, merciful. These names belong, not to any one person, but to all three for the numerically identical divine nature is common to all three. At other times, we address the divine persons by names that belong to them, not by reason of the divine nature, but by reason of the opposition of the relations of origin; such names, for instance, as Father, Son, Holy Ghost. These are completely proper names: the name of the Son cannot be given to the Holy Ghost, for title to it is by the relation of filiation which is proper to the Son alone. It is worth noting that when we say the “Our Father” we are addressing the whole Trinity, not merely the first Person; for God is our Father, not by the eternal generation of the Son, but by creation which, like all external operations, is common to the three Persons.
One of the most reassuring things about the mystery of the Trinity is its incomprehensibility. It is grand to have so concrete an assurance that our minds do not tell the whole glorious story of intelligence, that the crumbs of truth we amass so laboriously are only crumbs, not the sum total of truth’s banquet, that the feeble glow which hardly lights up a path for our own steps is not the light of the world. The concrete assurance of this incomprehensibility comes to the solitary human mind like the comfort of a lost child’s discovery of its parents; with a joy too big for words and too deep for laughter, with rekindled hopes and the utter, unquestioning, eager surrender of faith.
Conclusion
Some children, however, seem to have been born disillusioned. Someone has told them the truth about Santa Claus and now they spend their days in pouting. They are determined to be happy with the introduction to the story of intelligence, to be surfeited with the crumbs of truth, to light up the world with the match they have just blown out. They will get along without God and His incomprehensible mysteries, above all they will have nothing to do with the Trinity. Yet they never quite make their renunciation stick. Though they abolish God and the Trinity, they make a travesty on the divinity and the divine persons.
Parodies of the Trinity
It is palpably true that the man who denies God makes a god of his own with much more piteous results than the amateur wood-carver ever produces; but there is reason behind the unreason, for every man must have a goal towards which he aims his life. It is not at all clear why man should also produce a burlesque of the Trinity in abandoning it; the fact is clear enough. He makes himself and his material world as unbegotten as the Father; his intellectual effort is concentrated on self and the material world, sometimes even to the extent of that intellectual effort producing the world; from this knowledge of self and the world, a knowledge that is necessarily streaked with broad bands of ignorance, arises an abiding love that leaves room for no rival. It is an attempt at the perfection of immanency without the perfection of life that must underlie immanency, a parody of divine self-sufficiency which accomplishes eternity by overlooking the beginning and the end, a caricature, which ends in mere bustling, of the intensity of divine life.
Horror of death
Even for the undemanding purposes of burlesque there are too many characters involved; one or the other must go. So eventually, either the world is pushed aside while a man wraps the folds of his being about himself and retires into the arid oblivion of solipsism; or the individual is pulled into the maw of the world to furnish the material for the nourishment of a mass. Whichever way the choice turns one of two, or perhaps both, characteristic qualities come to the surface. If it is the mass that absorbs the individual, then there is little horror of death for death has already become a living thing; but there is a panicky fear of human life, a haunting terror that paralyzes a man at the very thought of being alone, being responsible, of possessing a life with a meaning. On the other hand, where the individual excludes the world, there is apt to be a combination of the two, a horror of death and a fear of life; his very precautions against death, his watchwords of security and safety first, his revulsion from physical hardship and sacrifice, will make it impossible to drink deeply from the hearty cup of life. He is so afraid of death that he starts his dying in the prime of life; life is so precious a thing, he dare not handle it.
Fear of life
The thing is logical enough. He has made a little trinity of himself; and no one knows better than he that that trinity is not a principle of undying life, that here there is no eternal grip on the elusive victory over death. He knows he has life only for an instant; why should he not fear death? He knows, as no one else knows, that life is too big for his little trinity, that it escapes his mind, his will, his hands; why should he not be afraid of life?
Thirst for life
Climax of life
Obviously a man cannot be consumed with a thirst for life and cut himself off from the full perfection of divine life. Obviously a man cannot be in love with life and either push it coldly from him or try to enfold its intensity within himself. Thirst for life must mean thirst for that perfection of action which is described by immanency; or in plainer terms, thirst for life must mean thirst for God, thirst for that absolutely immanent activity of the Trinity. This is the eternal and perfect life of God: all other life is a participation of this divine life: all other activity is a participation of this activity. All other life, all other activity, is perfect in proportion as it approaches to that complete immanence of divine life. This is the climax of all life, the top of the scale of life which is beyond all scales, the peak that is also the foundation, the beginning that is also the end.
CHAPTER VIII — THE ARCHITECT AT WORK
(Q. 44-49)
1. The story of the world
(a) A story that must be told.
(b) A story from which the architect cannot be omitted.
2. The unfolding of the story.
3. The cause of the world:
(a) The fact of the cause.
(b) The manner of the worlds production:
(1) Dualistic explanations:
a. A principle of perfection and of imperfection.
b. A principle of good and of evil.
(2) Monistic explanations:
a. Pantheism.
b. Evolution.
c. Creation.
4. The stuff of the world.
5. The model of the world:
(a) Primary and secondary models.
(b) Source of order and law.
6. The goal of the world:
(a) Necessity of the goal.
(b) Objections against the goal.
7. The variety of the world
8. The age of the world:
(a) From reason.
(b) From faith.
Conclusion:
1. Fictions and facts of the world.
2. Purposes and failures of fiction.
3. Comfort and significance of the facts.
CHAPTER VIII
THE ARCHITECT AT WORK
(Q 44-49)
The story of the world
HISTORY has been described as a blend of art and philosophy. Too much history has been, in actual practice, a blend of fiction and fact. Whatever its components or mode of procedure, it usually makes for comfortable reading even when its matter is unpleasant; we can be calm, detached, judicious about it. After all, these men are not going to rise from the dead and challenge us to debate or duel; the past is securely dead and we can look on its face as securely as we would on the corpse of an enemy, totalling up its mistakes, jibing at its incompetencies, smiling at its pretensions, stifling its protests as easily and majestically as we silence a radio commentator.
A story that must be told
We can be entirely impersonal about history, that is, about most history. Detailed accounts of men, of nations, of races, even of hundreds of centuries can pass before our eyes, as thousands of cases pass before a judge’s bench, leaving our lives untouched, our appetites unimpaired, our satisfaction with ourselves undisturbed. When we dig a little deeper and strike the rock bottom of the story of activity, it is an altogether different question; we cannot shrug off the fundamental history of the world for this is an intensely personal matter.
The mere contact of the world of reality with a human intellect arouses difficulties; and no one, as yet, has succeeded in avoiding that contact. Nor is it a matter of specialized difficulties particularly prepared for the palate of an historian or a philosopher; some of these difficulties plague the steps of every man and woman born into the world. They clamor for an answer with an insistence that is almost uncouth; they will not be put off, silenced, brushed aside and on their answer depends the whole course of human life in every age. Men have to know how the world came about; of what it was made; what was the model for this stupendous work; why it was made at all and when; whence comes the immense variety in the world and why; what keeps it going.
Clearly the answers to such questions cannot fall into the classification of a soothing bedtime story with which we calm our hearts in preparation for death, as we calm the children before sending them off to undergo the mysterious risk of sleep’s oblivion. This cannot be the pleasant fiction with which we dissipate the isolation of a cold winter evening, peopling the house with shadowy guests. This is not a tale of the past buried with the past; it is a story of the past that molds the present. On the basis of it, men live their lives wisely or insanely, hopefully or despairingly, courageously or cringing in cowardice, successfully or in miserable failure.
A story from which the architect cannot be omitted.
It might reasonably be objected that this book, as a companion to the Summa, is a theological book. If that means anything, it means a book about God: why not stick to the proper subject matter of such a book and leave the consideration of the world to scientists and philosophers? It is certainly true that this is a theological book and that theology deals with God. Let the objector be assured that the proper subject matter of theology will be closely adhered to in this book, as it is in St. Thomas’ masterpiece; here, as there, whatever the immediate matter of discussion, be it heaven or hell, sin or virtue, mud or stars, saint or sinner, the youth of the world or the agelessness of Cod, everything will be treated precisely in its reference to God.
It is less astonishing that a theological book should treat of the world than that a book about the world should attempt to omit a consideration of God. As a matter of fact, God has something to do with, some part to play in, the unfolding of every act in the drama of the universe. Indeed, nothing in the whole universe is adequately considered, nothing is truly seen, truly located, truly evaluated, until it is considered in relation to God. Like everything we say about God, calling Him the architect of the universe is decidedly inadequate. After all, an architect is responsible only for the form of the house; if he has left his plans handy, the construction of the house can get along very well without him. The house once finished, the architect slips away into the obscure regions of his office; the rest of the story of the house and the human drama that unfolds within it is completely outside the scope of a blueprint. God is the architect of the universe; but He is also its builders its sustainer, its governor, the source of its life, and its activity, its goal.
A philosopher looks at the world in the flickering light of human reason, tirelessly carrying on his endless search for the last answers as they are open to the human mind. Theology too looks for last answers. But it is much more than human wisdom. It is the supreme wisdom which, gazing down from the far horizons of eternity, with the background of infinite experience and under the floodlight of the first Truth gives that mellowed, rounded judgment that is the last, the adequate, the satisfying answer to the world and its smallest detail.
Theology has indeed something to say of the world. As a matter of fact, we started off our theological considerations with the world. That primary consideration, however, took the world merely as a starting point, a jumping-off-place for an expedition into divinity. We have not, as yet, attempted to consider the created world in itself; rather, talking a small, obvious fact of the world — such as the movement of an eyelash, the perfection of a stone, the order revealed in a human eye — we mounted to the heights of the life of God
The unfolding of the story
In this chapter we start a detailed examination of the world. A plunge into the mass of detail in that world might easily cost us proper perspective, trapping us into mistaking an ant-hill for a mountain. It will be much better to stand off a little, trying for a general view of the country we are about to invade, tracing its main outlines, fitting its salient features well in our minds, familiarizing ourselves with the topography of the country, at least in a rough fashion, before we set out on our journey. That general view is the goal of this present chapter.
Beginning with the next chapter, and continuing through all the rest of the book, we shall examine the world in detail. We shall look thoroughly into the spiritual world, the material world and into that doubly mysterious world that is part spirit and part material, the world of man. Throughout this chapter and all the others, we shall be considering God: not God as He is in Himself, His nature, the Trinity of divine person — that has all been done; but God as creatures proceeded from Him. God the Creator and Governor of the world.
The cause of the world
The story of the world is not a detective thriller. Consequently the purpose of such a story is not to confuse the mind, hide the answers, or appeal to impossible explanations. It is a story that must be told quickly, clearly and completely; for all men must have all of it accurately before they can begin the absorbing task of human living. Yet it is by no means a simple story; the created world it explains furnishes the philosopher with such fundamental problems as the many proceeding from the one without injury to that unity, and the action of the first cause, and purpose in a world too big for the philosopher’s mind to grasp its plan. The difficulties of the man who is no philosopher and the mysteries that besiege the mind of the man who is trying hard to be a philosopher are not, as a matter of fact, wholly different things. They coalesce in the central problem of the cause of the created universe: what is its efficient cause and how does this cause work; what was its material cause; its formal or exemplary cause; its final cause or end? Along the lines of this fourfold question the story of the world must unfold.
The fact of the cause
In the second chapter of this book, we have seen that the efficient cause of the world can only be God. There we saw that the only possible explanation of the existence of the created world was a completely independent first cause upon which every creature, every activity, even motion, every mark of intelligence, every bit of order depends. The question here, then, is not one of God’s existence and His first causality; rather it is a question of penetrating into the manner of operation of God. How did He work? How was the created world actually produced?
The manner of the worlds production:
Dualistic explanations: A principle of perfection and of imperfection
Many philosophers jumped at the obvious answer of dualism. There was much perfection in the world; and there was much imperfection. They proceeded to their solution as a man might conclude there was a masculine and a feminine influence at work in an apartment where one room was a model of neatness, everything folded and packed away so that nothing could be found, while another room showed a cluttered desk, heaped chairs and littered floors with everything in instant reach of one’s hand. These philosophers decided that there were two first principles one of complete perfection, the other of complete imperfection; from the principle of imperfection, the principle of perfection worked out the creatures of the world. The solution was quick, obvious and worthless.
