Tag Archives: Providence

On God’s Providence and Man’s Free Will

February 10, 2025God's WillBoethius, eternity, Free Will, ProvidenceRob Agnelli

There are certain questions that perennially puzzle the minds of men. Once these questions are answered, they often change the way reality itself is perceived. Perhaps one of the most foundational of these questions is how, if God is both omnipotent and omniscient, there can be any such thing as free will. Distilled down to its simplest form, the question relates to the possibility of God’s Providence and our freedom to choose. Thankfully, this question was cogently resolved over 1500 years ago by St. Boethius in his book The Consolation of Philosophy. Grasping what he taught will help us not only to address objections from non-believers but to strengthen our understanding and determination to cooperate with God’s Providence.

What is Providence?

As always, once we define our terms, the clouds blocking the rays of understanding are lifted. First there is Providence. God’s Providence is analogous to the virtue of prudence in that it represents the manner in which all things are directed towards their end. And like prudence, it has two aspects. The first is the eternal plan for creation. The second is the execution of this plan in time, which Boethius calls Fate. The first includes creating certain causes that are capable of carrying out His desired effects and the second is the employment of those secondary causes in time.

God’s plan is both immutable (unchangeable) and infallibly certain. This is because He is the universal cause to which all particular causes are subject. From this it follows that while it might be possible to avoid a particular cause, it is impossible to avoid the universal cause. As St Thomas puts it, one might freely choose to avoid a particular cause, but only

“through the intervention and hindrance of some other particular cause; as, for instance, wood may be prevented from burning, by the action of water. Since then, all particular causes are included under the universal cause, it could not be that any effect should take place outside the range of that universal cause. So far then as an effect escapes the order of a particular cause, it is said to be casual or fortuitous in respect to that cause; but if we regard the universal cause, outside whose range no effect can happen, it is said to be foreseen. Thus, for instance, the meeting of two servants, although to them it appears a chance circumstance, has been fully foreseen by their master, who has purposely sent to meet at the one place, in such a way that the one knows not about the other.” ST I, q.22, a.2 ad.2

There are two necessary consequences associated with this. The first is that there is nothing that happens that isn’t willed by God either directly or permissively. Second, there is no such thing as chance. Chance is merely our way of describing the experience of ignorance of the particular causes of thing since nothing can escape the universal cause.

God’s Foreknowledge

Notice that St. Thomas draws an important conclusion related to the existence of the universal cause. He says that everything that happens is also foreknown. This is where St. Boethius’ explanation about God’s foreknowledge is particularly useful. We use this term, foreknowledge, because it helps us to understand what God knows. But it does not really describe how God knows.

God is eternal. When we see this term, we think that means “He is outside of time”. It is this overly simplistic explanation that makes it difficult for us to grasp exactly how God knows. Saying that God is eternal means, according to Boethius, that He has “a possession of life, a possession simultaneously entire and perfect, which has no end” (Consolation of Philosophy, Book V). Eternity is changeless life possessed wholly at once so that God possesses His infinite life wholly at once. God lives in the eternal present and therefore everything happens at once.

God does not really foreknow anything. He knows all things because they are happening Now. It is like you knowing that you are reading the word word. Because He knows all things at once, He submits each particular cause to Himself as the universal cause in “real time”.

With this understanding in place, we see that there is no ideological conflict between Providence and free will. God’s knowledge of the choices of our will does not impose any necessity on them. His knowledge may be certain but that does not mean that the outcome itself was fixed. We still have the power to choose.

While there may be no ideological conflict between Providence and free will, there is, what for all of us, is an interior conflict. This is why Our Lord taught His disciples to pray “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” God’s will is immutable and thus we are not praying that what He wills happens, but that we will cooperate with it. The purpose of having free will is so that we can cling to God’s will. By understanding that God will is always accomplished, there is no reason for us to avoid it. The moment Providence reveals its plan to us, we should abandon ourselves to it and embrace what God has ordained. This is why we should leave the distinction between His active and permissive will to the theologians and focus only on the fact that both are willed.

