Dmitry Chernikov’s Blog

Level 1: freedom;
Level 2: happiness;
Level 3: self-diffusion.

On a separate page.

Eller admits that relativism, understood as the claim that “all judgments and values come from some particular point of view,” is a “danger,” because “this awareness is inimical to believing in your own man-made environment: if we know that we just made it up ourselves, it has no special or exclusive claim to our credulity or affection. ‘Why this and not that?’ is the perpetual response of relativism to any specific nonrational appeal to our attention and commitment.” (Natural Atheism, 328) How much like Robert Nozick’s ruminations on the meaning of life this is! (I comment on him here and here.) This is exactly what happens when the divine “I am,” whose Being and Light are everywhere and which calls for our “attention and commitment” from no matter which perspective we find ourselves in, is done away with (or replaced, at best, with “I think, therefore I am.”). I don’t envy Eller. But I let him be as he prefers matters.

For the intellect it offers unmitigated and infinite perfection, never to be actually comprehended, providing untold riches for the eternal life. Atheism, as best, considers man to be the measure of all things, and what a poor measure it is! Atheism forces one to cling to the temporal and transient which never seem adequate. “Don’t look up,” atheism says.

For action and striving it offers optimism, a lively hope that good will triumph. For, as I have suggested, either good or evil wins in the end. Christianity says good is the victor. Atheism must honestly recognize that it is a defeatist doctrine. It entails the destruction of life’s work and body and soul and human race and life. And if it is human nature to side with the winner, then atheism inclines one towards evil, such as deception and violence, in hopes that it will help one to stay alive.

For the will it offers joy and rest from the exhaustion of the worldly struggles.

Why wouldn’t you choose it?

Eller’s analysis of agnosticism claims that it denies that one can have any knowledge of God. But in that case one is automatically and essentially an atheist. For why bother considering the existence of that which is totally unknown or unknowable? What are we showing the existence of? “If you said that you have no idea what a zorg is or what it does or wants but that you believe that there is such a thing as zorg — and even worse, that you center your life around the existence and wishes of a zorg — I would think you were either pulling my leg or talking crazy.” (Natural Atheism, 170) But of course agnosticism is nothing of the sort. An agnostic says: “I accept your concept of God in all its richness as coherent; it is possible that this God exists; moreover, the probability that God exists is high enough to make me uncomfortable with atheism, which is why I am not an atheist; however, I still have doubts that this idea of God is instantiated.” An agnostic then knows what God is; he just does not know that He is.

In dismissing the argument for the existence of God from “personal experience” Eller relies on two tricks. First, he argues, “If I hear a voice in my head or have a mystical feeling or see a beautiful sunset and call that a religious experience, I have imposed a meaning on it and prejudiced the evaluation of it as an experience.” It is harder to misconstrue the argument more crassly. Every experience is interpreted, that is, “imposed a meaning” on. When our author sees the sunset, etc., he, too, interprets this experience, though as non-religious. Does he thereby “prejudice the evaluation of it as an experience,” too? Not necessarily. A new experience tries to fit into the picture of the world that we already have. Sometime the fit is perfect; other times the experience is to a greater or lesser extent discounted, because it does not cohere with what we already think we know; still other times, we adjust even our fundamental and most cherished beliefs in order to accommodate the experience. This procedure is followed whether one is a religious man or not. Now what is the right way of interpreting any experience that provokes an inkling, whether weak or strong, to consider it “religious”? Our first point is that genuine religious experiences are self-authenticating — if you hear God’s voice, you simply know with absolute certainty that it is God speaking to you. You feel no doubt: God’s grace comes with a guarantee that it is from God. Second, Peter Kreeft proposes three criteria for evaluating the truth of claims of communion with God: “(1) the consistency of these claims (are they self-consistent as well as consistent with what we know otherwise to be true?); (2) the character of those who make these claims (do these persons seem honest, decent, trustworthy?); and (3) the effects these experiences have had in their own lives and the lives of others (have these persons become more loving as a result of what they experienced? More genuinely edifying? Or, alternatively, have they become vain and self-absorbed?).” (Handbook of Christian Apologetics, 82) So, we have to do the hard work of verifying each religious experience on its own merits, which means that the easy and brisk dismissal of them just won’t do.