As a matter of fact, there simply cannot be two first principles, as we have seen in treating of the existence of God. Moreover, this principle of imperfection, while dependent on another for every development, is yet independent in existence; which is like saying that a man has everything but humanity, or a dog lacks nothing but canine qualities A dependent first principle of being comes as close to reality as a hollow shell without an external surface.
A principle of good and of evil
This, however, does not discourage the dualists. They come forth with another variety of solution that seems more plausible but, actually, is just as hopelessly contradictory. Because there was good in the world and also very much evil, and because evil is so unalterably opposed to good, the universe was explained by two principles, each supreme in its own field: one of good, the other of evil. These two do not work together, nor one upon the other, bust against one another; good is the triumph of the principle of good, evil is a memorial of a battle where the principle of good was defeated by the principle of evil. It sometimes happens that the Christian truths of God and the devil are given this interpretation; perhaps Satan relishes this sort of thing, but it is empty of truth. But, then, truth must be a bitter dose to one in the devil’s position.
Again the explanation is quick, obvious and worthless. A principle of evil supreme in its own field would be essentially evil, that is, it would have no good in it. That statement sounds rather solid, if a man stops thinking immediately. The trouble is that evil is not something positive, something one can put a finger on; the very essence of evil demands that it elude your finger, it is something missing, a defect. To have an evil at all, there must be a good capable of having holes in it for evil is precisely the hole in good. Immediately we concentrate on evil in any one order, the absurdity of a supreme evil becomes manifest. Evil, for instance, in the moral order, is a violation of reason, an unreasonable act; if, then, moral evil be absolutely complete, reason itself is destroyed to the destruction of the very possibility of moral evil. In a word, evil, if it be complete, destroys itself. Of course there is always something good to say about a bad thing; a filthy book will always have something good about it — it will be beautifully written, have a strong binding, or at least be cheap. There has to be something good in it or there could be nothing bad; the outstanding characteristic, then, of a first principle of evil would have to be, from the very nature of evil, its non-existence.
Evil cannot be a first principle for evil supposes good, in which alone it can exist; it cannot be independent, existing of itself, for that is its destruction. Moreover, evil does not appear suddenly, for no reason and from nowhere, like the words that pop out of a giddy, empty head. Evil must be brought about, it must have a cause. Of course it has no formal cause, it is the defect or privation of form to some degree. Neither has it a final cause, for it is essentially a privation of order to an end. To look for a material cause of evil does not mean looking for something from which to make evil, like hunting for the material for paper dolls; it means searching for some apt location for evil, a location that can be nothing else than a good. As for efficient cause, well, evil is always a by-product; it is never produced directly. It cannot be an efficient cause itself, for it is a defect; it cannot have an efficient cause, except indirectly, as the death of a carrot has its cause in the rabbit’s direct action to nourish itself. In other words, evil’s outstanding quality is one of complete dependence; whereas a first principle is outstandingly independent.
If we place evil in the human order as a first principle, we are establishing as a first cause either sin or punishment; for evil affecting man is either a defect of integrity or a defect in act, the first a punishment, at least of original sin, the second, sin itself. Strange qualities, indeed, to propose as ultimate explanations of anything. But, as far as that goes, all dualism is strange, as strange as a myopic man stubbornly insisting that there is nothing beyond what he can see. That is, in fact, the fundamental error of dualism: it is near-sighted. It focuses on particular causes, blinds itself to universal causality; it cannot see over the hill, so there is nothing beyond the hill. It sees only particular effects and makes its sweeping judgment from them, or it sees the contrariety of particular causes and concludes to contrariety in the very fundamentals of causality. These are the blind who insist on leading others; the marvel is that they can find so many ditches to fall into.
Monistic explanations
Dualism attempts to explain the diversity of the world by a diversity of principles; at the other extreme is monism, explaining that diversity on the basis of a single principle. Of its multiple forms, three which are fundamental are worth detailed consideration.
Pantheism
Pantheism solves the problem by denying it. It is the original sin of Eastern philosophy and the proud child of ultra-modern American philosophical parents. To its mind there is no question of the world coming from God, or from anything else; the world is God, a manifestation of the absolute that is identical with it. The world is an internal evolution of the divine substance.
The ancient philosophers advanced this denial of the problem to avoid what seemed to them a rupture of the unity of being; it was an escape from the apparently unbridgeable chasm between the finite and the infinite, it side-stepped the apparent contradiction of the addition of Created beings to the sum of the infinite to the impossible total of more than infinite being. The moderns advance it as a necessity for the philosopher who would keep pace with science, as a means of the preservation of the unity and hierarchy of being, and as the essential condition for keeping knowledge where it belongs — in the realm of science. The older cause of this explanation of the universe was intellectual cowardice: in face of the difficulty of a solution, the problem was denied; this led, as most cowardice does, to still more awesome difficulties. The modern adoption of the same explanation is rather an intellectual betrayal, an assassination by strangulation of the one faculty that could recognize the problem and find an answer for it.
Both lead to the same absurdities: the identification of the perfect and the imperfect, the contingent and the necessary, the free and the forced, matter and spirit, ani mal and angel. Both have so perverted the intellect as to have it swallow calmly the identification of opposites which normally nauseates it. In doing away with the difficulty they do away with God; in explaining away the necessity of the first cause, they destroy the cause itself. They do not meet the problem courageously; faced with it, they collapse and blow out their brains.
Evolution
The second monistic explanation is a widespread favorite today, the explanation of evolution. Let it be well understood that evolution, as an explanation of the universe, is not a working scientific hypothesis but a philosophic thesis; and it is precisely under its philosophical aspect that we are dealing with it here. Logically it is pantheism; it is admitted as such by many of its modern adherents. To others, that logical connection is not evident; they insist it is not pantheism, either because there is no God or because the god they admit has none of the attributes of the first cause, that is, their god has everything but divinity. We shall go into this philosophical evolution later on in this book, in treating of the origin of man.
For the present it will suffice to point out that evolution like pantheism, is not an explanation but a denial of all explanation. Some primary stuff, eternal or mysteriously giving birth to itself, slowly and inexorably developed, by chance and an equally mysterious environment, into the complicated world we know as the universe. Or, in another form, a mysterious life-force, utterly imperfect, has blindly, necessarily surged its way up through matter (which is unexplained) into the perfections we know to day. In this second form, there is no universe, no material world; only the process of perfection without a perfected substance, a process that does not stop long enough for us to know it. It is a river of undetermined origin ceaselessly flowing to undetermined seas; or, rather, the flowing without the river into seas without water.
Both these philosophical forms of evolution are very, very old; both have undergone face-lifting operations, both now travel by plane and dress in adolescent clothes to prove they are modern. The immediate, and modern, cause of this evolutionary explanation has undoubtedly been the mistaken effort to make a philosophy out of a scientific method. More profound reasons were the intellectual suicide of philosophy, following the devastating assumptions of a chasm between the mental and physical world, and the religious rationalism of Reformation times whose logical conclusion was the exaltation of human nature to the pinnacle of the universe by debasing it to the level of the material universe.
Whatever the explanation of its origin, evolution, as an answer to the questions evoked by the created world, fails. In its scientific form, it offers a highly plausible explanation of how the universe unfolded; in none of its forms does it offer an explanation of why the universe unfolded at all, or why and how there was a universe. A process is not an explanation but a demand for an explanation. Piling millions of years on a question does not smother the insistent query; it merely betrays fear of the question and despair of the answer. Slowing up the process to a hobbling pace does not change the problem nor its demand for a solution.
Creation
Creation, the third monistic explanation, is offered us by our faith and forced on us by our reason. It is commonly defined as “making something out of nothing”; a description that, while not inaccurate, is subject to misunderstanding. More properly, creation is defined as the production of an effect independently of any pre-existing subject; it is, in a word, the production of the whole being of a thing. The world was produced by the first cause in the way proper to that first cause, that is, with complete independence; if we maintain that there was anything upon which to depend, we have simply pushed the problem back and denied that this particular cause was first. Complete independence in action means production independently of any pre-existing subject.
The proofs for this explanation of the universe are those already given for the existence of God. Either this was the way things were produced or there are no things; there is no other way to account for the universe. Nor is this merely a question of accounting for the big things, mountains, continents, planets and stars; the question extends to the smallest of things, a speck of dust, the wink of an eye. One cries out the existence of the first cause and His mode of action — creation — as loudly as the other, or as all together. Either there is a first cause or there are no effects; either that first cause created (if He acted at all) or He is not first.
Though creation is the only reasonable explanation of the universe, men have consistently fought it throughout the ages. Such resistance to reason obviously needs clarification. One cause undoubtedly has been stiff-necked intellectual pride which refuses to bow before a mystery; and creation, from the side of God, precisely as His divine action, is a mystery. It is the infinite operation of God, the same as His divine essence; the comprehension of this action of creation would be comprehension of divinity itself. We can prove the world cannot have come into existence any other way and we know it has come into existence; nor are we at all reasonable in rejecting creation on the grounds that all truths must fit into the mould of our finite minds. In fact, we confess to the unreasonableness of this demand in our easy acceptance of such mysteries as life, solar action on the planets and many others in the purely natural sphere.
Some men have seen creation as a glorified bit of magic, with God pulling worlds out of nothingness as a magician pulls rabbits out of a hat. The real difficulty here is not that something is produced from nothing; that, in fact, is a fundamental dogma of the evolutionary thesis on emergent perfections. The learned among the moderns do not shrink from this sort of thing; they rush to embrace it, especially if something is produced from nothing without adequate cause. Real intellectual repugnance lies rather in the admission of the production of something without a cause; in the mystery of creation, there are absolutely no grounds for this repugnance, for here the supreme cause is operating.
Other men hare rebelled at the effortless ease of God’s action in creation, refusing to accept such a notion as the motionless action by which the universe sprang into being, the omnipotence of the whispered command of God. They would, no doubt, feel better if the work of creation had cost God effort. Yet these same men are fairly reasonable when the same philosophical principle is at stake in other matters. They do not chase flies with a spray of machine gun bullets nor close their fist to punch their way through a fog; in these cases, they see clearly that the dominance of the agent proportions the movement and effort necessary to his action. They expect an ant to stagger under the weight of a bit of grass; if a stalwart athlete staggers into a stadium under the same weight, they can be sure they are witnessing comedy or insanity. But they rebel at the notion that absolute omnipotence should produce effects by mere command.
The creation of finite beings in no sense destroys the unity of being, as the pantheists feared. That unity is to I be found in God Who has all perfection eminently. Created beings do not add something to the sum total of being; they participate being. They do not limit the infinite, marking off the spot where the Creator ends and the creature begins; for limitation is not so much by points of distinction as it is by subsistence or independence. My being, for example, is not limited by the being of my hand or my arm, but rather limits their being. If the thousands who listen to an orator were dependent on him for their very being, then they would not limit his being, rather he would limit theirs for they are dependent on him, not he on them; precisely because these listeners are not dependent but independent of the orator, they do limit his being. If a search of the universe were to uncover one being independent of God, then there would be a limitation of God; until such a time, no multiplicity of created things adds to or limits the being of God.
There is one last point to be noted about creation. It is not only the only way in which the world could have come into existence, not only the only way in which the first cause could act to produce the world; it is an act uniquely proper to the first cause. Only God can produce something independently of any preexisting subject. This might be made clear by insisting that only a whole cause can produce the whole of being, that we can expect no more than partial effects from partial causes; and only God is a whole cause in the sense of possessing the full perfection of causality. The same truth comes out from a consideration of the effect of creation, namely, being. Thus a damp rag cannot produce all the soddening effects of a summer shower, for the rag only participates the sopping wetness which belongs essentially to rain; in the same way, no total effect such as creation demands can be expected from a cause that only participates being.