It is always true that the foundational way for strengthening our resolve is to strengthen our understanding. This is exactly what St. Boethius was doing when he wrote The Consolation of Philosophy. He had been abandoned by everyone dear to him and left to rot in prison. In this midst of this great suffering, he turned to Lady Philosophy to help strengthen his resolve to abandon himself to God’s will. And once strengthened, he ultimately won the martyr’s crown.

A Healthy Sense of Sin?

February 20, 2021Freedom, Sacraments, SinAdam, Confession, Holy Spirit, Providence, Scrupulosity, St. Thomas, Summa Contra Gentiles, Upper RoomRob Agnelli

In a 1946 Radio Address, Pope Pius XII said that “perhaps the greatest sin in the world today is that men have begun to lose the sense of sin.” There has been no great moral awakening since he uttered those words so that what was begun has found its completion in our age. The widespread loss of a sense of sin has led to a great spiritual malaise in which any semblance of shame has been lost and sins are demanded as rights. The soul of our culture is dead, which is not surprising because its natural soul, the members of the Church, have also lost their sense of sin. Communion lines grow longer while Confession lines grow shorter and even public sinners are given Communion as a right.

A Great Spiritual Awakening

Pope St. John Paul II thought that the only way to stimulate a Great Awakening was to restore this sense of sin:

“The restoration of a proper sense of sin is the first way of facing the grave spiritual crisis looming over man today. But the sense of sin can only be restored through a clear reminder of the unchangeable principles of reason and faith which the moral teaching of the church has always upheld. There are good grounds for hoping that a healthy sense of sin will once again flourish, especially in the Christian world and in the Church. This will be aided by sound catechetics, illuminated by the biblical theology of the covenant, by an attentive listening and trustful openness to the magisterium of the church, which; never ceases to enlighten consciences, and by an ever more careful practice of the Sacrament of Penance.”
Reconciliation and Penance, 18

The Holy Father was reminding the Church that one of her essential tasks in to preach the bad news of sin. In fact, the Church has no mission if there is no sin, or at least if there is no sin to be forgiven. Just as the Father sent the Son into the world for the forgiveness of sins, so the Son sends the Apostles and their successors (c.f. John 20:21-23). To omit the reality of sin from the Gospel renders the Good News utterly senseless.

The Pontiff did not just say that a sense of sin was necessary, but a healthy sense of sin. Sin and guilt, at least according to spirit of the world, are things to be explained away because it is unhealthy. That we can develop a healthy sense of sin is itself Good News because it frees us from not only rationalization but also scrupulosity. Both of these ensnare us because they leave us closed to the reality of God’s mercy. What then would a healthy sense of sin consist in?

Elements of a Healthy Sense of Sin

We must first see sin for what it really is. First and foremost it is an offense against God, but not God as Divine Rulemaker, but God as Father. In fact, JPII says that all sin is ultimately a rejection of God’s fatherhood. God gave to us the gift of freedom, but not so that we choose whatever we want, but so that we can choose Him. He is at every moment providing (e.g. Providence) the means for us to do that. We only need to orient our freedom towards this reality. Sin then is disorientation, setting our eyes off in the wrong direction and away from God. And this is why one of St. Thomas’ thought that “God is offended by us only because we act contrary to our own good” (SCG, 3.122).

A healthy sense of sin then begins by orienting our freedom with acts that are truly good. When we see sin as ultimately harmful to us and enslaving us, we lose the desire to rationalize and self-forgive. Now we desire to flush our sin and move forward in freedom.

But it also consists in seeing sin through the lens of God’s Providence. God only permits our sin if He can turn it to our good. The obvious example is the “happy fault’ of Adam that won for us the Redeemer. But this principle applies to each and every sin that we commit. Ultimately, we are permitted to commit certain sins and not others because those certain sins ultimately can be oriented by God towards our sanctification.