Let’s consider the second argument Eller employs, namely that the experiences of various religions contradict each other: “Third, religious experiences are so different for different people that it serves as a red flag for us; the occurrence and interpretation of such experiences seems closely related to personality and culture, so much so that we can explain and dismiss them as culture-bound. In other words, if Christians have personal experiences of God, Jesus, and Mary, and Muslims have personal experiences of Allah, and Hindus have personal experiences of Brahma or Shiva or Vishnu, then either an awful lot of gods exist (to take the experiences seriously) or people just experience what they want or expect to.” (Natural Atheism, 43ff)

Now the varieties of religious experiences would seem to validate the admittedly very general notion that there is “something beyond,” rather than falsify it. The question then is, what is beyond? There is no universal agreement. But which reasonably sophisticated branch of human knowledge enjoys universal agreement? That economists disagree with each other does not mean there is no truth of the matter, nor that there is not a basic core doctrine that enjoys the support of all economists. Same with religions: all true religious experiences awaken us to a higher humanity and even deiformity. In Kreeft’s words, “many people understand their experience this way: they are ‘united with’ or ‘taken up into’ a boundless and overwhelming Knowledge and Love, a Love that fills them with itself but infinitely exceeds their capacity to receive.” (82) And Love by any other name… And, as can be proved independently, Christian religious experiences have more truth to them than experiences of the adherent of any other religion, because the Christian concept of ultimate reality is superior to any other. Further, that religious experiences are “culture-bound” is a pseudo-explanation: what is culture but mutual influence of individuals on each other? Perhaps the culture in which religious experiences are given respectful consideration has been formed by numerous people’s having genuine religious experiences in the past and describing what they had gone through to the public. The variety in experiences is due not only to different personalities of the folks but also to the fact that God is infinite, and religious experiences may perceive different aspects of Him. Instead of throwing our hands in air, helpless against this diversity, we should put all the experiences together, study them as any other phenomenon, and see what they tell us about God, life, the universe, and everything.

Finally, Eller owes us an account of what experience would convince him that God exists. Victor Reppert relates that atheist philosopher Keith Parsons told him that if the stars in the Virgo cluster were to spell out the words “Turn Or Burn This Means You Parsons,” then he would turn. Eller needs something analogous, lest his atheism be unfalsifiable.

David Eller opines: “To non-Christians (including Atheists), the Bible is not authority at all, just as to Christians the Qu’ran or the Hindu Vedas are no authority. Nonbelievers don’t care what somebody else’s text says. … I don’t care what the Bible says — it is not my authority — and so its claims are not worthy of my serious consideration, any more than any other texts or myths in the world.” (Natural Atheism, 39) Can I reason likewise about our author’s own book? Why should I accept anything he writes? Isn’t it a “text” in the world? What is not a “text”? Ah, Eller will say, but his book contains arguments. He is not asking me to believe on authority. The Bible, on the contrary, contains only unsupported claims about the articles of faith. OK, let’s start with the basics: did Jesus exist, and did He say and do the things recorded in the Bible? That’s a legitimate historical question. Eller cannot escape it: the answer is either yes or no, and it depends on a sober analysis of the Bible in its aspect as an historical document. If the answer is yes, then we might proceed from that, for example, to the question of Jesus’s self-understanding and to the C.S. Lewis’s trilemma. The Bible can ultimately be dismissed by an unbeliever in terms of its necessity or sufficiency or both for the distinctively Christian set of faith and morals. But it has to be dealt with. It’s a fact, a stubborn presence, and it won’t go away by being called “biased testimony.” (38) To make that happen Eller would have to claim that every important event mentioned in the Bible beyond, perhaps, early Genesis is fake or suspect or embellished by deceivers or deceived beyond recognition. And not even the most fanatical atheist would dare do that.

The shifting of the “burden of proof” of God’s existence entirely onto the theist is an unwise move on the part of the atheist. For the theist will welcome this development, because in so doing the atheist essentially refuses to use some of the most powerful arguments against the existence of God, such as the problem of evil, the problem of unbelief, and the problem of divine hiddenness. It is also disingenuous, because few atheists, I imagine, are atheists solely because they find the arguments in favor of God’s existence and concern for His creatures unpersuasive and take the default action of cutting off the seemingly unnecessary entities with Occam’s razor. They are atheists presumably because they are overwhelmed by the positive arguments in favor of atheism, such as the ones mentioned above.

Now it is certainly possible that I am wrong at least in the case of David Eller who calls himself a “natural atheist,” apparently implying that nothing in nature points towards God, and that’s why theism is a silly hypothesis. But even so, I suspect that he is exception to the rule.

Update. I think even the problem of evil, etc. can be used by a “negative” atheist, as well, in the sense of a spotted contradiction within the theist’s concept of God. An atheist need not prove anything; he can sit serenely and argue that the Christian God does not exist, e.g., because omniscience and omnipotence are incompatible, or because omnipotence is incoherent (can God make a stone… ?), or because the problem of evil contradicts our idea of God. In my view the coherence of theism can be successfully defended against all attacks, but it is true that the theist has to do the lion’s share of the work.

