God's Providence

 Walter Farrell O.P.

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.

 

God's will

 Walter Farrell O.P.

The mainspring of action

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

The nature of appetite

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

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

The boundaries of desire

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

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

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

Sources of these views

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

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

A perversion of knowledge

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

Double difficulty: human freedom, evil and suffering

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

Existence of the will of God
The proof

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

Supremacy of the divine will

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

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

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

Free objects

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

Its characteristics

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

Cause of all things

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

Infallible

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

Invariable

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

The difficulty of human freedom:
Preliminary notions

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

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

Preliminary notions to the solution

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

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

Precision of the question

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

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

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

Solution: Definition of freedom

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

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

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

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

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

Direct Proof

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

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

The love of God

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The justice and mercy of God

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

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

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

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

Conclusion: The erroneous views of the will of God

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

Their significance for men

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

Their common bond

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

Significance of the truth of the will of God
For freedom

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

For love

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

For justice

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

For mercy

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