This sense of sin is unfathomable unless we drop the God strictly as Rulemaker paradigm. He is not sitting in Heaven with His Divine Gotcha Button waiting for us to mess up. From all eternity He plotted how He was to redeem me and you and that would include using those sins we commit as a means to that sanctification. This is not to trivialize our sin, but to see them from God’s perspective. We are permitted to commit certain actual sins because those are the sins that, when repented of, will draw down upon us the grace of a true and deeper conversion. So that when we sin, the grace of repentance follows right behind it, causing us to run back harder and faster than when we fell. This healthy sense of sin then takes the focus off of our actions and shines it upon Divine Mercy. In other words, a healthy sense of sin sees all personal sin as a means that Providence uses to glorify God’s Mercy and save our souls. Only a healthy sense of sin rooted in this reality protects us from falling into scrupulosity.

Consequentialism and the Dropping of the Bomb

October 10, 2020Abortion, American Founding, Catholic Social Teaching, Church and State, Just War, Moralilty, Natural LawAtomic Bomb, Consequentialism, Evil, Good, Intrinsic Evil, John Paul II, Providence, World War IIRob Agnelli

The Venerable Bishop Fulton Sheen thought that the demise of Western Culture, specifically American culture, began on the morning of August 6,^,1945. That was when the United States dropped the first of two nuclear bombs on Japan at Hiroshima. It was the moment that “blotted out boundaries. There was no longer a boundary between the military and the civilian, between the helper and the helped, between the wounded and the nurse and the doctor, and the living and the dead. For even the living who escaped the bomb were already half dead. So, we broke down boundaries and limits and from that time on the world has said we want no one limiting me! We want no limits, no boundaries.” As usual, the first televangelist was also a prophet. Since that fateful day, the boundaries between right and wrong, natural and unnatural, good and evil have all broken down. This is because, lost amidst the rubble of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, was traditional morality and a firm belief in God’s Providence.

By all accounts even down to our own day, dropping the atomic bomb was the only viable option. Continuing to fire-bomb cities like Tokyo was going to kill far more Japanese citizens than the Bomb would ever do and, even more likely, would harden Japanese resolve, leading to a long drawn out war. A full ground assault would lead to thousands, if not millions, of deaths on both sides. In order to save American lives then it was necessary to drop the Bomb as both a show of force and a deterrence to any further Japanese aggression. Many Americans, including the one writing this article would likely never have been born had the Bomb not been dropped. Thousands of men were headed to Japan with the sure knowledge that they would not return. To most of them, Harry Truman is a hero who made the best possible decision.

Another man whose existence is linked to “Truman’s Terrible Choice” is George Weigel. In a web article for First Things last week, he defended Truman saying that he “it was the correct choice” given the options. Weigel’s logic is paradigmatic for many Catholics and follows from the loss of a traditional morality in favor of, what St. John Paul II condemned in Veritas Splendor –Consequentialism. In Weigel’s defense, he mentions that consequentialism is wrong in the article, but he still goes on to employ its logic. Nevertheless, he is defending the indefensible.

The Two Moral Camps

The tradition understanding of morality has always included the notion that there are intrinsically evil acts. These acts, no matter the circumstances or the intention of the person, can never be ordered towards the good. Some examples would be the deliberate killing of an innocent person, lying, and adultery. Among these acts would be the direct targeting and indiscriminate bombing of civilians during a war. This would include the aforementioned “fire-bombing” of German and Japanese cities as well as the dropping of the Bomb on the two Japanese cities. When no distinction is made between military and civilian targets then the dropping of any powerful bomb, atomic or otherwise, is always an intrinsically evil act and is akin to mass murder or terrorism. One can clearly see under this moral paradigm that there could never be any justification for dropping the two bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Consequentialism, on the other hand, evaluates all moral actions based upon the consequences. It requires a form a moral calculus in which you decide that if there is more good than evil in the consequences of an act then the act is morally permissible. Consequentialism, as St. John Paul II puts it, “draw[s] the criteria of the rightness of a given way of acting solely from a calculation of foreseeable consequences deriving from a given choice…[and] maintain[s] that it is never possible to formulate an absolute prohibition of particular kinds of behavior” (Veritatis Splendor, 75). It is, in essence a form of moral relativism, in that leaves all our actions relative to circumstances and the moral calculations of the individual. With Consequentialism as the guide, the decision to drop the Bomb would depend upon a moral calculation in which the good of American and Japanese lives are weighed against the loss of innocent Japanese lives.