We can push this truth still further to point out that not only can no secondary cause of itself create, absolutely nothing in the universe, from the highest angel to the least of things, can be used by God as the instrument of creation. The closest anyone or anything comes to taking part in creation is the human mother who cooperates with God in the production of His masterpiece of humanity; she prepares the material destined for union with a spiritual soul that can come into being only by the direct action of God. It is not divine snobbishness that excludes all created causes from creative activity; there simply is nothing in the act of creation for a created cause to do. Given a choice between a sponge and a hammer for the work of driving a nail, we would, of course, select the hammer as the proper instrument, knowing well that an instrument must have its proper effect or there is no sense in using it. It would be too much to expect the sponge to stiffen up sufficiently to drive the nail; that simply is not the effect of a sponge. It is much too much to expect a Created cause to produce its proper effect when there is nothing, absolutely nothing, on which it might produce that effect.
The stuff of the world
With the efficient cause of the world determined and something of its nature and manner of operation understood, the rest of the story of the world tumbles over itself in its eagerness to get down on the pages before we write finis to the book. IF we appear to start off on another avenue in search of the stuff of the world or its model, we know very well that we are simply taking a circular stroll that will bring us back to the same delightful spot that is divinity.
The thought of our time almost makes it necessary to talk of the stuff of the world, the very phraseology implying, erroneously, that there was some pre-existent subject upon which divinity worked. In this erroneous sense, it is said that God Himself is the material cause, the stuff, of the world. But this is to slip back into the unhealthy, primeval slime of pantheism or evolution where both God and the intellect must die to keep a monster alive. It is true that only God is the sufficient explanation of the existence of the material of the universe. Even though we take this material in the sense of extreme imperfection which the philosophers designate by “prime matter”, it must still be traced to the first cause, the more so because of its utter dependence. It is positively childish to picture the material of the universe as the stuff from which God fashioned the universe much as a child fashions muddies from a handful of mud. That material is itself a part of the universe and can actually exist only as a part of the concrete things that make up that universe. It is not a prerequisite of creation but an effect of it; it is not something with which God must have started off, but something that must have started off from God’s act of creation.
The model of the world
The search for the model of the universe leads us even more directly to God. As intelligent effects do not pop out of nowhere without rhyme or reason, it is obvious that there must be a model for the universe. Now and then, when we drag our tired eyes above the dust and confusion of the moment to let the fresh winds of the future and the dry breezes of the past wash and refresh them, we catch some insight into the truth that only God could be the model of the universe. Some detail of the masterpiece — the minuteness of love’s thoughtfulness, the magnitude of a mountain, the power of a smashing wind — brings out the genius of the craftsman and we are almost ready to fall down in adoration. If the model were anything other than God, then He would not be first, He would be dependent; that is, He would not be God.
Primary and secondary models
In spite of the suffering, the vice, the ugliness, the evil in the universe, the scale to which it is drawn, the plan upon which it is built, its blueprint is the eternal knowledge of Cod. It is not these defects that are difficult to explain; but the beauty, the joy, the perfection, the virtue, the happiness, the very existence of the universe can be conceived in no other way than as participations of that divine perfection. Who but God could know the possible participations of that divinity, the myriad mirrors that could reflect the divine excellence. We have seen this in some detail in an earlier chapter on the knowledge of God. Here it is only necessary to point out that the divine character of the model of the universe is not a denial of all other models. Of course an architect can have, in his mind, a model of the house he is building; of course a boy can choose a model upon which he builds his character. These are not excluded but rather made possible by the fact that the supreme architect is in possession of the first and absolutely universal model to which everything in the universe responds.
Without such a model, the divine action would not be the intelligent operation of divine wisdom but the stupidly haphazard wanderings of a drunkard or an idiot; deter mined forms of things can come only from the determined plan of their maker. Even the so called “accidental” discoveries of scientific research are the inviolable results of a determined divine plan giving determined qualities to the elements that enter into that research. The scientist can repeat the “accident” again and again, precisely because the only accidental thing involved was his discovery that there was no accident at all.
Source of order and law
These divine ideas, the model of the universe, are, then, the source of all order, an order that extends not merely to the physical outlines of the universe but to the essential principles of all natures, to the details of all acts. This order, which brings the benediction of peace and precludes the chaos of madness, embraces not only the physical and spiritual world of being but also the moral world of men’s acts. To all these worlds it gives standards as stable as the divine mind. It is as impossible for the morality of men’s acts to fluctuate from age to age as it is for the nature of angels, of men or of water to change. The moral laws are not the result of a caprice, not even of a divine caprice; they cannot be changed even at the pleasure of God. That divine model of the universe is immutable; so also is His law which is the ultimate root of the order which governs the universe, for the model is one of the roots of the law.
The goal of the world
Why were these things of the universe created at all? Why did God extend His activity beyond divinity itself? What was His purpose; what is the end of it all? Surely there must have been some goal; God, above all cannot act for no reason at all for that would be a disorderly act, a violation of His divine intelligence. Rather, the absence of an end, the complete indetermination thus involved, would result in no act at all. An act does not saunter aimlessly about the universe, or about the walks of eternity; it is going some place or it does not start at all.
Necessity of the goal
From what we know of the nature of God, it should be clear that there is only one goal, one end, possible to Him: if He acts at all, He must act for Himself. God created the universe for Himself; His goal was God; the end of the universe is the same as its beginning, God. Anything else is simply unthinkable. If God were working to a goal other than Himself, divine independence would be a myth as would the primacy of the first cause; God would, through the long life of the universe, be creeping up on something He lacked, mapping out a campaign for the capture of something outside Himself. There simply cannot be anything outside of God that does not come from Him, He cannot lack anything and still be God. Aside from the divine nature, the divine action cannot tolerate any other end than God: God, the absolutely perfect agent, must act in a perfect manner, not in the imperfect manner of an imperfect agent striving to perfect himself. The perfect agent, having all perfection, can act only for him self.
Objections against the goal
This truth has caused many a sniff at God by high-minded pagans. The idea! This is the God Who demands complete unselfishness and self-denial from us, yet, having all things, He cannot in the least of His works act for anything but Himself. This is a mean, petty, grasping God that a man can enjoy cheating. Like many another sniff, these protests of outraged nobility are entirely due to a misunderstanding; indignation stamps out, slamming the door, before it can be explained that the phrase “for himself” is equivocally used of man and God. A man, because he is an imperfect agent, reaches out to get something when he acts for himself; God, because He is a perfect agent, reaches out to give something away when He acts for Himself. We act to obtain or insure our perfection; God acts, in the only way He can act having all perfection, only to communicate His goodness. This is the perfect act — communication of goodness; this is the exact meaning of God acting for Himself.
Let us suppose these noble pagans had their way with God and He decided not to act for Himself, what would happen? Obviously, nothing would exist, for God cannot act any other way. But on the impossible hypothesis that God created the world and then washed His hands of it, as an ultra-modern mother gives birth to a child then turns it over to household and institutional servants, what would happen? Such a world would not be directed to Him, men and creatures would push God entirely out of their lives, out of their actions. The result? A howling chaos; a world full of creatures with no possible end in view; heartless brutality; men remorselessly driven by a desire for love and knowledge of God, a desire doomed to hopeless frustration. The whole thing would be a humorless practical joke on a cosmic scale, a mass of whirling worlds going nowhere, like a man driving himself insane by marching about the living room in a perpetual circle.
For the perfection, the end, of anything is the same as its beginning; the effect comes from the cause faith something of the excellence of the cause — certainly no more, usually very much less — and it approaches its perfection as it approaches the excellence of its cause. All things coming from God reach their perfection as they approach the divine likeness which is the peak of that infinitesimal participation of divine perfection which makes them what they are.
The variety of the world
The end or purpose of creation was to communicate the divine goodness so on every side of us we see something of the family likeness of God. The staggering variety of the universe is the result of divine ingenuity’s struggle to paint, in the stiff medium of creatures, a likeness of the gracious beauty of God. Of course even the divine artist failed. No finite creature is capable of receiving all of divine goodness, no one creature is capable of perfectly mirroring that divine perfection. It is more perfectly mirrored through the multiplication of different species of creatures; but even indefinite multiplication through all of an eternity fails to give back an adequate likeness of the face of God. The divine likeness, perceptible to the keen eyes of a saint in the lowest creatures of the world, is like the image given back to a woman by the one faulty mirror in her room; the bewildering beauty and inconceivable variety of the angelic world gives the effect of many mirrors each giving back a particular view, but no one of them nor all of them together, do more than catch a mood, a passing gesture, the light of a smile. Worlds could have been multiplied, as mirrors can be multiplied, but the results would be no more adequate. Nor, for that matter, would they be any more disparate; whatever the number of worlds created, the whole of creation would still be bound tightly together by an order to the only possible end, God Himself. Whatever God does must be orderly and there can be only one principle of that order, one end, God.
The age of the world: From reason
The story of the world, as the story of the likeness of God on earth, is a beautiful story. It is also a long, long story; how long we do not know. Our faith assures us that it is not as long a story as eternity, that it is not coeternal with God. Many modern scientific discoveries are taken by their discoverers as proofs from reason of the beginnings of the world at some definite time, such discoveries, for example, as the breakdown of radio active substances, the laws of thermodynamics tending than equilibrium of energy, the account of the years graphically written in geological strata, and so on. These may indeed be indications of a fact and a decided embarrassment to those devotees of a scientific method as a philosophy who have found their place among the evolutionists. But these discoveries are not proofs of the necessity of the fact. Neither the eternity of the world nor its beginning in time can be proved by human reason.
From faith
There is no place for such a proof to start. If we begin the argument from the side of God, there is the obvious fact that since this creative action was free and He existed from all eternity, He could have created from all eternity or He could have created in time. If we decide to build up the argument from the side of the created world itself, we are blocked by the fact that the essential natures within the world do not, in themselves, include any reference to or against time; they contain merely a reference to a cause, an insistence that they did not produce themselves.
It is to be noticed, however, that even if the world were eternal, the problem of its cause would remain unchanged; the world’s dependence would not be destroyed by its eternity, nor would its ageless existence make of it a first cause. In other words, the problem of the cause of the world is not to be dismissed by hiding it in the vast spaces of eternity any more than it can be destroyed by heaping the centuries upon it. We can know without faith that the world has its causal beginning and what is its end; faith alone can assure us that it had its temporal beginning.
Even so, the story of the world is a long, long story; a story that is never finished and never untold. It has been told from the beginning of the lives of men. In the telling, it has passed through the minds, the hearts and the hands of all the countless millions of men who have looked out upon the world up to this time. Some were simple, others sophisticated; there were wise men and very foolish men; cowards and men of courage; the far-seeing and the blind; the humble and the proud. The story has done something to all these men; and many of them have done something to the story. The centuries still to unfold will not vary the variety of men who listen to the story and tell it to their children; it will do things to them and many of them will do things to the story.
Conclusion:
Fictions and facts of the world
The story, however, will not be changed; there will merely be some spurious versions of it circulated with great popularity for a moment, then the old, old story will go on. There are bound to be spurious versions, as there have been in the past, because the story itself will not be to the liking of everyone. For one reason or another, men make their own changes in the old tale, as if their telling of it could mold the world. To some, the beginning of the story will be absurd because they did not witness it; they will do away with the beginning and start in the middle. To others. the end will be too hard and strong a thing to face; they will do away with the end, keeping something of the end’s gift of order, as a murderer will do away with a man but hold fast to his fortune. Others will be displeased with the way the world started and call on their own distorted imaginations for versions that are not so much mysterious as grotesque and absurd. Still others will be quite content with the world and the way it runs along, but insulted by the idea of an architect of it all; they will make the most of the house and laugh the architect into oblivion.