There are some people, Christians mostly, who call atheism a “religion.” David Eller takes them to task for this: “If Theists think religion is good, then that is high praise; in fact, we should then qualify for federal funds and tax exemptions, too. If we are a religion in any sense, we are entitled to toleration, First Amendment protections, and all the prestige that Theists think religions deserve. I’m sure they do not mean that. Probably they mean that Atheism is dogmatic, self-assured, intolerant, authoritarian, and other bad things. But if they think that those things are descriptive of religion, how can they be proud of their own religion? Are they really saying, ‘Oh, you are just as dogmatic, self-assured, intolerant, and authoritarian like us?” In other words, when they call Atheism a religion, do they mean it as a compliment or an insult?” (Natural Atheism, 15) Now I would object to this characterization as follows: theists indeed intend this appellation as an insult but in a peculiar sense. There are dogmatic, etc. elements in Christianity, but those things are good, because (theists think) Christianity is true. Since it is true, then the deposit of faith and morals (i.e., dogma) must be taught and preserved with authority. Further, one is entitled to self-assurance if faith is an infused virtue which turns one’s opinions about matters of religion into undoubted beliefs, and even to intoleration of what are perceived as errors in other religions. On the other hand, if atheism is false, then its corresponding dogmatism, etc. are clearly bad.

But none of the foregoing defines religion. A religion is “the service and worship of God or the supernatural.” (m-w.com) Atheism is rejection of any such service and worship. So, atheism is not a religion. (An atheist may be animated by a powerful vision of how the world ought to be which is a substitute of the true perfection for him. This fight for the good for an atheist has all the overtones of religious devotion. Case in point: Walter Block.) What it is, however, is a worldview, a weltanschauung. I’ll give you two dentitions of this term. m-w.com says that it is “a comprehensive conception or apprehension of the world especially from a specific standpoint.” Mises classifies worldview as follows: “If we look at all the theorems and theories guiding the conduct of certain individuals and groups as a coherent complex and try to arrange them as far as is feasible into a system, i.e., a comprehensive body of knowledge, we may speak of it as a world view. A world view is, as a theory, an interpretation of all things, and as a precept for action, an opinion concerning the best means for removing uneasiness as much as possible. A world view is thus, on the one hand, an explanation of all phenomena and, on the other hand, a technology, both these terms being taken in their broadest sense. Religion, metaphysics, and philosophy aim at providing a world view. They interpret the universe and they advise men how to act.” (Human Action, 178) A worldview, Mises says, “explains the cosmos and seeks to say something about the meaning and purpose of human existence.” (Liberalism, 192) In this sense, I think, atheism qualifies as a worldview.

The IEP sets out the objection:

Proponents of this objection point out that, according to Molinism, the truth of counterfactuals of creaturely freedom must be prior to God’s creating activity because they inform His creative decision. However, under the standard possible worlds analysis, which counterfactuals are true is dependent upon which world is actual (counterfactuals are true if they are true in the closest possible-but-not-actual world to the actual world). Thus, which world is actual (and presumably, how close all possible worlds are to it) must be prior to God’s knowledge of the true counterfactuals. But this means that God’s creative decision must be prior to God’s creative decision! Thus, middle knowledge is circular.

Let it be that if P were in C, then he’d do A. In the possible world W which interests us, P is in C and hence does A. W is fully specified and self-sufficient; we do not need to connect it to any actual world in which P is not in C. In fact, the real counterfactual is this: if God were to actualize W, A would occur. The actual world relative to which this counterfactual is evaluated is the world prior to God’s decision to create — an empty world containing only God. But our counterfactual is self-evidently true, because in the possible meta-world, in which God actualizes W, A indeed happens. So, there is no circularity.

Middle knowledge has been variously defined. Norman Geisler says in a critique that God’s natural knowledge is His knowledge of all possible worlds; free knowledge is the knowledge of the actual world; and “[b]etween the merely possible and the necessary there is the contingent.” (Baker Encyclopedia of Christian Apologetics, “Molinism”) Wikipedia divides knowledge differently: “necessary” means truths that are independent of God’s will and have no possibility to be false; “middle,” contingently true but independent of God’s will; and “free,” contingent truths that are dependent upon God’s will. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy proposes something similar:

Natural knowledge is that part of God’s knowledge which He knows by His very nature or essence, and since His essence is necessary, so is that which is known through it. That is, the content of natural knowledge includes all metaphysically necessary truths. …the content of God’s natural knowledge is independent of His will; God has no control over the truth of the propositions He knows by natural knowledge. Consider, for example, the mathematical truth, 1 + 1 = 2. No matter what God wills, it will always be true that the concepts represented by the symbols 1, 2, +, and =, when arranged in a formulaic expression, one plus one equals two.