Consequentialism and Providence

Embedded within Consequentialism is a rejection of Providence. Not only does the person assume divine status in thinking they can foresee the actual consequences of their actions, but it also assumes that God could ever leave us in a situation when the Good could not be done. This is the flaw in Weigel’s logic when he says that Truman chose the best option. No situation falls outside of God’s Providence and therefore no situation leaves us without an option to choose good. Truman could have chosen otherwise, and his choice could have been in accord with the good. Perhaps the decision would have been to send the troops in on the ground and allow the men to courageously fight for goodness and truth even to the giving up of their lives. Giving your life in noble defense of other people is always a good. Or perhaps it was to accept the non-absolute terms for Japanese surrender. The point though is that God had allowed the circumstances to be as they were and, incapable of causing us to sin, would always include a way to choose the Good.

Bishop Sheen thought August 6,1945 was the turning point for America because it created a new moral environment. Large swaths of the population owe their existence to the consequentialist logic of Truman and others. America herself, in order to avoid facing the music for such a heinous action, adopted Consequentialism as the new moral order. Gone, thanks to the Freemasonic court-packing of Roosevelt and Truman, was legal reasoning based on natural law. Gone too is the idea of intrinsically evil acts. Try explaining to someone about abortion being intrinsically evil and they will get caught up in the consequences of brining an unwanted child into the world. Or, relevant to today’s political climate, tell them why they cannot support a candidate who promotes and defends intrinsically evil actions. You will instead get some moral ledger that pits immigration against abortion.

When Truman decided to drop the Bomb he opened a moral Pandora’s Box in which true moral reasoning was shed in favor of Consequentialism. Now people with no sense of morality are the ones performing the moral calculus leading to all kinds of evils that have put our society in jeopardy of collapse. The only way forward is to reconnect Americans to the moral tradition of the Founders.

On Divine Judgement and the Coronavirus

March 11, 2020Culture of Life, Sufferingabortion, Divine Judgement, euthanasia, Pachamama, Providence, Punishment, SinRob Agnelli

As punishment for their idolatrous worship of the Golden Calf, God sent a plague among the Israelites (c.f. Ex 32:30-35). Serving as a bookend to this event, St. John tells us that the fourth rider of the Apocalypse brings with him plague “by means of the beasts of the earth” to punish mankind. And between these two instances, Scripture is replete with many cases in which mankind suffers a plague in punishment for sin. The point is that it is a common means that God uses in order to punish wayward mankind and, we ought not be surprised that in our age of decadence that we are once again witnessing the rise of a new plague.

At the outset it must be admitted that the notion that anything that happens is associated with Divine retribution is hardly ever discussed. It is usually embarrassingly glossed over so that only those “fire and brimstone preachers” animated with a punitive view of God that speak of it. Nevertheless true Christians must see it and call it what it is.

Calling it what it is

It is helpful first to examine why we are so hesitant to call something like the Coronavirus a tool of Divine punishment. This reticence is rooted in a grave misunderstanding of punishment in general and God’s punishment in particular. For us, punishment is always viewed as an evil, a lack of some good that becomes a penal act inflicted on us when someone in authority is fed up. For God punishment is only a relative evil deprivation of some good.

For men, good comes in three forms—external goods, the good of the body and the good of the soul—that form a hierarchy in which a lesser good may be sacrificed for a higher good. The evil of punishment then is always relative because it contains a medicinal value. A man may give up his money (external good) in order to feed his body (a good of the body). That same man may later fast and deprive himself of food so as to grow in virtue (a good of the soul). Whenever God punishes then he will allow the deprivation of some lower good for the good of the soul.

Here again we bump into a profound conflict with the spirit of the world. All of this only makes sense if you believe in the hierarchy of the manifold goods of man such that every punishment has a specific meaning. It is never inflicted haphazardly or indiscriminately but always with some good in mind. Justice and mercy are never separated. The good includes not only a repayment of the debt to justice, but also contributes, when willingly accepted, to the healing of the person.

