Even in our post-Christian age, there are innumerable truths which illuminate the consciousness of the average man which he, since he has given up or never possessed the faith of his fathers, would not himself profess in a dogmatic manner.
The average man of the Western world assumes that the universe had a beginning and will have a definite end; he believes that time is moving forward and that each individual event which he participates in during his life is utterly unique and unrepeatable; he believes that since each moment and each action is unique, they are therefore meaningful and significant; he believes, instinctively, that his own personal actions will bring about real change in the world and that those free actions of his will make something happen which would not have happened if he would not have acted, therefore, that he is in some way in charge of his own fate.
Modern man also knows, again without any conscious doctrinal justification, that the consequences of a wicked action should not be the same as the consequences of a good action. Moreover, he knows that when something happens in his own life, either a triumph or a tragedy, he expects someone to care. No one, really, can personally tolerate Friedrich Nietzsche’s nihilistic aphorism which states that “man shouts out all of his greatest hopes and desires to the universe, and the universe turns to man and yawns.”
What Western man takes for granted, we can say almost instinctively, are the dogmatic truths first declared to mankind by the Catholic Church concerning God the Creator’s providential guidance of all of His creation towards its own proper end. That there was such a thing as an omniscient providential mind and an omnipotent will which inclined all things towards what is best, was not at all evident to the civilizations which existed before the proclamation of the gospel by the Church.
Fate and the Eternal Return
It is hard for us to understand and empathize with those who lived not so many thousands of years ago, who did not understand the world to be the product of a single Mind whose providential guidance and care extended to the very “fringe” of reality. If we should look at the pre-classical works of Homer, for instance, we find that there are many places in his epic poem the Iliad in which he explicitly portrays Zeus, the “father” of the gods, as completely impotent when it comes to effecting any challenge to the dictates of the Fates.
If a warrior was “destined” to die at the hands of another warrior, there was nothing that Zeus could do to interfere with the predetermined sequences of events. The ultimate impotence of the gods in the face of the “inevitable,” lessened their dignity and majesty in the minds of the human warriors spoken of in the Iliad; “this ghastly Fate, that kept a man with wounds alive, and one unwounded, and another dragged by the heels through battle-din in death,” 1 completely dominated the moral consciousness of ancient man, so much so that the sharp bite of the moral reality of good and evil was dulled by the resignation to the preordained dictates of Fate.
To the passionate pleas of his wife Andromache to stay within and defend the walls of Troy, rather than meet death on the battlefield at the hands of Achilles because that course of action was the best for her, their infant son, and for the city of Troy itself, Hector, the most noble of the figures of the Iliad, replies, “Unquiet soul, do not be too distressed by thoughts of me. You know no man dispatches me into the under-gloom against my fate; no mortal, either, can escape his fate, coward or brave man, once he come to be.” 2
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For the pre-Christian consciousness, it was not just that one’s individual fate had been determined from all eternity by an impersonal force, one’s actions, brave or cowardly, virtuous or vicious, being unable, in any way, to alter one’s destiny. What truly weighed heavily on most of the ancient pagan cultures was the conception of time which was interwoven with this understanding of fate.
For the Mesopotamians, the Chinese, the Hindus, and even the Greeks and the Romans, time was not understood in a linear way, but in a cyclical way. This meant that not only would there be an inevitable cycle of rise and decline of civilizations, but also, that each moment, at least in a generic way, would be repeated forever. Each individual event had happened innumerable times in the past and would happen innumerable times in the future. One can easily understand the enervating effect which such a conception would have upon a race of people. 3 Witness the saying of the Hindu King Brihadrata: “In the cycle of existence I am like a frog in a waterless well!” 4 How can we as Christians even conceptualize the thought that one’s own situation would never be different, never, unto all eternity. Never. It is a thought fit for the damned, and them alone.
This fatalistic determinism, which has as its root a materialistic understanding of being, was brought to the level of philosophical theory by a number of Classical schools of philosophy. When we consider the Atomism of Democritus (c. 460-360 BC), which held that the primal and fundamental reality, to which everything was reducible, was atoms in free-fall, we see how an “ethics of despair” can emerge from such a metaphysical theory. According to Democritus, all things in their form and in their ordered structure were the result of one atom in free-fall, amidst the others, swerving so as to cause collisions among the other falling atoms. The clusters of atoms, which Democritus thought to be hard indestructible bits of matter, created by these multiple collisions constitute the world which we see around us. What is important to consider in regards to our topic is that the world came to be by an unexplainable accident and that there is no inherent purpose in any of the movements of the individual atoms. On this theory, all that we experience around us would be purposeless, because it is not goal directed and, therefore, accidental.