Free knowledge is that part of God’s knowledge which He knows by His knowledge of His own will, both His desires and what He will, in fact, do. The content of this knowledge is made up of truths which refer to what actually exists (or has existed, or will exist). … First, the content of that knowledge is contingent; it could have been different from what it, in fact, is. That is, free knowledge includes only… truths that could have been prevented by God if He chose to create different situations, different creatures, or to not create at all. Second, free knowledge is postvolitional; it is dependent upon God’s [decretory, causal] will.

[M]iddle knowledge is like natural knowledge in that it is prevolitional, or prior to God’s choice to create. This, of course, also means that the content of middle knowledge is true independent of God’s will and therefore, He has no control over it. Yet, it is not the same as natural knowledge because, like free knowledge, its content is contingent.

The problem with these definitions is that {necessary, contingent, actual} does not cover all the relevant possibilities. {necessary, contingent/possible, impossible} indeed exhausts all the modal categories, but it is not what we need at all. Both necessary and contingent knowledge are still understood in terms of possible worlds. Thus, if God “knows all the possible worlds,” then He has both the natural and middle knowledge already. It’s true that 1 + 1 = 2 is necessarily true, but the possible worlds in which this statement is true are contingent. The contingency we care about is the contingency of each possible world not the contingency or necessity of propositions or states of affairs in these worlds. That a proposition is true in all possible worlds is a happenstance; good for the proposition, I suppose, but what is it to us? (NB: I’m not saying that PNx & P~Nx which is always false.) Given any world, a proposition in it will either be true or false, whether it is necessary or contingent, and God knows that. It’s the truth value that’s important not the modality. Let me suggest therefore that 1 + 1 = 2 is not part of the natural knowledge of God but of the middle knowledge, defined indeed as the knowledge of all possible worlds. An objection immediately arises: if knowledge of possible worlds is middle, what remains for natural knowledge? The answer is, we cannot know. That knowledge is reserved for the blessed only. We can’t even give an example of a single anything that is true for God naturally. But one thing we can state for certain: God is not reducible to the set of all necessary truths, if such a thing is even coherent. We meet God half-way in possible worlds, but beyond that we cannot progress unless beatified and in the state of glory.

Aquinas would no doubt object. Possible worlds, he would say, are finite reflections of the infinite God. Hence God knows them through Himself. By knowing Himself, God knows how He can be imitated in every possible way. Similarly, the actual world is one of the possible worlds, and since God knows everything to which His power extends, He knows which possible world is the actual one. No need therefore for any kind of knowledge but God’s innate knowledge of His own essence. But here St. Thomas has made a crucial error by failing to countenance the levels within God: necessity, self-interest, and charity or creativity. For example, we humans can easily (perhaps with the help of grace) discuss possible worlds without thinking of them as crude copies of God. Why must God think of them as such? Possible worlds represent what God Himself could be. But He is what He is. He is supremely actual. He has chosen that possible world to live in in which He is omnipotent, omniscient, and all-loving. Of all the possibilities of existence God’s way is the best one. He has rejected every possible evil, every possible deficiency. In a way, God is the best possible world Himself, the best way of them all to be.

It may be true that “God, from a most profound and inscrutable comprehension of every free will in His essence, has intuited what each, according to its innate liberty, would do if placed in this or that condition.” (Geisler, Ibid.) But that intuition is indistinguishable from the knowledge of necessary truths in the possible world in which some free will FW is in condition C; it’s just that 1 + 1 = 2 will also be true there (and everywhere else, but so what?). Again, we are interested in describing each possible world not in the modality of particular propositions.

The source for the reason why God is masculine is Peter Kreeft’s speech “Women and the Priesthood.” He says that God is masculine, because He “impregnates” the soul from the outside with grace. I add that there are reasons why each person of the Trinity could be called masculine.

The first person, because (1f) He as Creator and in His capacity as a perfect agent or pure act created matter and imbued it with form, and that which acts is masculine, while that which is acted upon is feminine; and (2f) as Father He rewards and punishes those He loves, an activity which properly belongs to the father not the mother (or at least, to the masculine part of every human being).

The second person, because (1s) as Redeemer it belongs to the man to sacrifice himself for his bride rather than to the woman for her bridegroom; and (2s) Jesus was male (of course, this only shows the sex of His human nature not His divine nature, but it would be odd indeed if the divine Daughter was incarnated as a male).

The third person, because (1h) as Sanctifier, as Kreeft states, He gives grace which bears fruit, etc.