For each sin not only offends God, but also warps our souls in some way by turning us away from what we were made to be. Each time we sin, we do so by abusing some good, by taking pleasure in something the wrong way. To fix the damage that is done, we have to submit to the deprivation of some pleasure that would result from the correct use of some good. By accepting punishment as a means of repaying that stolen pleasure, it actually heals us as well.

In short if we do not call it what it is, then the only other option is to conclude that it is completely meaningless. If plagues like the Coronavirus are not punishment then they are just accidental occurrences without any real meaning. This ultimately makes life itself meaningless and thus suffering becomes an absolute, rather than a relative, evil. By not calling it a punishment we are depriving the world of its meaning and it becomes in a very real sense useless suffering.

Admittedly we are also reluctant to call it a punishment because it feels like we are being judgmental. And this is the unforgivable sin of our age. But again it is Christ who judges the living and the dead that is being judgmental. And His judgment is not definitive but instead a call to repentance and healing, a call to peace and joy. His judgment is that “you are going to wrong way, turn around now because you are headed into an abyss.” Or, using His own words, “Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Instead, fear the One who can destroy both soul and body in hell” (Mt 10:28). If no one echoes that call, then many souls will be lost, including those whom He has called to speak His truth.

What It Means

We should be slow to say how the punishment applies to each individual man, but quick to point out how it applies to mankind as a whole. It seems that the meaning of the Coronavirus as a punishment for all of mankind is relatively clear. For Rome, the Coronavirus appears to be a Divine Judgment upon the sin of the idolatrous attachment to Pachamama. They must receive their deprivation of the Eucharist and offer it in reparation for the sin of idolatry. Setting that unique situation aside, the Coronavirus also offers an opportunity of reparation for our treatment of the most vulnerable among us.

The full effect of the virus is still unknown, but what is clear is that it is particularly deadly for the most vulnerable among us. In this way, the Coronavirus is not much different than the sins of abortion and euthanasia which attack those same people. It is because of the most vulnerable that all of the rest of us must now suffer. This suffering may be as simple as remaining in isolation for a fortnight or as devastating as losing a fortune. The point is that we are being made to make sacrifices in order to keep those same people we want to throw away safe. All of us can accept those sufferings and offer them in reparation for those grave sins.

In a Twitter post a couple of days ago, Conservative pundit Ann Coulter said that Americans were being manipulated by stories of the deaths in Italy. She made a point to say that the average age of the victims was 81. In essence she was saying “you shouldn’t be scared because it is just a bunch of old people dying.” Now most people wouldn’t so callously say that, but many people are thinking along the same lines. We shouldn’t fear because it only attacks the vulnerable. This survival of the fittest mentality is exactly why we need to Coronavirus right now—as an opportunity to make reparation for so savagely treating the very ones we should be protecting as mere useless beings. Fear not the one who gives you the Coronavirus, but instead fear the one who can destroy both body and soul.

Praying with Christ

January 15, 2020Grace, Passion of Christ, PrayerGethsemane, grace, Hypostatic Union, Jesus Praying, Passion of Christ, ProvidenceRob Agnelli

At various points along the Christian journey, believers must confront questions related to the true identity of Jesus Christ. Those who persevere and grow, learn to plow through them one by one and in so doing, more deeply discover the personality of the Incarnate Son of God. Among these questions there is one that is particularly illuminating, especially because it deals with something that has very practical implications for our own spiritual life. Articulated in various forms, the question goes something like this: “If Jesus was God, then why did He pray?”

The question of the identity of Jesus is not just something that plagues the neophyte, but it was also a question that the Early Church had to face head on. Although worked out over centuries, we can summarize their findings by articulating a single principle—the distinction between person and nature.

The Person/Nature Distinction

In his encounter with individual objects in the world, man is confronted with a powerful question: “what is this?” The answer as to the thing’s what-ness is its nature. But a nature determines not just what a thing is, but what a thing can do. A bird can fly because it has a bird nature, an elephant, because it has an elephant nature cannot. Man can pray because he has a human nature, but a mantis’ nature limits him to merely posturing.

When the object of one’s inquiry is also a subject, this innate tendency gives rise to a second question: “who is this?” No longer concerned with the fact that the object has a human nature, the interlocutor turns their gaze to the person himself. The human nature may determine what the person can do, but it is always the person who performs the action. The nature, in a very real sense, limits what the person can do.