Epicurus and his Atheistic Hedonism
A Greek from the island of Samos in the Aegean Sea, Epicurus (342-270 BC), used Democritus’ Atomism as a metaphysical foundation for and as a philosophical justification of his ethical system. What Epicurus liked about Democritus was precisely the lack of any concept of divine providence in his physical and metaphysical description of the universe.
Epicurus thought the atomist description of the world and of all being justified his “ethical” claim that we need not consider the will or the actions of the gods in charting the course of our lives. If the gods were a mere collection of atoms like everything else, what was the point of worrying about their will for mankind or for each individual man. Since there were no providential gods capable of holding man to an inherent purpose or law written by the divine in the very structure of human nature, man must direct his actions solely according to whether or not they bring about a state of physical or psychological pleasure or pain. Metaphysical purposelessness and ethical hedonism here are shown to go hand in hand. If you feel that the universe is yawning at you, you will do as you will.
Stoicism and the Providential Fire
The philosophical school of Stoicism, founded by Zeno (334-262 BC), did not have the reaction to the idea of universal determinism as the Epicureans did. For the Stoics, there was order and purposefulness in the universe, all things being directed towards “their natural place of rest.” In this, they were relying on Socrates’ insight, spoken of in the Phaedo, that all things are naturally directed to achieve that which was best.
The Dispatch
This inner directness of all things had its motivating and directing force a material principle, considered divine, which the Stoics identified with the natural element of fire. It was the divine fire which was responsible for the beginning, movement, activity, and the end of all things. Included in this understanding of universal determinism, was the view that all of the happenings of a man’s life were ultimately beyond his control. A man’s life, his triumphs and his tragedies were completely prearranged from all eternity.
The Stoics, however, being the great ethical thinkers that they were, could not overlook the obvious fact that in this “providential” system of universal directionality toward a natural end which was best, man has a power of choice which they as a philosophical school could not simply overlook. Their materialism, extending even to God and the human soul, would not allow them to say that any external action of a man was under his ultimate power. Rather, the Stoics stated that the only thing that a man has real control over was his own attitude towards the inevitable.
The attitude which the Stoics, who were the dominant philosophical school in ancient Rome, attempted to cultivate was the attitude of ataraxia or apathy. One could only achieve some measure of happiness by killing hope, because hope can disappoint and most of what we hope for in life depends upon many circumstances and the actions of others outside of our control. We maintain peace if we are indifferent to what comes our way. We refuse to receive anything as gift, because a gift is gratuitously given and depends upon the generosity of another. Stoicism is perhaps the most noble, but also the most subtly diabolic of all the pagan attitudes.
Creation and All-Encompassing Providence
With this brief summary of the ancient philosophical pagan conception of fate, materialistic determinism, and the cyclical movement of time, we can appreciate the new world which dawned upon mankind with the coming of the Catholic Faith.
One of the most characteristic traits of the new conception of the world was the understanding of Divine Providence. Indeed, the early Catholic apologists like Athenagoras were keenly aware that it was this idea of Providence, which most sharply set apart the ancient pagan and Stoic view of the world and of human life from the new Christian view. As these early apologists insist, this new understanding of Divine Providence is firmly rooted in the Catholic Church’s dogmatic teaching that the world was created from nothing by an omnipotent God who is Ipsum Esse Subsistens or Self-Subsistent Being. 5
It must be noted here that this idea of creation from nothing, which denies eternality to the world and denies that God is merely the Great Landscaper of the Universe ordering pre-given matter, is a doctrine which completely distinguishes the Christian outlook from the pagan outlook. It is the very first truth upon which all statements about man, the world, and God’s relationship to the world must be founded.
The idea which the early apologists, again Athenagoras is an example, attached most readily to this absolute understanding of creation was the idea of the Creator God’s ubiquitous providence. Why does the Creator God’s providence extend to the very fringe of creation? On account of the fact that if God was not present to a “piece” of the world, that piece would not be. If something exists, if it is real, we know two things about it. It is known by God and He wills it to be. By this act of knowing and willing on the part of God, a thing is. So wherever we find being, we find the presence of the mind and will of the Father.
The most fundamental act of Divine Providence is to uphold all things in existence. This is the ultimate reason why the Deistic/Masonic idea of God as the great “watchmaker” of the universe who long ago sold his product is erroneous. If God is not present with His mind and His power to the “watch” at all times, the “watch” would not be. In order for created beings to do anything, God must uphold them in existence. The act by which God upholds all things in being so that they can do something is referred to as concurrent causality. The truth of concurrent causality is born out in simple language. Adam and Ben are painting. Before Adam and Ben can paint, and a precondition of their painting, is that they “be,” that they exist. No existence, no painting.