Calvinism is ruthlessly logical. Let’s consider its first article of faith: 1) total depravity. Aquinas produces for us a litany of things that are not possible without (either habitual or actual, depending on the context) grace:

• Loving God as a friend. As usual, this is for two reasons: partly wounded nature and lack of charity, the latter preventing successful operation even in the state of perfect nature.
• Fulfilling the commandments of the Law.
• Meriting everlasting life.
• Preparing oneself for habitual (sanctifying) grace.
• Restoring oneself to grace after sin.
• Avoiding sin and persevering without repeated infusions of grace. (ST, II-I, 109)

If total depravity refers to any of that, then on this matter Aquinas is a Calvinist. It cannot, however, refer to the claim that humans in a state of nature cannot do any good. Every human being seeks happiness necessarily and for the sake of that wills different goods for himself and for those he loves. Nor need a natural man be in any sense a “bad person.”

2) Unconditional election. This follows directly from (1). If one cannot merit beatitude without grace, and God is He who bestows grace, then God decides who will and who will not be saved. Perhaps everyone is actually saved (which is my opinion, for what it’s worth); perhaps not, in which case the fault may lie not with God but with the Craigian transcircumstantial depravity of the damned (which God foreknows through scientia media), or with this being the best possible world despite the need for utilitarian tinkering, or some such thing.

We must draw here a crucial distinction between positive and negative reprobation. It is not necessary to suppose that God positively reprobates from eternity some people to hell and therefore wills (rather than merely permits) sin to occur, only that He negatively excludes some people from the beatific vision, which admits the possibility of some middle state such as natural happiness. The ultimate fate of these folks is anybody’s guess, but if universal salvation is true, then even the negatively reprobated will eventually make it to heaven. Calvinism may not deserve its reputation as harsh.

3) Limited atonement, again a self-evident implication. Why bother forgiving the sins of those predestined to be damned? The damned will be confirmed in evil, and there is no escape from hell. Even if some of their sins in this life are forgiven, it will be in vain, as they forever, though hatred, accumulate new sins as they burn in hellfire.

4) Irresistible grace. I’ve already quoted Aquinas on the infallibility of actually given grace. Also see this post. I see no problems whatsoever with this.

5) Perseverance of the saints. Another straightforward deduction. If God has actually bestowed on you even a single instance of grace for your own sake, then if you are to be eventually condemned, then this gift was useless. It may even have worsened your situation, like “sufficient” grace (sufficient for what?) which is not efficacious. But God’s actions are never in vain. Of course, it’s not that you can’t fall away; it’s that you won’t, of which happy fact the first grace is a sign.

Jesus is recorded to have said: “Do you think I cannot call on my Father, and he will at once put at my disposal more than twelve legions of angels? But how then would the Scriptures be fulfilled that say it must happen in this way?” (Mt 26:53-54) This is extremely suggestive. Was Jesus free to do anything, or was He bound to behave in such a way so as to fulfill the prophecies? I think He had the power to act such as to break the prophecies, but He wanted to fulfill them. Moreover, if the Holy Spirit had foreseen that Jesus would not want to fulfill the prophecies, He would not have prophesied.

Aquinas’s solution is mysterious:

Hence, whoever knows a contingent effect in its cause only, has merely a conjectural knowledge of it. Now God knows all contingent things not only as they are in their causes, but also as each one of them is actually in itself. And although contingent things become actual successively, nevertheless God knows contingent things not successively, as they are in their own being, as we do but simultaneously. The reason is because His knowledge is measured by eternity, as is also His being; and eternity being simultaneously whole comprises all time, as said above… Hence all things that are in time are present to God from eternity, not only because He has the types of things present within Him, as some say; but because His glance is carried from eternity over all things as they are in their presentiality. (ST, I, 14, 13)

The last sentence can be meaningfully interpreted in the sense that causes do not fully determine their effects. But it seems that they have to. God must see agent A in circumstances C, and from that deduce that the agent will do either x or y or whatever. Given indeterminism, if God sees A do x, how does He know that in the actual world A will in fact do x? What He sees is a possible world, one of many. If there is indetermination, then it is unclear which possible world will ensue when it comes to pass. How does God know that when it’s time for A really to choose, A will choose x? If we want to invoke pure randomness and God disposing of creaturely proposals to do x or y, or of an atom’s “preference” to decay or not, or of a virtual particle to pop into existence or fail to do so, then the set of causes which fully determine the future includes God as the first cause. But there has to be determination; otherwise there is no way for God to foreknow.

Suppose that I’m at the top of a tower, and I drop a heavy ball. I foreknow (with a high degree of probability) that it will fall to the ground. How do I foreknow? By seeing the effect in the cause. A certain aspect of the future is necessarily determined: the effect must occur given the entirety of the cause and the passage of time. God foreknows in the same manner. Foreknowledge is possible, because even though humans can do numerous things, they desire to do something definite at any given moment. They literally do not will to do other things, though they can do them. If God knows the desire, and if in addition the agent knows how to satisfy it, then He can predict human actions.