Purposes and failures of fiction
These, of course, are fictions, playthings of the mind of children whose greatest value is that they make no change in the facts. It is still true that the world had a beginning and has an end; that it sprang from nothing at the command of an omnipotent Creator. The madness and chaos that should flow From a causeless world whirling to no purpose clever crimes about; the despair that should saturate the lives of men in a meaningless world never displaces the hope established by the facts of the World. The fictions might have been concocted that the sophisticated might revel in their superiority, that the foolish might clown with impunity, that cowards might run away from life, the blind enjoy their darkness and the proud lord it over their little world. But it never is kindness to cater to and encourage the weakness of men; it is merely hurrying the half-reluctant suicide over the abyss he has been flitting with. The fictions fail as substitutes for the truth of the story of the world, for truth has no substitutes; the more heartily they are hugged to the breasts of men, the more completely do they betray men. In his heart, the superficial, cynical sophisticate has a deeper knowledge of his own pettiness than ever another man will have; the coward knows well his lack of courage; the blind, his lack of light; and the proud, the lowliness of the throne he occupies.
Comfort and significance of the facts
The story of the world is a hard story only to weak men who are very proud. To all others, it is the solid bedrock on which a man can build the towering spires of his human life. The omnipotent Creator is an assurance upon which a man can begin his life with the unwavering confidence of strong youth; the source of the world’s material is a dash of common sense that protects man from the absurdities of puritanism and hedonism, from irrational gloom and senseless ecstasy; the divine model is his explanation of the beauty, the order, the peace that links all of creation to the family of God. The goal of the world explains his present restlessness, his incredible hopes and courageous efforts, the values that make life a cheap coin to be spent extravagantly in the attainment of this last thing that gives meaning to the world, to life, to struggle and even to failure.
CHAPTER IX — THE ANGELIC WORLD
(Q. 50-53; 61)
1. Banishment of the angels:
(a) By the ancestors of modern philosophy.
(b) by the moderns:
(1) Its reasons
(2) Its effects.
2. The angels and the ages:
(a) Universality of belief in angels:
(l) Testimony of men.
(2) Testimony of philosophy.
(3) Testimony of history.
(b) Explanation of this universality:
(l) Primitive revelation.
(2) Angelic effects.
(3) Reason.
3. Existence of the angels:
(a) From faith
(b) From reason:
(l) From the perfection of the universe.
(2) From the imperfection of the human intellect.
4. Nature of the angels:
(a) Their simplicity.
(b) Their incorruptibility.
(c) Their variety and number.
5. Consequences of the angelic nature:
(a) in relation to bodies.
(b) in relation to place.
(c) in relation to movement.
Conclusion:
1. Companionship of the angels:
(a) An inspiration.
(b) An acceptance of the limits of man.
(c) An insistence on the excellencies of man
2. The appeal of the angels.
3. Room for the angels.
CHAPTER IX
THE ANGELIC WORLD
(Q. 50-53; 61)
Banishment of the angels
AS THE moderns edit it, the first dreadful chapter in human history has been recast, the roles changed so that the victim is now victimizer. Originally the angels stood at the gates of Paradise, inexorable, their swords flaming, as the first man and woman trudged out of the Garden disconsolate to begin their long, lonely exile. Today it is the angel who is banished and man who stands, inexorable, his words a flaming sword, guarding the barriers of the world. Of course, an angel is a difficult person to get at, even with a flaming sword; but the moderns have done the best they could. If it were possible to imagine a bedraggled angel, the victim of the modern decree would be a sorry sight; for here there is no promise of a redemption or a Redeemer. Indeed, if the angels had to take this stern exile seriously, their lot would be much more serious than was that of Adam and Eve: the first man and woman were forbidden a corner of the earth and made to climb the hill to heaven; the angels, if the moderns had their way, would have no corner of the earth left to them, nor any place in heaven or in hell. They would be ruled out of existence.
By the ancestors of modern philosophy
In the modern picture there is little room for an angel, however economic an angel might be with space. Certainly the immediate ancestors of our modern philosophers left little ground for angels to walk on, none to call their own. The materialism of the nineteenth century made a closed shop of the world, its machines purring along smoothly in a mechanical pride at their monopoly of the past, present and definitely predictable future. Machines and angels have little in common; and this was a completely mechanical world. No account could be taken by it of the angels for, by its own confession, it could handle only the material; the rest was ruled out of existence.
By the moderns
The naturalism, which supported this machine-like world, identified the known with the seen, the observed; only that which could be weighed, measured, dissected was real. An angel was much too slippery to be real. Rationalism, at least in its earliest beginnings, admitted human reason and its immaterial character into the world of reality; but then it slammed shut the gates. There were no seats left, certainly none for a being that claimed superiority over that human spirit, Rationalism expected to destroy the angels by snubbing them; instead, it has come perilously close to destroying the human reason it professed to champion.
Its reasons
The modern attitude is a jumble of all three of these views of reality. Some men, pushing naturalism to its logical extreme, deify science and so, of course, brush the angels aside impatiently. What can a scalpel, an atom smasher or a list of cleverly arranged words do with an angel? There cannot be angels. A logical consequence of this is the denial of reason itself; reason, you see, has not as yet been strapped to an operating table. Their flag proclaimed them to be mechanistic and psycho-analytical psychologists but they were, none the less, pirates preying on humanity who made even that feeble offspring of spirituality which rationalism spared walk the plank. The step was not far from the insistence on the absolute supremacy of reason to its complete extinction.
Today, many legions of men insist on the complete independence and supremacy of man, refusing to have anything to do with a creature, or even a God, superior to man. Modernity again bites off its nose to spite its face; the trick is so ingenious that we have not yet tired of it. To spite reason and extol the scientific method, reason is ruled out and so science is killed; to spite authority and rule mystery out of the universe, reason is elevated to the highest rung of the ladder and nothing is left for the ladder to stand on. The moderns have made the defense of man by putting him at the crown of existence, a kind of three ring circus with no publicity barred; but when the noise dies down and the crowds file out, the hero of the whole performance is crawling about on all fours. Obviously angels have no place in such thinking as this; neither, for that matter, have men.
Its effects
This modern contempt for things angelic has, as a matter of fact, had its effect on those who have no slightest doubt about the angelic world. Not that it has shaken their belief in any way; it has rather made them self-conscious about angels. They would hesitate to drag an angel out in public. Belief in angels is made to seem just a little childish, like believing in hobgoblins or Santa Claus; it is as though angels belonged in the world of make-believe that may be dissolved at any moment by the call to dinner. There is just the faintest odor of suspicion that by such belief we are not being entirely true to our reason, we are a little too credulous for manhood, a little too hopeful for an adult.
The angels and the ages: Universality of belief in angels
Testimony of men
If a Christian must have his angels, then he must stand off to one side of the modern world, in a sense sharing the banishment of the angels, isolated. Yet, strangely enough, it is only in these last few centuries that an angel was made to feel like an outsider or the believer in angels to feel naively credulous. The anthropological findings on primitive man certainly indicate that an angel would have been taken for granted in the days of pre-history, at the very beginnings of human life. The belief in beings, superior to man and matter but inferior to God, was then almost universal. Sometimes these spirits were good, sometimes they were bad: at different times they were identified as belonging to a river, a tree, a rock, an animal. But their essential characteristics of immateriality, their superiority to man and inferiority to God, crop up as constant factors.
Testimony of philosophy
As history grew up and began to scribble its account in the copy book that will never be filled, it found the world positively crowded with beings exhibiting these same angelic characteristics, beings who bore the names of spirits or demi-gods. The richness of Greek and Roman mythologies, to give just one instance, is evidence of this among the people themselves and in the literary expression of this popular attitude. Lest this be discounted on the grounds of popular ignorance, it might be well to notice that the philosophers did not escape this universal belief. Thales and Pythagoras placed them in the vestibule of the divine world; Socrates talked familiarly with one of them; Plato and his disciples filled the world with separated intelligences or secondary gods; to Aristotle they were the movers of the heavenly bodies. Indeed the angels are not newcomers to the world of men.
Testimony of history
Putting the popular accounts, mythology and philosophy to one side and coming to strict history, we find the most thoroughly authenticated and extrinsically corroborated of historical books — the Bible — parading the angels across almost every page. It was an angel that stayed the hand of Abraham, that slew the first-born of Egypt, that led the way to the Maccabean victories; the angel’s message was a little too much for the aging Zachary but not for the maid of Galilee or her trusting husband; God Himself stooped to angelic comfort after the long days of desert fast and the long hours of Gethsemane’s agony. Down through the centuries, the lives of the saints, not to be sniffed at even by the most historical of noses, have not found room enough for all the angelic details; nor were their writers seriously disturbed, knowing full well there would be all of heaven’s eternity to listen to the full account.
Explanation of this universality:
Primitive revelation
It is not the angels who are lonely in the world of men; rather it is the age that banishes the angels that finds itself a stranger among its fellows who have harbored human life. Such universal belief deserves better than to be treated contemptuously; surely it is too huge a thing to be cast off like a shawl by a shrug of the shoulders. At the very least, it deserves some examination, and considerable explanation. From the Catholic’s point of view, the view of faith, a quite obvious explanation is primitive revelation; an explanation, by the way, that has many a likely looking corroboration in the folklore of primitive peoples with its accounts of a virgin birth, a creation, a flood and so on. This is one way of knowing about the angels, indeed one of the very best ways of knowing about anything — being told by the first truth Who can neither deceive nor be deceived and Who is the first cause of everything.
Angelic effects
Putting aside the question of a primitive revelation, there are many facts pointing plainly to the existence of the angels. To the medieval mind, with its solid Catholic outlook on all of life, even angelic life, there was no particular difficulty connected with such things as Peter’s release from prison or the collapse of the chains that had bound him: nor with the case of Peter of Verona whose lonely cell was flooded by brilliant light long before the days of electricity and voices were heard talking to him as he prayed alone in his cell. Quite obviously the angels were responsible for these things. When one of the brethren was obsessed by the devil, it was not necessarily an epileptic fit nor congenital insanity; for after all there were devils and the fact remained that the afflicted one was returned to perfect normalcy through an ecclesiastical exorcism.
Reason
There is at least a suspicion creeping into the cynical modern mind that there is more to the world than bodies, more to thought than measurement, more to activity than the bouncing of electrons. A modern philosopher, for instance, admits in print that there are many psychical phenomena that have not been satisfactorily explained, giving as examples such things as authenticated activities of a seance room, the mischievous, cheap little tricks of poltergeist origin and so on. A long established psychical research laboratory in London, and a like institute in Boston, frankly admit numerous examples of things that defy explanation on the grounds of a materialistic philosophy. Indeed some modern scientists have been so overwhelmed by these phenomena as to go to ridiculous lengths of childish credulity in originating a cult that has often been a rich harvest field for knaves and tricksters.
Existence of the angels
All this may or may not appeal to the mind of a man of today as a rational jumping-off-place of an argument in favor of the angels. There might, as a matter of fact, be serious difficulty from this angle in arguing to the activity of the good angels; such suprahuman activity might be a direct divine effect. No such difficulty, however, presents itself in arguing to the activity and existence of the bad angels, the devils. For such satanic activity, while obviously suprahuman, is just as obviously not divine; surely the divinity does not play the poltergeist’s cheap tricks of breaking dishes, cuffing surprised victims or slipping in a sly pinch just for the devilment of it.
There is still another way of getting at the existence of the angels by reason alone, a solid enough way and old enough to have proved its solidity. Indeed, this was the method adopted by many a scientist with remarkably fruitful results; thus it was, for instance, that Descartes, arguing to the way other things had to be by the way things are, uncovered so many of the mysteries of the spectrum long before there was tangible evidence to support his theories; thus, too, the table of atomic weights was drawn up in neat completion long before many of the tardy elements had found their way into the narrow opening of a man’s mind; it was in this way that Einstein proceeded in evolving his mathematical theories.