When we extend the person/nature distinction to the Incarnation, it is especially helpful in addressing our initial question. The Divine Son, the Word Incarnate is a Person, but He is a Person Who has two natures or two modes of operation. At any given time we can observe Him using one of those two natures. He can change bread and wine into His Body and Blood using His Divine Nature, but He can pray using His human nature. But in either case, it is always the same Divine Person who performs the action. He simply has two modes of operation. This is theologically referred to a the Hypostatic Union.

Christ then prayed using His human nature and not His divine. He prayed as Man and not as God. And Christ’s prayer, because it is the prayer of a Divine Person, is one of the means that He Providentially determined would be the cause of certain graces to flow into the world. And in that way His prayer was always effective. Two examples from His Passion are particularly instructive in this regard.

Two Dominical Examples

The first example of Christ praying shows us something that we naturally intuit. If Christ prays as man and nevertheless it is God Himself who utters the words, then we should expect His prayer to do something. During the Last Supper He tells Peter that “Satan has demanded to sift you like wheat. But I have prayed for you that your faith will not fail so that when you have turned back you will strengthen your brothers” (Lk 22:32). It is Our Lord’s prayer, expressed in an absolute manner, that is the cause of Peter’s repentance.

The second Example shows us something deeper that if we are not diligent we might miss. In the Garden of Gethsemane we find Christ, again in His human nature, praying that the cup be removed from Him only if it be in accord with the Divine will. In so doing, Christ is praying in a conditional manner as far as the direct outcome is concerned. But His prayer is always effective so that it accomplishes something, namely that those who are united to Him through faith and charity be awarded the graces for us to pray boldly and to endure those moments when prayer is not answered according to our will but the will of the Father.

What this shows us is not just that Christ’s prayer was infallibly effective, but that our prayer is really just a participation in His prayer. Every grace that we are given through our prayer was first merited by Christ in His. Because He is God, He saw every instance of our prayer, all of our intentions, spoken and not, when He prayed. It was in His moments of prayer that He won the necessary graces for us. It remains for us to simply enter into His prayer with Him and receive what He intended to give us when He invited us in to begin with.

St. Cyril once said, “that which was not assumed, was not redeemed.” What he meant by this is that Christ took to Himself a true human nature with all its needs and redeemed every aspect of our nature. This includes our prayer. Christ prayed so that our prayer was efficacious. This union of Christ’s prayer with our own helps us to understand exactly what we mean when we pray “through Christ Our Lord.” Our prayer insofar as it is genuine is always through His prayer. He lives forever to intercede for us because time and eternity have met in the Incarnation.

Most of us are moved deeply by the Gospel accounts of Christ praying even if we are not able to articulate why. If we merely see it as an example, which of course it is, then we will miss the invitation. Christ’s prayer is an invitation for all of us to come and pray with Him. He may have gone off alone to pray, but each one of us was there with Him.

The Divine Composer

August 21, 2019Freedom, God's Will, PrayerCommunion of Saints, ProvidenceRob Agnelli

If we were to encapsulate the teachings of the self-help gurus, then they would boil down to “never leave anything to chance.” After all, at the heart of the self-help movement is, well, helping yourself, by taking control of your life and seizing the day. The saints too would exhort us to never leave anything to chance. But they would express this for a very different reason. For the saints there is no such thing as chance. Instead they would urge us to leave everything to Providence. And it is this attitude that make them saints. If we too want to join them in the Church Triumphant then it behooves us to study how the most practical of Christian doctrines, Providence, “works”.

Notice how any discussion of Providence will always have the idea of chance in its orbit. To say that “there is no such thing as chance” might seem provocative at first, but once we unpack it then we will see that it must be profoundly true. If any discussion of Providence cannot proceed without bumping into the notion of chance, then we must begin there.