Here is the master himself:

Consequently, when man knows an effect, and knows that it has a cause, there naturally remains in the man the desire to know about the cause, “what it is.” And this desire is one of wonder, and causes inquiry… For instance, if a man, knowing the eclipse of the sun, consider that it must be due to some cause, and know not what that cause is, he wonders about it, and from wondering proceeds to inquire…

If therefore the human intellect, knowing the essence of some created effect, knows no more of God than “that He is”; the perfection of that intellect does not yet reach simply the First Cause, but there remains in it the natural desire to seek the cause. Wherefore it is not yet perfectly happy. Consequently, for perfect happiness the intellect needs to reach the very Essence of the First Cause. (ST, II-I, 3, 8)

So, the point of seeing God and His glory face-to-face is to… satisfy your curiosity? You just wonder how all things began and where everything is going and that’s why you want to see God? So that He would answer all your questions? Does all Aquinas want to know is the entirety of truth regarding God’s relationship with the actual world? Does he want to know God in His aspect as the first cause of the world, or does he want to find out (1) not merely what is actual but what is possible; and (2) not merely what is possible but God’s self-knowledge of His inner self, isolated from both the possible worlds and the actual world.

We go from the actual world to possible worlds to God’s essence; God goes from His essence to possible worlds to the actual world. I‘d like to meet God in His inner core, unless it is impossible. Is it?

I find it slightly annoying that people often say that the three main attributes to God are omnipotence, omniscience, and perfect goodness. In fact, the third attribute is not goodness but love. This way the attributes correspond properly to the persons of the Trinity. Goodness is ascribed to God as such and can mean either metaphysical goodness (completeness of nature, simplicity, pure actuality), moral goodness (God’s doing good to His creatures), or even physical goodness (God’s happiness). Goodness is an important property of God, but the specifically Trinitarian qualities should still be acknowledged.

Update. God’s moral goodness depends on all three attributes so far discussed. If God wants to do something for a creature, he must needs (a) love it, (b) know how make the creature best off as compared to all other courses of action, and (c) be able to actualize His plan.

Nozick points out that no matter what we do, there exists a point of view — in fact, numerous points of view — from which our actions appear insignificant and pointless and futile. Therefore, I argue that “that’s as good a reason as any to tie your destiny to God. And that’s the meaning of life. To use Nozick’s terminology, meaning involves transcending the limits of your non-ultimate ends into the last end.” We first seek the particular limited goods for their own sake. Then, with religion and faith, we go up towards the universal good. But that good is unattainable in this life. So, having fixed our attention on that universal good, we go back into the world and continue seeking the limited goods but now for the sake of our last end. Our actions which seemed to be so trivial now attain overriding importance which is not shed in any perspective. They are ordered to God so as to bring glory to Him and ourselves. No matter where you stand, you can’t help but respect such devotion and, God willing, success. You can’t say: “That’s not for me” or “This guy is odd,” anymore. There is nothing odd about trying to reach God through any unique personal means. Hell is no longer other people, if those people are self-consciously seeking heaven.

1. Grace completes nature; it makes us into what we are meant to be, viz., “like unto God.”

2. Grace is intelligent design of the soul. I write that God cannot flood everyone with grace. I’d like to suggest that grace is not something you can “flood” someone with. Grace is not a uniform substance, as though God were an ocean of gray tapioca (with tapioca standing for “being,” as a C.S. Lewis’s acquaintance was induced to picture God in her childhood) and could infuse some of that into a person. Rather, grace is a spiritual influence which makes various aspects of the soul, such as habits, more beautiful, more precisely defined, and better. It is more appropriately imagined not a piece of concentrated substance coming to inhere in the soul but as a laser scalpel designed for spiritual surgery. Even in the case of St. Philip Neri’s miracle of the heart, the grace given to him is hardly characterized as a “flood.”

3. Grace (a) requires nature and cannot do everything.

Nevertheless there are numerous critics who find much to object to in Congruism, and who fail to see in it a clear solution of the problem of grace and free will. They find it difficult to believe that grace adjusts itself slavishly to all the circumstances of the recipient, when the story of many a conversion shows that grace simply lays hold of man and without much parley leads him whithersoever it would have him go. Thus, grace does not depend for its efficacy on the congruity of the circumstances, but conversely the congruity of the circumstances is shaped and brought about by grace. Like all the other systems Congruism is forced to the confession: “We are standing before an unsolved mystery.”