This way of arguing can bring out the possibility of angels, or even the sublime fittingness of angels in the ordered scheme of things; it cannot demonstrably show that they do exist There simply is no way in which we can set about proving the existence of angels a priori neither from the side of their cause, God, Who creates with complete freedom; nor from the side of the angels, His effect, who, like all other creatures, do not include existence in their very nature. Before setting out, then, on the arguments reason offers, it is to be noted emphatically that, for the Catholic, the solid grounds for the existence of the angels is the word of that first Intelligence, the source of all truth, i.e., the infallible revelation of God Himself assuring us of the existence of these supreme creatures of the created world.
From Faith
The importance of angels to human life may be estimated from the overwhelming character of the evidence of the revelation of their existence we have already spoken of the familiar frequency with which the angels stride through the pages of Scripture. These examples could be multiplied indefinitely, from the wandering visitors of Abram, through the unemployed Raphael’s ready acceptance of a position as guide, to the business-like brusqueness of Gabriel. Even more impressing is the part the angels played in the human life of God Himself: they heralded His birth, ministered to His weakness in the desert, comforted Him in His agony, announced His resurrection and on the mount of the Ascension drew the curtain after the short drama of His life That there be no mistake about its importance, the existence of the angels is reasserted in the earliest statements of belief, the creeds or symbols. The same truth is proclaimed again and again in the Councils in solemnly impressive language: “We firmly believe that there is one God, creator of all visible and invisible things, spiritual and corporal; Who by His omnipotent power from the beginning of time made both the spiritual and corporal creature, the angelic namely and the earthly, and then the human creature from both spirit and body.” (Fourth Council of Lateran.)
In both Scripture and the Councils it is insisted that these angelic creatures are intellectual substances superior to men. These essential characteristics of the angelic nature have been stressed with complete universality by the Fathers, both Greek and Latin. This is the more remarkable in that there was no particular dispute about the angels and there were enough fundamental doctrines under heavy attack to occupy the hands and heads of all the Fathers all the time. It was as though each one considered his life and writings incomplete until he had paid his intellectual tribute to these big brothers of humanity.
From Reason
Down through the centuries, the angels were a subject to be cherished by every Catholic author. They played such an intimate part in the lives of Mary, her Son and the apostles, they took the beginnings of Christianity so much to heart that Christian authors, now that Christianity had grown up, frankly hailed the angels as the friends, the champions, the defenders they really were. It is not surprising, then, that the Doctors of the Church labored lovingly on their treatises on the angels. Thomas put such exquisite touches to the delicately firm lines of his tract as to merit the name “Angelic Doctor” and to have the tract draw the eye of every intellectual connoisseur by the sheer boldness, Penetration and beauty of its conception; its execution has left it unparalleled as the supreme treatment of the angels. That supremacy, however, has not discouraged theologians since his time from doing their bit towards establishing the angels solidly in the heart of Christians of every age.
From the perfection of the universe
To get back to the elusively inconclusive but subtly persuasive argument from reason, it might be well to point out that the angels do properly fall within the scope of a natural investigation. The angels are decidedly an integral part of the natural order because they are suprahuman, some men have jumped to the conclusion that they are supernatural; it is a naive conceit that forgets that to a plant a worm might as reasonably seem supernatural, to a worm a dog, to a dog a man. When, in a rare moment, we emerge from pride’s fog, it is not difficult for us to admit that we are not so utterly perfect as to make unthinkable a natural perfection superior to our own; especially in the morning before breakfast. It is from this obvious limitation of man and the clear perfection of the Author of man that the arguments of reason for the existence of angels proceed.
The first, and very beautiful, argument might be summed up in the dry words of the principle that the effect is perfect in proportion as it resembles or images its cause. The principle comes to life as soon as it is brought from the abstract to the concrete: we agree without demur to the contention that reflected light is more perfect as it can itself illumine others; knowledge is more perfect when it can enlighten others; love of God is more perfect in our hearts when we can set the hearts of others on fire. We cannot picture the perfect architect of the universe bungling the job; the universe, for God’s purpose, is perfect. His purpose was the communication of His perfection, the manifestation of His goodness. Thus, things existing mirror the existence of God, things living give us a faint picture of the life of God; but of the operation of God, of His own most inner life, of the intellectual activity proper to Him we have no adequate image unless there be angels intellectual substances, independent of the world of matter, whose entirely immanent activity is one of intellect and will.
From the imperfection of the human intellect
It is true that man does mirror God in some little way; compared to the creatures beneath him, man is far and away king. He seems infinitely above them by his power of thought and of love. But even to our feeble eyes, there is a jagged gap between the operation of God and the operation of man. Man’s spirit is incomplete without a body; he needs matter for the very stuff of his thought; in every action, every thought, he must use his material body; it is through the material that he attains his intellectual and moral perfection. What a contrast to the complete independence of spirit that is God’s! If man stands at the peak of the created universe, the table of perfections is incomplete: there is existence, life, sense knowledge and love, intellectual knowledge and love dependent on matter; the missing grade is obvious — intellectual life, knowledge and love completely independent of matter. A scientific mind meeting a similar situation in the scientific world has no hesitation in proclaiming the existence of the missing grade and setting out in search of it; the mind of man, scientific or otherwise, meeting the same situation in the wider world of the universe, has had even less hesitation in proclaiming the existence of angels. Nor has the search for them been far or long.
Whether a man preen himself, looking over the world with a proud eye, or debase himself, insisting on identification with the world beneath him by ingeniously devised camouflage, the fact remains that he is neither at the top nor the bottom of creation. He stands on the lowest rung of intellectuality. In him the native independence of intellectuality is walled about by the world of matter. And this feeble flicker of intelligence in man itself proclaims the existence of a more perfect intelligence. In treating of the life of God, we have seen that intelligence does not of itself need the material of the physical world; to intelligence as such the material is accidental, something peculiar to intelligence as it exists in the composite we call man. This fact tells quite a story. It is accidental to animal life to flaunt wings; so we find some animals without wings. It is accidental to legs to be bowed; so we find some legs that are not bow-legs. It is accidental to living things to have legs, so we find some living things without legs. If, then, it is not essential, but rather accidental, to intelligence to be bound up in matter, there will be some intelligence, even created intelligence, independent of matter.
In fact we can push this farther, making it a more general argument, by insisting on the point that human intelligence is an imperfect grade of intelligence. In every class of beings, the imperfect presupposes the perfect, perfection is something posterior to perfection, something that happens to perfection, like the twisting of a word through a crooked mouth. The appearance of an imperfect grade assures us of the existence of the perfect grade of that perfection.
At any rate, our study of the different grades of life in which we traced the intrinsic activity of creatures up to the intrinsic activity of God that is the Trinity gives us more than room enough for an angel or two in the scheme of things. Certainly the story of creation would have been halted in the middle of a chapter if angels had not been produced by God. For all their high perfection, angels are not to be confused with God Himself. They are not uncaused, nor did they make themselves; they are not utterly self-sufficient. Rather, in common with all creatures, they are utterly dependent on the sustaining hand of God which brought them into being and alone keeps them there. Their stupendous perfection is only a wavering silhouette of the infinite perfection of God. Theirs too, like our own, is a borrowed, a participated perfection, a loan made from the essential perfection that is divine.
Nature of the angels
They were created in time, not from eternity; though any attempt to prove this statement is foredoomed to failure. This is one of those truths that are not material for proof but for belief; obviously, if the temporal beginning of the universe cannot be proved, the existence of any one thing in it cannot be dated with the stamp of eternity or time. Proceeding on faith’s solid assurance of the temporal beginning of angelic life, theologians have no hesitation about plunging into the question of the relative time of the production of the angels: were they produced before, after, or simultaneously with the physical world? Again, reason cannot get very far. From the language of the definitions of the Church, and because they are such an integral part of the natural universe, St. Thomas concludes that the angels were created together with the physical world. Here reason is left entirely to itself; walking alone in this territory, it rapidly loses its swagger, its voice sinks to the whisper of an opinion and, while the darkness endures, humility is no effort. Thomas’ opinion is reasonable where decision is impossible; though he stands opposed to the Greek Fathers, he is not alone, for his opinion is the quite natural universal opinion of the Latin Fathers.
Their simplicity
Those superior intellectual substances which we call angels do exist. What are they like? The picture that reason draws of them is necessarily negative. At least it is clear that they are not bulky giants whose great strength makes men look anemic. There can be no question of bulk in an angel for there is nothing material in an angel. Moreover the possibility of ever dissecting an angel is precluded hy the fact that they are without matter: there is no inside and outside, top and bottom, fore and aft, arms and legs to an angel. This spiritual being, precisely because it is spiritual, is completely simple, utterly devoid of parts. In fact, an angel has not even that essential composition of matter and form so universal in all of nature beneath the angelic order; and this is no more than to insist again that these beings are spiritual, completely spiritual, altogether independent of the material. True, this conception comes hard to us because our minds are necessarily entangled in the material; as much as we agree that the angels are spiritual substances, subsisting forms, the flavor of matter haunts our consideration of the angels like a disembodied memory of a vague perfume. It is somewhat of a help to remember that the angel’s normal existence is like that of the soul of a man after death and before the resurrection of the body; though, of course, the human soul has a lonely incompleteness about it in this state which is altogether absent from the full life of the angels.
Their incorruptibility
There is nothing in an angel that might fall out, come loose, or be cut off. An angel is totally incorruptible. Being completely simple, it cannot break up into parts; nothing of its nature can be lost for there is nothing composite about that nature. In simple terms, the angel does not go through that dress rehearsal for death which we call a change; above all it does not have to play the leading role in the drama of death. Thomas, rightly, says that every change is a kind of death; for in every change some thing is lost, even though something is also gained.
Corruption, as we understand it, is the result of the separation of the principle of unity and life from the matter it unifies and vivifies. Obviously this implies at least the fundamental complexity of form, or unifying principle, and of matter. Looking at it in the concrete, we can destroy a fresco by scraping it off the wall or by tearing down the wall it beautifies; that is, either by destroying the thing itself or that upon which it depends. There is no chink in the armor of the angels into which we might plunge the lance of destruction. The angel cannot be taken apart or erased; it cannot be destroyed by destroying that on which it depends, for it depends on nothing but God. God could, of course, destroy an angel; not by a blow of an almighty fist or the roar of a thundering fiat, but by the simple recall of the loaned existence the angel enjoys. In common with every other creature, the angel is not self-sufficient, its nature is not its existence; it lives by a borrowed, a participated existence. It too continues in being only because of the sustaining hand of God; there is no positive action necessary on the part of God to annihilate an angel, merely the withdrawal of that conserving hand without which an angel, and indeed a universe, falls into the nothingness from which it sprang.
Their variety and number
On the basis of their spiritual natures, we can spear of the angels as we would of members of the same family, emphasizing common characteristics such as immateriality, simplicity and incorruptibility. That generic sameness must not, however, betray us into conceiving of the angels as indefinitely numerous facsimiles of the one model. There is as much difference between one angel and another as there is between a horse and a man, for each angel is a distinct species, complete and entire in itself. In other words, angelic nature is not said of the angels in the same way as human nature is said of men; we differ among ourselves only by individual differences, specifically all men are the same. In each angelic species, on the contrary, there is only the one individual in whom the species is complete.
There is no point in a multiplication of individuals within an angelic species. In material things, such multiplication is absolutely necessary to assure the continuation of the species, for the individuals, reaching their allotted term of existence, cease to be; in the angelic order, the incorruptible nature of each angel is itself a guarantee of the permanency of the species. It might be argued that God’s purpose in creating — the mirroring of His divine perfections — is better served through the multiplication of individuals within a species. But; as a matter of fact, it is by the variance of the species that finite creation achieves some little likeness to the smile of divinity, not through the material differentiation of individuals within the species.
