Divine Motion

THERE IS AN INHERENT ABSURDITY in the notion that omnipotence by sharing its goodness through creation has lost something of its power and all of its freedom. We have managed to swallow this indigestible morsel on the human level in our own times. It has been seriously argued that the State which is man's created instrument for political life automatically supersedes its creator. The radically revolutionary argue that the state devours a man; the merely liberal, that it absorbs him. In either case, he is small change compared to the state. To accept this same humiliation on a cosmic scale is to replace the fact of creation and divinity's perfection with a Frankenstein myth of total universality. God's creation towers over Him and ultimately destroys Him. The enlarged proportions of the tale do not diminish its childishness. Common sense would put aside this pettishness and look squarely at the obvious question: what can God do in the world?

Can God, for example, dispense with active causes in producing changes? The philosophical argument that omnipotence can effect all it has given creatures the power to do is unnecessary in the light of the shining beauty of the first instant of the Son of God upon earth. The Virgin Mary, because the Holy Ghost came upon her and the power of the Most High overshadowed her, virginally conceived her Son, Jesus Christ. Of the beginning of all human life upon earth, it is written: "God formed man of the slime of the earth." God has done this; a thing beyond the power of any angel or any devil. Nothing in nature can work without natural causes.

It is within the easy power of angel, devil or man to move a body, as easy as a mother's effortless rocking of her infant. This is hardly a thing to be denied to God's omnipotence; yet our minds are apt to stumble over the absence of hands and arms in God's lifting. We are vastly more surprised than we should be at the story of the Deacon Philip in the Acts (8: 39): "when they were come up out of the water, the Spirit of the Lord took away Philip; and the eunuch saw him no more... But Philip was not found in Azotus; and passing through, he preached the gospel to all the cities, for it was omnipotence at work.

When it is a question of God's actions in our sovereign powers of intellect and will, we are not in the field of the unusual, the startling, where ordinary causes are supplanted by God Himself. This is the prosaic routine of every moment of a man's rational actions. The university professor is no more than a servant; at best, he serves food that must be eaten and digested by his students, he can not stamp it on their minds, he can not give them his vision. To see something of God's action on the mind of every man, we must go behind the teacher's work and beyond its greatest effort. It is from God that every man has the power to know at all; a power that the professor hopefully takes for granted. In all his actual knowing, man is never alone; God must play His part here, the part of the First Cause of everything real. This act of knowing, too, is a reality not a fiction; it depends in its every instant on the cause of all reality or it ceases to be. We know truth, but not completely by ourselves, not in absolute independence; not divinely but as creatures moved and sustained by the Creator in every instant of real motion. Only God can work thus within the mind of man; it is the privilege of the First Cause and the sole explanation of anything getting done by the mind of man.

Could this be tested from experience? Well, hardly; for who but God is to get inside the mind of a man? Yet it is not to be challenged under pain of treason to common sense. Common sense is right in its insistence that one never finds something coming from nothing, activity from passivity, perfection from imperfection. As we pass from the condition of potential knowers to actual knowing, we can not in common sense cherish the illusion that knowledge has given birth to itself in our minds, that the unknowing intellect has given itself knowledge. We do indeed know the truth; that knowledge is rigidly personal, it is ours. Behind our knowing is the God of all reality, causing and sustaining our knowing and our knowledge in the world of the real.

The same must be said of the divine activity in our will's free choice if both the choice and the freedom of it are to be real. If a man, his action, and that action's freedom are all real, then all three are intimately dependent in every moment on the Cause of all reality. Escape from the divine motion is a plunge into nothingness. God's activity within our will is not an affront or an impediment to our free choice; rather it is absolutely indispensable and completely first cause of that freedom. Under that divine motion, we do our own choosing humanly, for we are men; not divinely, for we are not God. Absolute independence would destroy both us and our freedom.

We have difficulty with this truth, not only because it is necessarily mysterious since it involves the infinite divine motion, but primarily because we insist on putting God on trial in a human court. For ourselves, we can move things, and men, only from the outside; our movement of others is always a kind of violence even when it is no harsher than an allure or enticement. We never get inside any creature to move it by its own principles. Stubborn men have shown us convincingly that we can not move men's wills; certainly we can not move them and have them move freely. So, of course, it just can not be done. The proper conclusion from this human helplessness should be that we cannot understand how it can be done, but we can know by common sense alone that it has to be done.

God must work in every agent, in every action, or there is no reality to the agent or the act. The divine motion is not a brutal blow putting an end to all opposition, the rule of the mailed fist. If there is irreverence for an individual nature in the world, we can be sure indeed that the irreverence is not from God; He moves all things according to their natures. So the sun, the moon, the trees and the animals are moved necessarily to their goals, for freedom has no part in their natures. Man is moved freely to his goals, for necessity has no part in his moral nature. It is equally true that this action is mine and is God's, His because He is the First Cause of all reality, mine because God stands behind the execution of the powers He has given me. To ask to understand how God can move from the inside, freely, from the principles proper to man's nature is to demand a comprehension of the infinite motion of God by the finite mind of man. God's part in our freedom is not a contradiction but an assurance of reality.

My Way of Life
- Confraternity of the Precious Blood