What can be designed is limited by the form and matter of what already exists. On the one side there is divine creative intelligence and power. On the other side, a half-made spirit. The spirit is not prime matter; it cannot be reshaped in anyway whatsoever. Nor would it make sense; God has already created fully-formed beings; they are called angels. It is our human lot to slowly make ourselves. So, God’s power both adjusts itself to the existing form and at the same time creatively changes it in hard-to-fathom ways. Now it has to be realized that God is omniscient and exceedingly clever. So, he can change us in unpredictable and even radical ways. But unless God’s grace happily accepts nature and builds on it, the more solidified the form of the soul is, the harder and more painful it is to change. If a statue given to a master sculptor is poorly made, he may need to break off large pieces of it; if a branch of a vine is ugly, it may need to be severely pruned. So, it is in our interest to be naturally good. This way, when you find yourself in the company of the Holy Spirit, He will raise you up effortlessly to dizzying heights rather than cast you down into the fire to be heated and re-made. A distinction of design methodologies must, of course, be made between embodied and disembodied designers and also between direct and indirect spiritual influences.

4. God may modify your desires by reconfiguring your soul, such that you want different things as compared to your desires prior to an infusion of grace, but that does not mean that you no longer construct a value scale in your mind; it’s just that this value scale has changed thanks to divine influence. Free will continues to function unabated.

5. Grace (b) becomes nature or second nature; it does not sit there as a foreign additive in you; it belongs to you, becomes part of you, and constitutes your identity and personality. You are good by your own goodness, even though some of that goodness is God-created. Here is one metaphor: It’s as if the king were to give you 50 gold coins, and you came home and threw them into the chest with your savings consisting of 100 coins. After that you can no longer distinguish between your earned cash and the king’s gift: all coins are identical. Yet here is another, because there is still a difference between nature and supernature within your soul: we might say that what you have is silver coins which represent nature, and you mix with them gold coins which represent grace. Their buying power is similar but the distinction remains, such that if you sin mortally, then you lose the gold but keep the silver.

6. Actually bestowed grace is irresistible, unless it is a part of a series of soul-designing events, such that even if some grace in that series is resisted, nevertheless, the entire series accomplishes God’s end which moreover could not be achieved with less unpleasantness or greater efficiency than by allowing that grace to be resisted. The only conceivable reason to bestow a grace that is resisted is in order to have a better “legal” reason to condemn a person, which is nuts. God is a maker of gods not devils. As the Catholic Encyclopedia relates, Jansen “did not shrink from reviling sufficient grace, understood in the Catholic sense, as a monstrous conception and a means of filling hell with reprobates, while later Jansenists discovered in it such a pernicious character as to infer the appropriateness of the prayer: … ‘From sufficient grace, O Lord deliver us’.” I agree with his opinion, even though in Catholicism they do distinguish sufficient and efficatious grace.

Further, to think that grace can fail to do what the omnipotent and omniscient God wants it to do seems absurd, as well: grace “may be considered, secondly, as it is from God the Mover, and thus it has a necessity — not indeed of coercion, but of infallibility — as regards what it is ordained to by God, since God’s intention cannot fail… Hence if God intends, while moving, that the one whose heart He moves should attain to grace, he will infallibly attain to it…” (ST, II-I, 112, 3)

7. I write that “natural virtue is a necessary condition for being eligible for grace, and it is also a quasi-sufficient condition — for God is so good that He won’t miss any opportunity for uplifting a person into deiformity.” The Catholic Encyclopedia agrees:

God, out of mere liberality, does not withhold His grace from the one who accomplishes what he can with his natural moral strength, i.e. from the one who, by deliberate abstention from offences, seeks to dispose God favourably towards him and thus prepares himself negatively for grace. Some theologians… declared even this most mitigated and mildest interpretation to be Semipelagian. Most modern theological authorities, however,… see in it nothing else but the expression of the truth: To the one who prepares himself negatively and places no obstacle to the ever-ready influence of grace, God in general is more inclined to offer his grace than to another who wallows in the mire of sin and thus neglects to accomplish what lies in his power. In this manner the cause of the distribution of grace is located not in the dignity of nature, but, conformably to orthodoxy, in the universal will of God to save mankind.

It may be objected to this reasoning that “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.” (Mk 2:17) See the next point for a reply.

8. Grace for the sake of the individual receiving it can be divided into common (which heals nature) and sanctifying (which uplifts nature), e.g.,

For one [love] is common, whereby He loves “all things that are”…, and thereby gives things their natural being. But the second is a special love, whereby He draws the rational creature above the condition of its nature to a participation of the Divine good; and according to this love He is said to love anyone simply, since it is by this love that God simply wishes the eternal good, which is Himself, for the creature. (110, 1)

9. What is God’s MO? It is to squeeze out of unaided nature every good thing it can produce and only then, once you have exhausted yourself, complete through grace what nature cannot bring to a finish.