With one exception, it is true that, throughout the created world, the individual is unimportant but for the part it plays in perpetuating the species. That exception is the world of man. There every individual is of supreme importance, for every individual is possessed of an eternally enduring soul, a soul that will outlast every other species in the material order. Really, the human exception is no exception at all. Throughout all of nature, it is the enduring, the permanent that is the object of nature’s ceaseless care; because the individual’s spark of life is so momentary a thing, it is unimportant in comparison with the constantly renewed existence of the species. It is on the basis of this identical principle that the human soul is so terribly important — because it is not destined for the life of a moment, of a year or even of a century, but of all of an eternity. On the same grounds, men who see nothing spiritual, eternally enduring, in themselves arrive, with devastating logic, at the tragic conclusion that individual human life is a cheap, common, unimportant thing.
Even if there were some point in multiplying angelic individuals within the one species, it could not be done. Let us say we are discontented with our human souls and decide to do something about it. If we remember that our soul, being spiritual, has no parts, we can readily understand that there can be no question of trimming rough spots or rounding off curves. That soul, like all forms in matter and like all substances in the spiritual order, is utterly simple; if we could induce any change whatsoever, however small, we would have changed the whole thing. We might have produced something very pleasing but we would have destroyed a man. Any slightest variation in a substantial form results in a substantial change; and the rational soul of man is precisely that substantial form by which he is differentiated from every other creature in the universe. The angels are subsisting substantial forms; any slightest differentiation would not mean multiplication of individuals within a species, but a specific, a substantial change. There is, in fact, a possibility of multiplication within a species only when an essential element of that species can suffer modification that is not a substantial modification; or, in plain language, the principle of individuation can be found only in matter. The angels are completely independent of matter.
The implication of this specific character of every angel, taken in conjunction with the number of the angels, is staggering. For their number is beyond all computation. The Sacred Scriptures hint at this in such passages by: “thousands of thousands (of angels) ministered to him, and ten thousand times a hundred thousand stood before him”: It is right, eminently right, that the number of angels should dwarf the number of all other created things. The beauty of creatures is an imperfect image of the beauty of God and the whole purpose of creation was to mirror in creatures something of that divine beauty; the more perfect the creature, then, the greater the image, of divine beauty; the angels, as the most perfect of all created beings, are the most perfect image of divine beauty. By their multiplication the divine purpose in the universe is most effectively attained. Each angel portrays an angle, a shadow of the divine beauty, each much more distinct than the fragrance of the locust tree from the blossom of a cherry tree.
The white light of divine beauty is only partly appreciated by us when it passes through the prism of creatures. There it is broken up into the thin rays of color which alone may seep through to our mind and senses. The terrifying numbers of the angels give us some little idea of the streaming rays of beauty that pour from the world nearest divine beauty, the world of the angels.
Consequences of the angelic nature:
in relation to bodies.
Perhaps it was some vague appreciation of this angelic beauty that introduced the words “angel” and “angelic” into love’s vocabulary. Actually, to look like an angel is a dubious accomplishment; at least to human eyes, an angel is not much to look at. Insisting on their independence of the material, we have already made plain the fact that bodies in no sense belong to angelic nature; angels are immaterial, completely spiritual substances. Yet angels stood, sword in hand, at the gates of Paradise, they came walking down the road to Abraham, made the long journey with the young Tobias. These angels certainly had bodies. Where did they get them?
Obviously, these bodies could not have been the angels’ own bodies; angels do not have bodies. Since they did have them, they must have taken them for the particular occasion, somewhat as a man might hire a dress suit in the penury of college days. As to where they got the bodies, well, any answer is no more than a guess. After all, this particular body was only for appearance’s sake; it was not necessary that it have a back as well as a front, that it be complete, a human body. In their search for the kind of body they needed, the angels were not reduced to grave-robbing. St. Thomas suggests, timidly, that the angels used compressed air as the material of these bodies. He was, of course, only guessing. There are many questions relative to these angelically assumed bodies more important than their source. Could, for instance, these bodies produce vital acts: could they see, take nourishment, grow, get old, rheumatic and creaky? The angel Raphael, declining the hospitality of Tobias, gave the answer: “I seemed indeed to eat and to drink with you; but I use an invisible meat and drink which cannot he seen by men.” No, these bodies were not capable of vital acts. Only living bodies, bodies informed by a substantial form proper to them, can do these things. Without bodies, devoid of matter and consequently of all quantity, an angel cannot be in place as we are; the surface of our bodies is, in a sense, surrounded. How can an angel be surrounded? It cannot be locked in a closet or folded up in the ectoplasm of a medium. Yet angels must be some place; they do not enjoy the ubiquity of God. The difficulty comes, as it so often comes, from our effort to conceive of everything in human terms. The angels are in place, not by a contact of quantity as we are, but by a contact of power. In other words, an angel is where he is at work. The philosophers have put all this in two words by saying that men are circumscriptively in place, while angels are definitively in place.
In relation to place
However we phrase it, the fact remains that an angel can operate in four corners of a room at one time; yet these four corners will be but one place for an angel. For an angel’s place is where he is working: it may be that one material place exhausts the angel’s power and then the material and the angelic place coincide; but it may also be that a dozen material places do not exhaust the angel’s power and then, because our minds are so wedded to the material, we begin to insist that it simply cannot be so. The truth becomes plainer, and more startling, when we push it further. The fallen angels who chose the swine for then next habitation, were speaking literally when they told Christ their number was legion. An angel, you see, does not need a defined space; there is no danger of any number of angels crowding each other, tussling for the same strap, or blocking a doorway. There is no limit to the number of angels assignable to any one material place for the crucial question of quantity is one that does not come up in the angelic world.
In relation to movement
The manner in which the angels move, then, represents little difficulty since it follows their manner of being in place. If this particular angel has assumed a body, then, by reason of the body, the angel moves locally, step by step, trudging up one hill and down another. Otherwise, that is, without the assumed bodies, the angels are in place by their operation which is by intellect and will; they move as they change operation, with the speed, the ease and completeness of thought or desire. Gabriel was not out of breath on his arrival in Nazareth. It is true that the angels sat on the tomb of Christ the morning of the resurrection; but we must not read fatigue into that position. What could be more natural, having a body handy, than to sit it down. We might almost say that the process of sitting down might well be one an angel could take pride in. For no one having a body merely sits down: they may drop themselves into a chair and heave themselves out of it in open confession of aging bones; they may collapse into a chair as though from the sudden disintegration of bones, and drape themselves over it as formlessly as a rug; or they may make of the process a demonstration of suave serenity, sitting down as smoothly as a cat stretches, as bewilderingly as a mirage disappears, as swiftly graceful as the glide of a swallow. From the practical point of view, it was unfortunate there was no twentieth century commentator on etiquette present to discover just how one should sit down.
Conclusion: Companionship of the angels:
An inspiration
Undoubtedly we can accomplish the complicated operation of sitting down without angelic help; but to eschew the companionship of the angels entirely is to suffer a serious loss that may well lead to a misunderstanding of human nature itself. For a man is a cosmopolitan being alone in a provincial-minded world; he alone is spiritual, which is to say that he alone is impatient of matter, that only his thought scales the barriers of the universe, only his love holds fast to the dream of an eternal surrender, only his soul is dedicated to a task that only ceaseless energy and unending duration can possibly finish. It has never been good for man to be alone; it has always been good for a man to be in the company of those who cling to finer ideals, are possessed of greater talents, who strive for higher goals. His play in the game of life is steadily worsened if he meets only equals or inferiors; it is steadily improved if he moves in faster company where he has something to learn, something to imitate, something to urge him on every minute of the game.
An acceptance of the limits of man
Alone in the material world, a man is apt to develop eccentricities as absurd as the quirks that twist the recluse into a caricature of a man. He has, as a matter of fact, made the absurd mistake, looking about the world, of thinking that his was the supreme intelligence, his the supreme love, his the supreme achievement; he has made an angel or even a god of himself — and then, reasonably, given in to despair. He has missed the companionship of the angels that would have opened his eyes to the feeble stumblings of his slow mind, the waverings of his love, the ready fatigue of his energy; he has missed a realization that would have given him hope, pride in the intellectual family of which he is the humblest member, and confidence in his efforts, knowing he did not work alone.
An insistence on the excellencies of man
On the other hand, from this same loneliness, he is apt to make, and in fact has made, the mistake of completely underestimating himself. His supremacy to the material world was too great to be believed, its responsibilities too heavy to he carried by his narrow shoulders; so he brushed aside that supremacy and plunged to the level of the things beneath, a level that seared and withered his lonely soul. He missed the companionship that would have opened his eyes to his own incorruptibility, the speed of his thought, the timelessness of his love, the height of his goals.
The appeal of the angels
In other words, being alone, man has taken himself apart; and, as so often happens, one of the parts was lost in the reassembly of his powers. It is not, however, men as men, but philosophers or scientists who take man apart. Men do not break themselves into parts; they take man as a whole. Perhaps that is the secret of the universal appeal of the angels to the mind of men. In that angelic world, the soul of man is at home as it can never be at home in any lesser world; there the soul of a man finds the common language of the spirit, the ready understanding, the quick sympathy and unquestioning helpfulness that allow him to be completely himself, relaxed but intense, at home. For this is the world of the spirit.
Room for the angels
There is room enough in the world of nature for the angels. It would be a narrow, confining place without them. And room will be made for the angels as long as a man trudges the length and width of the world knowing his loneliness, humbly conscious of the limitations of his powers, awed by his superiority over the material world in which he moves. The hope, the vigor, the inspiration and the comfort of the companionship of these big brothers of humanity will not easily be surrendered; to one dedicated by nature to a search for the beauty and goodness of God, there will be slight challenge to the angels who most perfectly mirror that beauty and goodness. There is room enough in the world of nature, there is room enough in the heart of a man, for an angel who takes up no room.
CHAPTER X — THE ANGELS’ VISION
(Q. 54-58)
1. The angels’ vision a dream of men
(a) From the beginning
(b) Among the first philosophers
(l) The fact
(2) Reasons of the fact
(3) Dual results of the fact
2. The dream and the moderns
(a) Descartes’ angelism
(b) Its legitimate descendants
3. The dream of men a natural gift of the angels: perfect knowledge in a perfect way:
(a) In a perfect way, i.e. innately, intuitively, independently:
(1) This knowledge is innate
a. Relative to angelic essence
b. Relative to angelic existence
c. Relative to angelic intellect
(2) It is intuitive
(3) It is independent
a. Source of the angelic ideas
b. Source of the angels’ knowledge of God
c. Source of the angels’ knowledge of self
(b) Perfect knowledge
(1) The objects of angelic knowledge
a. Spiritual objects
1. Other angels
2. Thoughts and desires of men
3. Mysteries of grace
b. Material objects
(2) Infallibility of the angelic knowledge
Conclusion:
1. The dream of men is not without its excuse
2. It is not without its divine reason
3. Nor is it without it fulfillment
CHAPTER X
THE ANGELS’ VISION
(Q. 54-58)
THERE is little of idleness in the universe; what little there is is not for long. For the penalty of idleness is frustration and, shortly, extinction. Apparently idleness can be indulged in by men with more impunity than any other creature of the universe; but the appearance of unpenalized idleness in the human world is an illusion. Actually, man is one with the rest of the world in the possession of that inner drive for the fullness of perfection that so ruthlessly stamps out the idle; he not only has this same drive, in him it exists in a degree so intensified that it seems to demand that he outstrip himself. H is possessed of a yearning for goodness and truth that pulls the heart out of him.
The angels’ vision a dream of men
Unable to satisfy this quenchless thirst, men have, from the beginning both of individual life and the life of the race, been haunted by a dream; the dream of quick, easy, complete quieting of the remorseless demands of their very nature. Sometimes they have mistaken the dream for a reality, for the port itself instead of the guiding beacon; but, mistaken or not, the dream has persisted. Thus children go to school with lagging steps and race out of the classroom; vacation time is a release from prison and September is approached with the listless resignation of a doomed man’s steps to the gallows. Yet “why” is never far from their lips; they want to learn, insist on learning, but easily, quickly, satisfyingly. It is as though the dream were born within them.