Through Whom All Things Were Made
Here we are confronted with a profound truth concerning Divine Providence: it extends to everything and is everywhere, even to the most microscopic “piece” of creation. God could, of course, only create and maintain in existence every bit of His creation if He knew that creation; creation is God knowing something into existence. 6 God does not know the world in the same way that you and I know the things around us. God does not have to intellectually go “outside” Himself in order to know the world which He has willed to create. Instead, by knowing Himself, God knows Himself as the principal of all the tings He has chosen to create. By knowing those things which He has chosen to create, He knows those things which are imperfect participations in His own essence. 7
If we are to get the proper measure of the Creator and of the Ideas through which He creates all things, we must look at real things as they exist all around us for all to see. When we look at God’s creation we find that its most noteworthy characteristic is that all real things are also individual things. To be real means to be an individual. Thus all genera, species, and qualities exist insofar as they subsist within an individual. If real things are individual, and it is through the Divine Ideas that all things have been made, we must reason then that Divine Ideas include ideas of individual things, an idea for each of the very specific things which we find in the world, in all their diversity and particularity. 8
This fact, that God possesses particular ideas of each of the things which now exist or have ever existed, or will ever exist in creation, is very significant when considering the reality of God’s providential and paternal guidance of His creation. From all eternity, in the same single act by which the Eternal Son was begotten and the Holy Ghost spirated, God was cogniscient of all the ideas of the particular individual things He would create. He was not only aware “then” of the things themselves, but also, the manner of their coming to be and their individual destinies.
Hope and the Eternal Friendship
With this Christian understanding Divine Providence, we have come a long way from the abandonment in the great indifferent universe which tortured the soul of many of the best men of the ancient world. Now it is not swerving atoms or eternal cosmic cycles which account for all events and situations in the world, but rather, all is upheld by an infinite, loving, perfectly good Father God Who concerns Himself with the lilies of the field, frees the captives, and has promised His faithful ones a kingdom. What can man, made in the divine image, expect from the providential hand of an infinitely good God? Such is God’s will for each individual man: To share with him His own infinite goodness, along with the happiness which is the effect of that goodness.
One of the most interesting aspects of the theological virtue of hope is the way in which it is ordered towards the fulfillment of ourselves as individuals, in God, of course, on account of God, and yet, it is our own fulfillment which is desired. This virtue is the unique complement of the specificity of God’s providential care. To understand this, we must think of what St. Thomas himself was thinking of when he considered the nature of this virtue, and what distinguishes it from the theological virtue of charity.
What St. Thomas was thinking of was Aristotle’s well-known distinction between three different forms of friendship: useful, pleasure, and character friendships. The virtue of hope, which St. Thomas is stating is a type of friendship with God, resembles the imperfect forms of friendships spoken of by Aristotle: useful and pleasure friendships. These imperfect forms of friendship exist when we possess a relationship with another in which we both will each other’s good and, yet, what I love in the relationship is not necessarily the friend himself but the good, usefulness, or pleasure which I receive from his companionship.
The true and perfect form of friendship spoken of by Aristotle is character friendship in which I love the other for his own sake, not for the good which I receive from the relationship. St. Thomas compares the relationship between God and the individual man established by the virtue of hope with imperfect friendship, while the relationship established by the virtue of charity is compared to the perfect friendship.
In hope, I desire and trust in the omnipotent God to supply the goodness which will make me eternally and perfectly happy. From God, I expect and want only bliss. What the virtue of hope is directed towards is the happiness which comes to the individual from God. It is only with the virtue of charity that I am able to love and desire God for his own inherent goodness, not for what He has promised to bestow upon me. Rather than being an accidental byproduct of the impersonal forces of nature and the plaything of fate, I am an individual man whom God, in His infinite perfection and power, wishes to receive nothing less than Himself and the completely fulfilling happiness which is a consequence of that possession.
- Homer, The Iliad, trans. Robert Fitzgerald (Garden City, NY: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1974), Book I, 501-611 and Book XVIII, 538-540. ↩︎
- Ibid., Book VI, 443-447. ↩︎
- Cf. Stanley Jaki, The Savior of Science (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1990), pp. 26-28. ↩︎
- Maitri Upanishads cited in Stanley Jaki, The Road of Science and the Ways to God (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1978), pp. 16-18. ↩︎
- Etienne Gilson, The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame Press, 1991), p. 154. ↩︎
- Ibid., p. 153. ↩︎
- St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I, Q. 15, A. 1, ad 2. ↩︎
- ST, I, Q. 15, A. 3, ad 4. ↩︎