Toppling the Objections to Providence

On the one hand we know that pure chance, the notion that things “just happen” violates the principle of causality. Everything that happens must have a cause. Usually what we mean by chance then is when we cannot observe the causality or so many causes seemed to converge that the event was so unlikely that it had to be chance. Labeling an event as chance really is a way in for us to admit that we cannot fully explain how an event happened. But this leaves us with only two alternatives—either the causality was governed by some random force that we call chance or it is governed by God through His Providence. Even if it is a tough pill for us to swallow in our empirical age, we must side with the saints in their choosing of the latter and their insistence that there is no such thing as chance.

This raises a second objection in that, by removing chance, it seems to also remove free will. If everything is meticulously planned out, then how can there be freedom to choose? But this is to confuse chance with contingency. God’s Providence has left some things to necessity (like the Incarnation) and some things to contingency (like Mary’s cooperation). But it is by His omnipotence that He governs the bringing about of the necessary things through contingent things (c.f ST I, q.22, a.4). This bears some further explanation because it enables us to marvel more fully at God’s Providence.

Because God is the Creator of all things and, because He knows His own omnipotence, He can know all things that could happen or do happen because He is their ultimate cause. So, despite leaving some things up to free will decisions, He can alter the events surrounding those decisions to suit His purpose. This is not to suggest that He is constantly executing “Plan B”, but an admission that He foresaw all that was to happen. Therefore, His eternal law is simply one plan. Fr. Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange gives a useful example to demonstrate how this might work.

Over time, the great composer Beethoven grew deaf but, despite not actually be able to hear them, was still able to compose beautiful pieces of music. This was because he knew music not just in hearing it, but through its laws. He could compose without audible experimentation because he knew how the notes would fit together and create harmony. This higher way of knowing his music through the laws governing it made it unnecessary that he try all possible combinations of notes. In knowing the law he, in a very real sense knew all possible combinations enabling him to say “these fit, these don’t” to every set of notes that entered his mind. So too with God. He knows the laws by which the universe is governed, even the “law” of free will by which our actions are presented to Him and thus can Providentially compose the world.

There is one final aspect that bears mention as well and that is the role of petitionary prayer. Prayer is a gift from God meaning that true prayer is always inspired by God in order to conform our desires to the plans of Providence. That is why the holiest of men and women, that is those who are most like God, willing what He wills, will always be the most effective of pray-ers. In asking for what God intends to give, they are free instruments in the implementation of His plans. Prayer then is one of the instrumental causes of Providence, perhaps the most powerful of all them.

The Laws of Divine Providence

The laws of God’s divine composition, which we call Providence, are essentially threefold. First, nothing that happens is contrary to His purpose of Creation, namely, as a manifestation of His Goodness and the rational creature’s share in the revealed Glory of Christ. Second, nothing that happens was not foreseen by God and willed either actively or permissively. Finally, God sees to it that all things work to the spiritual benefit those who are called to be saints and persevere in His love (Romans 8:28).

At this point it is good to be reminded that the doctrine of Providence is practical. Hidden within the word Providence is provide. This means that although we make theological distinctions between God’s active and permissive will, in our daily living we should not make any such distinction. We should see each and everything that happens as coming directly from the hand of God with the intent of providing for the spiritual needs of those who love Him. And everything, means everything including our own sins. God only allows us to fall if, in the end, it leads us towards being more fully invaded by grace.

An example drawn from real life might help us bring all of this into relief. Forgiveness, something most of us struggle with, is only possible with a firm belief in Providence. Recall the story of Joseph the Patriarch. When his brothers sought forgiveness he did not trivialize what they did nor did he forget it. In fact, he remembered it and told them as such. But he remembered it as it truly was, an instrument of Providence. Joseph is the perfect model for the stance towards those that slight us. When we submit to the plans of Divine Providence, we see those who harm us actually doing us a favor. They become instruments in God’s Providential plan. The “logic” is simple if we believe the laws of Providence elucidated above. This does not mean we won’t suffer, but we are guaranteed to draw the fruit that God intended for us to receive when we submit to His will in it. Our Lord was silent in the face of His oppressors precisely to win the grace for us to do the same. Nor does it make what the person has done right. It simply gives us a means by which we can move towards truly forgiving the other person. Providence makes forgiveness possible and even easy.

Two Wings to God

"Faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth" – Pope St. John Paul II