From the beginning
In the very beginning of the race, satanic ingenuity could devise no temptation so seductive as the promise to materialize this dream: “you shall be like gods, knowing good from evil.” Awed by the splendor of that dream, the strong, unimpeded intellects of the first human couple became as credulous as a child listening to a ghost story on a stormy night. Even after that first terrible lesson had been learnt, after men had seen what might be expected from grasping at shadows and deserting reality, they still started their tower of Babel, that they might look into heaven.
Among the first philosophers:
The fact
It is not so surprising, then, to see men, in the first baby steps of philosophic thought, tottering towards the bright tinsel of the unceasing dream. The fact is beyond dispute. Hindu philosophy tried to reach the utmost boundaries of wisdom by one proud thrust. Impatient of the material world, the Eastern philosophers denied it; their intellects would be independent of all else and, by a kind of natural contemplation of self, would pierce into and be absorbed by the absolute. The Chinese philosophy of Lao-tse embraced a kind of wisdom through contemplation together with an esoteric principle of revolution; the two added up to a sort of self-hypnosis, aided by opium, whose goal was complete cessation of activity and reabsorption in nothingness, to become one with the first principle.
Reasons of the fact
To eyes made sympathetic by the vista of crumbled dreams that stretches the length of a lifetime, reasons for this fact of philosophical history do not have to be laboriously excavated from the ruins of the dream. Unquestionably glimpses of quick, sure, easy knowledge are given to men from time to time. A man’s position in the units verse is a perch on the peak of an alp from which he can exult in the scoured cleanliness of sun-drenched clouds and the mysterious depths of the sky, depths that are above him not below him; or be sobered by the shadows, the fog, the ready darkness of the valley that lies at his feet. He stands nicely balanced between the spiritual and the material world. Standing on tiptoe he can almost peer into the city of the angels. Just as in himself he sees the gray spectres of his own bestial potentialities, so also in himself he sees an occasional flash of angelic beauty and perfection. It is not hard to understand a man dreaming of the wings of an angel or the claws of an animal.
Dual results of the fact
Then, too, just as there is no one so impatient with stutters as a stammerer, so there is no one more impatient of human intelligence than an intelligent man. Its weakness, its sluggishness, its inaccuracy, its dependence on the material world and material conditions are all a constant exasperation to him. If this is true despite the immense intellectual deposit we have inherited from the ages, how much more true must it have been in the early days of man’s philosophic thought. Along with these two factors, there was a pride of intellect that was almost diabolical, as, in fact, is most human pride. It was a pride that could not, would not, stoop to the things love inspires. We look in vain for any mention of love among the Eastern philosophers. Love, you see, has a way of being satisfied with the crumbs that fall from the table. It is astounded at having so much, however little be given it; the haughty gesture expressing personal excellence is caught in mid-air by love’s paralyzing glimpse of the excellence of God shining forth from the loved one. Love cannot be proud: so the early philosophers ruled out love.
The dream and the moderns
The results of this personification of a dream, this enthronement of the pride of intellect, were cataclysmic and, strangely, uniform wherever this dream took to itself a body. In Brahminism, in Buddhism, in Taoism the goal of wisdom was always the same: denial of the reasoning process, denial of reason’s efficiency outside itself, finally, the destruction of reason itself; under such circumstances, the ultimate destruction of man, the surrender of personality and individuality through absorption in the absolute, was a foregone conclusion. If men would be angels, then they would in fact become neither angels nor men.
Descartes’ angelism
Beginnings are always difficult things; perhaps that is why man is always so impatient at the beginning of things. At any rate, he is much more inclined to indulge in a dream than to swing an axe, even an intellectual axe. It was almost natural, then, that at the beginning of the modern scientific age some one should take refuge in the age-old dream of an angelic short-cut to knowledge. The modern father of angelism, which destroys both angels and men, was Descartes.
Its legitimate descendants
In its modern form, the dream restricted the material world’s contribution to man’s mental life to being man aged by human reason; as it turned out, this was an insistence on the complete independence of reason that later brought forth that astonishing child, pragmatism. The slow, plodding steps of reasoning were impatiently brushed aside in favor of the rapier-thrust of angelic knowledge which would contain all else that was to be known. And this knowledge was made a practically innate affair; indeed, if it were to be so independent, there was nothing else to do but insist on its innate character. After all, it had been completely cut off from the material world in which it existed.
The dream of men a natural gift of the angels:
perfect knowledge in a perfect way
Even in this very early stage of the modern resurrection of man’s favorite dream, there are some seeds of catastrophe. Obviously, the denial of the reasoning processes and of the contact of reason with the material world, isolates and perverts the mind of a man. The children of Descartes carried on his tradition boisterously, plundering the intellectual level of man’s life like so many vandals bent, not so much on booty, as on destruction. Destroy they did: first intellect itself and finally, reaching the inevitable result of a dream made to walk, the humanity of man. Rationalism trod its suicidal way through Locke, Berkeley and Hume; then Kant rushed to the rescue of reason but his aim was bad and reason died from the shot he fired. From this orphaned home where philosophy was a beaten waif, there came forth idealism and naturalism: the first, linking up the old dream with Neo-platonism and the Hindu philosophies, thus sinking man in the unnatural depths of the world of pure spirit; the second, our American favorite, breaking up into the thousand and one varieties from pragmatism to naive evolutionism, in all of which reason is a thing of the past and man a creature with no future.
The dream has remained unchanged since the beginnings of the human race; it has appeared in philosophic dress again and again since the first puzzlings of the first philosophers. Its results have remained uniformly tragic; now, as always, the dream crashes in the unsounded depths of pessimism. And the lesson the dream teaches is still unlearnt. We still do not agree that it is not by casting away the bone we have that we shall find food, it is not by trying to become something other than ourselves that we can accomplish anything but our own destruction. It is as true now as it was in the beginning that we do not improve nature by destroying it; that originality does not consist in being different but in the astonishingly humble courage to be ourselves. We do not attain perfection by pretensions to the angelic but by being most thoroughly human.
In a perfect way, i.e. innately, intuitively, independently
Through the ages, the promise of this dream which has haunted men was perfect knowledge in a perfect way. What man has striven for, even at the cost of his humanity, the angels have by their very nature. Their knowledge is had in a perfect way. Knowledge comes to the angel in the first instant of its existence, without loss of time or energy, without labor, and completely free of any dependence on the world of creatures beneath the angelic world. To put it with a brevity so extreme as to demand further explanation, we could say that the angels’ knowledge is innate, intuitive and independent.
This knowledge is innate: Relative to angelic essence
Innate knowledge in the angels means precisely what one would suspect: that the angels are created with their knowledge, as men are born with their faculties of intellect and will. There is no worry about it on the part of the angel; knowledge is an integral part of the angelic nature. Yet this does not mean that the angelic knowledge is the angelic substance, the angelic essence. Angels are not large masses of knowledge wandering about the courts of heaven; nor are they subsistent intellects. The intellects of the angels, as the intellects of men, are faculties, potentialities: their knowledge is an act of that intellect. If, indeed, their intellects were identical with their substance then the angels would be identical with God; they would he subsistent intellects and intelligence is one of those perfections that of themselves are infinite, utterly Perfect. Subsistent intelligence, as we have seen, is a property of God.
Relative to angelic existence
Nor does this innate character of angelic intelligence mean that the angelic nature is given life by angelic knowledge the angel’s knowledge is not its existence. This should not be obscure. After all, it is plain that a non-existing dog does not bite, nor is the bite of an existing dog the dog itself. So the existing angel is presupposed to the knowing angel; it does not know until it exists, nor does it exist by the fact of knowledge. As a matter of fact, the angelic existence, marvelously perfect as it must be to match the angelic nature, still falls short of the wide scope of angelic knowledge. Angelic existence is limited to that one angelic species, that one angel; while angelic knowledge is free to roam from God to worms and back again.
Relative to angelic intellect
In both men and angels, intellect is a power, a faculty, an accident perfecting nature. But the angel’s intellect does not grub about among material things gathering its knowledge; hence its intellect is a single faculty, utterly, free of dependence on the phantasm of imagination or any other material thing. In us there must be both an active and a possible intellect, as we shall see more thoroughly later on in this book. The first finds the potentially intelligible material in the products of the imagination and makes it actually intelligible to the possible intellect, bridging the gap between the material and the spiritual; the second, actually understands. In somewhat this same way the infra-red ray camera and the human eye cooperate; the camera, on its film, making actually visible what formerly had been only potentially visible, then it is the eye that sees.
In the angels, the intellect is never merely a blank sheet waiting for knowledge to be scribbled on it, it is never merely potentially intelligent. Nor are the objects of the angels’ knowledge wrapped around with the bandages of matter which hide their faces, only potentially intelligible. Their knowledge is innate; so the objects of their knowledge, from the very beginning, exist in them immaterially, in an actually intelligible way.
It will, perhaps, help us to grasp the immateriality of the angels and their knowledge if we remember that the whole field of imagination, which so enriches human life, is completely missing in the angelic world. The angels have no imagination. Of they had imaginations they would not be angels. For imagination is the function of a corporal organ, part of our sensitive or animal equipment; it is one of the links that bind us to the animal world, like a spinal column, hunger or death. Without a body, imagination is altogether impossible.
Angels, then, have never felt the sleekness of velvet or the hard gaiety of silk, the rush of wind on a spring day or the softness of a rich turf. They have never had the feel of clean clothes, the agony of tight shoes or a ragged collar. In fact they may know how these things feel, but their knowledge of them is purely intellectual; they have no sensitive knowledge, for the simple reason that they have no senses with which to know. This is the quite apparent reason why their knowledge must be innate; there is no way in which it can be gathered from the material world. On this same ground of their absolute spirituality, we must exclude all passions from the angels. Some of the early Fathers explained the wiles and craftiness of women on the grounds of a quite reprehensible carnal familiarity with the fallen angels: but this was a very bad guess in a somewhat vague cause. Angels do not tremble with fear, pace the floor with anxiety or boil with anger. This sort of thing belongs in our world, not in the world of the angels.
It is intuitive
The intuitive character of angelic knowledge is much more readily grasped by our minds than its innateness; we ourselves have some little taste of that mysterious intellectual action of intuition. It is in us, quite normally, as the very first of our acts of knowledge; we know such things as tree, dog, man antecedently to our judgment that “this is a tree, dog or man.” In other words, we have these concepts, not by the slow scrutiny of judgment and reasoning, but before these processes, by the first glance of intuition. In its higher forms it is the brilliant flash that illumines the minds of men of genius, the mystic penetration of the saints and the deep understanding of the simple faithful relative to the mysteries of faith.
It is independent
The angels’ intellect is a cup capable of holding the overflowing knowledge of all created things; but the cup does not fill itself. That intellect is a faculty or potentiality; it must be fulfilled by some act, by some form. Certainly it is not filled by the angels’ own substance, perfect as that may be; for the angelic substance is only one drop in the steady flow of creatures from the Creator, a picture of one mood of God which cannot represent the drawling splendor of all His other images in the world of creatures. This cup must be filled by something other than the angel itself; if the angels’ knowledge of them created world is to be perfect, some medium other than the angel itself, some other form must fulfill the potentiality of the angels’ intellect. That other form, that other medium, can be no other than the intelligible species, the ideas, the mental similitudes, the intentional existence of created things. There is no other possibility: God could give supernatural knowledge proper to Himself, as He does in the vision of His essence, but this would still be a gift, not a natural knowledge for an angel; the angel itself is inadequate to represent the whole created world; every inferior creature is not only inadequate, it is physically incapable of affecting the angelic intellect. The angels must know as we know, through ideas; where do these intelligible species come from?
Source of the angelic ideas
Certainly they cannot come from created things. We could as easily paint a mathematical point or wrap up the substantial form of a rose in cellophane as give an angel an idea of a flag by waving at the vault of heaven. Material things cannot act directly but only through a medium on spiritual things; in knowledge that medium is the phantasm of the imagination. There is, then, no way in which an angel can acquire ideas from created things, for it has no imagination.