On faith:

If the question be put: In how many truths as a means… must one believe to be saved? many catechists answer Six things: God’s existence; an eternal reward; the Trinity; the Incarnation; the immortality of the soul; the necessity of Grace.”

It seems to me that some of these, like existence of God, immortality of the soul, and even perhaps the necessity of grace, are known by reason; some, like the Trinity, by faith united with reason; and others, like an eternal reward and the Incarnation, by faith alone.

On justification:

The Catholic idea maintains that the formal cause of justification does not consist in an exterior imputation of the justice of Christ, but in a real, interior sanctification effected by grace, which abounds in the soul and makes it permanently holy before God… Although the sinner is justified by the justice of Christ, inasmuch as the Redeemer has merited for him the grace of justification…, nevertheless he is formally justified and made holy by his own personal justice and holiness…, just as a philosopher by his own inherent learning becomes a scholar, not, however, by any exterior imputation of the wisdom of God. … For since sin and grace are diametrically opposed to each other, the mere advent of grace is sufficient to drive sin away; and thus grace, in its positive operations, immediately brings about holiness, kinship of God, and a renovation of spirit, etc. From this it follows that in the present process of justification, the remission of sin, both original and mortal, is linked to the infusion of sanctifying grace as a conditio sine qua non, and therefore a remission of sin without a simultaneous interior sanctification is theologically impossible.”

So, then, sins cannot be forgiven to a bad person? Hmm… Why not say that what is taken away is not sin or sinful habits but guilt for previous sins and the debt of punishment? Then again, as I argued before, even feeling guilt is a response to actual grace.

On participation in the divine nature:

To the difficult question: Of which special attribute of God does this participation [in the divine nature through sanctifying grace] partake? Theologians can answer only by conjectures. Manifestly only the communicable attributes can at all be considered in the matter, wherefore Gonet… was clearly wrong when he said that the attribute of participation was the aseitas, absolutely the most incommunicable of all the Divine attributes.

Aseity is an attribute derivative from simplicity, insofar as God’s essence is existence. But charity is a unitive force. Hence a person in the state of sanctifying grace is “simpler,” more one than an unbeliever. “Be shrewd as serpents and simple as doves.” (Mt 10:16) I think the word “simple” in this phrase refers not so much to innocence but precisely to the simplicity and integrity of the soul acquired as a result of grace. Or maybe to both, as innocence brings peace and self-control and self-contentment which are also the fruits of charity, etc.

On the 7 gifts of the Holy Spirit:

we may possibly assume that God gives in the process of justification also the seven gifts of the Holy Ghost.

I can testify that this assumption is incorrect. A gift of the Holy Spirit is like a flower on a plant. However it is produced, it is something beyond any other grace. It’s extremely rare and just as beautiful. For example, the gift of wisdom is a voice at the very top of your head, a voice of a child, judging generously every good thing good and happy and every bad thing appropriately bad. The sense of personal identity, of selfhood is tremendously sharpened. (When I asked a priest in New York whether he was familiar with this phenomenon, he said he was.)

On the characteristics of sanctifying grace:
Uncertainty:

The heretical doctrine of the Reformers, that man by a fiduciary faith knows with absolute certainty that he is justified, received the attention of the Council of Trent…, in one entire chapter…, three canons… condemning the necessity, the alleged power, and the function of fiduciary faith. The object of the Church in defining the dogma was not to shatter the trust in God… in the matter of personal salvation, but to repel the misleading assumptions of an unwarranted certainty of salvation… In doing this the Church is altogether obedient to the instruction of Holy Writ, for, since Scripture declares that we must work out our salvation “with fear and trembling,” it is impossible to regard our individual salvation as something fixed and certain.

It’s true that Jesus forgives all sins but only to those who want them forgiven. If you are shameless in evil, you are pretty much out of luck.

Inequality:

If man, as the Protestant theory of justification teaches, is justified by faith alone, by the external justice of Christ, or God, the conclusion which Martin Luther… drew must follow, namely that “we are all equal to Mary the Mother of God and just as holy as she”.

If true, then Protestants have made a crucial error: what is equal is not our holiness but our right to forgiveness of sins.

Amissibility:

On account of the grave moral dangers which lurked in the assertion that outside of unbelief there can be no serious sin destructive of Divine grace in the soul, the Council of Trent was obliged to condemn… both these views.

Come on, Protestants, you can’t be serious!

I heartily recommend this whole article for its remarkably modern style and Scholastic precision.