Moreover, the thing is plain from the very manner in which the angel exists. We would be reasonably astonished to find a cabbage slinking up behind us with the grace of a leopard; cabbages move, but not precisely in that way, for movement follows the manner of existence. If that existence is a plant existence, then the movement is a plant movement; if the existence is animal, then the movement is animal. So our thoughts do not come together with even so slight a jar as that felt by the teeth meeting well cooked asparagus. The mode of existence of the angels is quite independent of material; their action or movement of understanding, then, is a smoothly intellectual thing. Let us look at the whole picture. Man has an intellectual potentiality unfulfilled by nature; God has no potentiality but perfect intellectual fulfillment, perfect act; in the middle, the angels, half-way between God and man, possess an intellectual potentiality perfectly fulfilled from nature, and so, of course not from the material world outside their nature.
The only source of these angelic ideas is God Himself giving them to the angels by directly infusing them into the minds of the angels. No higher angel will do for this first knowledge, as will be apparent from a later chapter on the speech of the angels. Here it is enough, by way of explanation of the incapacity of the higher angels, to point out that the angelic intellect and will, like the human intellect and will, are intrinsic accidents of the angelic nature; they are utterly inviolable, theirs is the sacred territory from which everyone, everything is barred violent entry. This is the garden where only God and the individual possessor of that intellect and will can walk freely.
The angel, then, has intelligible species from God; about how many? No, the question is not nearly so absurd as it sounds; in fact its answer is decidedly illuminating. In our own case we do not base our judgment of intellectual acumen on the number of species, the amount of knowledge a man has acquired, but rather on how much a man can see in this or that particular species; it is not quantitative knowledge but penetrating wisdom that is the mark of excellence. Thus, a workman, who knows that he can get a brick off a roof by throwing it and sees nothing of the possibilities of its hitting someone on the head, is stupid. Thomas, in a comparatively few theological principles, could see the whole field of theology; a mathematician, in a few principles, can see the unfolding of the whole complicated area of mathematics; while a student, sitting under either Thomas or the mathematician. must be satisfied with little bites from the edge of the pie of knowledge.
Our judgment in this case is entirely reasonable. The closer a creature is to God in the natural order, the more it participates the divine perfections, the more perfectly it images God. Those nearer God in the intellectual order will, then, participate more closely the divine mode of knowledge; and God understands everything in the one species which is His divine essence. The angels as a class, have fewer and more universal species than men, being so far superior to them; the superior angels will have fewer and more universal species than the lower angels, precisely because of their superiority.
The angels’ intellectual content is thus seen as infused intelligible species which are fewer and more universal the higher we go in the angelic order of perfection. How does it use these ideas? What is this intuition which is the normal manner of knowing for the angels?
Certainly the angel has no period of cooing and gurgling infancy while it awaits the age when ideas are possible to it; it undergoes no tortuous school days in which ideas are gathered one by one. The angel is in no way in potency as to the acquiring of its ideas; these ideas are had from the beginning. Nevertheless, the angels, like ourselves, cannot consider more than one species at a time. These species are forms actuating the intellect; to have the mind consider two of them there at the same time would be like having a man run in different directions at the same time, and with much the same results. In scholastic language, the angels are always in act as regards the possession of these species: they are in potentiality as regards the actual consideration of this or that species. In other words their knowledge, like the knowledge of God, is always actually possessed; but, like the knowledge of man, it has its potential element, it is only successively used. For a man, no matter how much affection he may have for the multiplication table, does not spend all his time thinking of it.
Though an angel cannot consider more than one of these species at one time, yet it can know many things at one time according as many things are contained in this or that particular species, much as a man, looking into one mirror, can see all the many things reflected in that mirror. In one species the angel sees all that it contains in just the one penetrating glance, as the eye of a camera in an airplane catches the detail of the city of New York as it paces restlessly between its confining rivers far below.
An angel can do this because the angel is a step higher in the intellectual order than men. The precise imperfection of the human intellect is its nearsightedness. It can see only one corner of the picture at a time; the world is a map too huge to be seen all at once by a human mind which must, instead, go slowly over the whole surface inch by inch, because of the weakness of our minds, we must come down from principles to conclusions like an old man cautiously feeling his way down a flight of steps; only when we reach the bottom, the conclusion, do we have a clear notion of all that might have been seen from the top by a stronger eye. Like children with a Christmas package, we must open things up, tear them apart and put them together again before we know what is in them. The one who made up the package or who has information from that original source, knows the whole story by merely identifying the package.
Source of the angels’ knowledge of God
The angels do not reason their way down from principle to conclusion, not because they cannot, but because they do not have to. Their position between God and man demands the absence of the essential imperfection of the human intellect, the imperfection which makes reasoning, piece by piece judgment, necessary. It is, indeed, just this absence of the necessity for reasoning and judgment that males it impossible for an angel to make a mistake in natural knowledge. There is nothing peculiar about this; it is the way intuition works. As a matter of fact, we make no mistake in our first act of intellect, our intuition of tree, dog, man; our mistakes come in our judgments and reasonings, in our hooking the wrong things together. “John” and “crank” may both be representative of objective truth; but when we hook the two together to say “John is a crank” we run the risk of error and rash judgment. Objectively, the steps down from principle to conclusion may be sharply cut and broad enough; but if we miss one of them, we tumble down to erroneous conclusions with a battered head.
Source of the angels’ knowledge of self
Its own brilliant, purely spiritual, utterly immaterial essence is immediately present to the angelic intellect and is, in itself, completely intelligible. Consequently, it is immediately known by the angel without the necessity of a medium such as we must have. For it must be clear to every man that he knows his soul only through the revelatory character of his spiritual acts penetrating the material wrapping of his body. In this intimate, immediate knowledge of itself, the angel has a natural knowledge of God, as it also has in its knowledge of all other creatures; for nothing is fully known until God’s part, the part of the cause and the exemplar, is known. The intelligible species by which the angels know all other things come only from God; they are the first copy of the ideas of God, the first participation of that supreme truth, the blueprint formed directly from the mind of the divine Architect.
St. Augustine put this beautifully when he maintained that the things of the world poured forth from God in a double way: intellectually into the minds of the angels; and physically into the world of things. In this account, the angels are looking, from the wings at the drama played on the stage of the world. He who wrapped up this great package which is the physical world, has given His own first hand knowledge of it to the angels.
Perfect knowledge
The natural knowledge of the angels is a vast sea that touches the shore of every created thing — with one exception. There are no natural secrets hidden from the piercing intellectual eye of an angel — except one; spiritual and material, all are laid open and naked before their eyes — except one.
The objects of angelic knowledge
Spiritual objects: Other angels
On the spiritual side, they know themselves, immediately, by their own substance. More, they know every other angel in heaven or in hell in spite of the terrifying number of angels; of everyone each angel can say with perfect confidence “I knew him when.” These other angels, too, have come forth from the creative hand of God, of them there exists, too, a perfect model in the divine mind; and as they came from God in their physical natures to exist in the universe, so they came from God intellectually to exist in the mind of the lowest angel.
Thoughts and desires of men
All material things are known to the angels for exactly this same reason, that is, because these material things too are creatures of God, effects of the first cause; a detailed account of them exists in the divine mind and is communicated to the minds of the angels. The mysteries of grace are completely above the powers of the angels. These supernatural secrets of God’s own life and the share in that life He has planned for men and angels are totally beyond the entire powers of the natural order, which, of course, includes the angels. What knowledge the angels have of these things is a free gift of God by a special revelation to each particular angel; or, in the case of the good angels, in the beatific vision, the sight of the essence of God.
Mysteries of grace
But there is one natural phenomenon that is without the scope of the angels’ knowledge, that escapes the otherwise universal sweep of the angels’ intellect. There is one thing too sacred for the eye of any but God, one private room where man devil or angel cannot enter in; that is the realm of the thoughts and desires of intellectual beings, men and angels. Only God can enter into the house of our soul; and even God cannot violate our sovereignty there if there is to be desecration there, we must be the guilty ones; if there is to be the perfume of sanctity pervading the soul, God and our selves must pour the fragrant oil of consecration
An angel can know future things that come about necessarily, as an astronomer can know of an eclipse of the moon years beforehand; an angel can guess very accurately as to future contingent things, as a weather forecaster can predict the path of a storm with reasonable accuracy; an angel can know singular things in their most precise singularity, as a housewife knows the price of bread or milk. But as to the movements of our intellects and wills, the angels have no grounds for more than a very poor guess until we have manifested such movements by our external actions. Even then, with the external actions there for all to read, they, and anyone else short of God, cannot be absolutely sure of the motives which inspired the actions Really the devil has a most uncomfortable time of it in the pursuit of his devilish profession He goes to the window, endlessly placing his bets on no more than a hunch; his mixture of hopefulness and despair must endure until the race is all over and the judges have handed down their decisions.
There is an obvious difficulty in this angelic knowledge of human affairs. If an angel does not know what Jim Jones is going to do at three o’clock on Wednesday afternoon, how does it find out on Thursday what actually took place? We have insisted again and again that the angels have all of their intelligible species from the very beginning of their existence; they receive no more natural knowledge, either from the world or from God. Yet these past things are surely known, though as future they were not known. The difficulty is not so insuperable as it appears at first sight. After all, the ideas of God are eternal yet they are effective as divine decrees only in time; it was not just a few months ago that God decreed the creation of the soul of the Smith’s newborn baby, but the decree was from all eternity. Even though the angels possessed all their intelligible species from the first instant of their existence, these species caused knowledge only after the existence of these future things in the material world. In other words, given the species from the beginning, the angel, by a decree of God, was barred from the use of this particular species until the event had occurred.
Infallibility of the angelic knowledge
All of this angelic knowledge is had without the possibility of misinformation, for God is the informant. There is no possibility of misjudgment, for there is no judgment involved in this knowledge; nor is there any chance of mistaken reasoning, where there is no reasoning. An innate, intuitive, independent, infallibly certain and perfect knowledge; a view of the universe second only to that of God; a perfect insight into the beauty, the variety, the perfection of the vast mirror which images the eternal splendor of the infinite — such is the angels’ vision.
Conclusion: The dream of men is not without its excuse
As you can readily see, that agelong dream of men is not without its excuse. There is such a perfect knowledge had in such a perfect way. Those momentary glimpses of incredible brilliance and penetrating simplicity were not illusions. The tales told by explorers of the intellectual world, the tall stories of the men of genius, the dark illuminations of the mystics that gave such a relish even to gall and vinegar, those solemn moments when our own minds are struck by this lightning from above — all these may sound like the exaggerated ravings of a returned Marco Polo of the intellectual world. In actual fact, however, they are deficient only by reason of the poverty of the pictures they paint for us, an inadequacy as hopeless as a tin-type of the living beauty of a woman of the last century.
It is not without its divine reason
The dream did, indeed, have its excuse. It also has its reasons, for of course, we still dream. Its purpose is not to tease us with the cruel humor that dangles the bottle just out of reach of a screaming baby. It is not to humiliate us to the point of despair while we batter our brains out against a stone wall, as did the old and the new philosophers. The dream does not exist to tempt us to the rashness of presumption, moving us to cast away the crutches of human reason before we can walk or to play truant from school before we have learned to spell out the humble script of the material world. Rather, its purpose has been, and is, to keep alive in us that “unappeasable hunger for unattainable food,” to fan that fire of divine discontent that never gives us rest, and to give us some little natural idea of the goal that never lacks inspiration, the goal of life close to God.
Nor is it without it fulfillment
The dream has its excuse; it has its divinely wise reasons; and it has its divinely generous fulfillment. True, we are men and men we must remain; there is no possibility of a fulfillment of this dream by natural means. But through the goodness of God, Who has not yet found the limits of generosity, the dream comes true supernaturally, by a wave of the fairy wand of grace and glory; it comes true, dimly now, through the share in divine life which grace brings to us, but with all the brightness of divine — not angelic — life in its fullness through the infinite reaches of eternity.
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