As we have seen, all things are God's workmanship and bear His imprint, but some things He made in His likeness, too. These are spirit; those that bear His imprint only are matter.
Highest in the created order come the angels, pure spirits as we call them, spirits with no material element in them. That such beings exist we might guess; indeed, as we shall see later, a consideration of so much of the created universe as we can discover for ourselves would lead us to feel that creation would be incomplete without them. Yet it remains that there is nothing in our experience which forces our reason to postulate angels as its cause: we know of their existence as a fact only by revelation, taught us by God through His Scriptures and through His Church.
The Church has told us, as we saw in the last Chapter, that angels exist,
and that they are created by God.
There is not a great deal actually defined by the Church about them,
but the
writings of the fathers, doctors, and theologians are rich in development of
what Scripture has to tell us of them;
and Scripture, both the Old Testament
and the New, is so filled with their activities that it is difficult to see
why in the religious awareness of so many Christian bodies they occupy so small
a part—
so small that many appear to have forgotten them altogether.
Probably this has something to do with a feeling that belief in angels is unscientific— it may have been all right for our ancestors, but modern science has made it just too difficult for us. This feeling is all but universal and all but meaningless. Science can no more disprove the existence of angels than it can prove it. If by some odd freak science offered to prove that angels exist, we should have to refuse so well meant an offer; if science denies their existence, its denial is as irrelevant. If angels exist, they will be beyond the range or reach of the sciences which man has developed for the investigation of matter. To refuse to explore our universe by any but one set of methods is much as if our ancestors had refused to discover any more of the world than they could reach on horseback. Philosophy can discuss the possibility of pure spirits; theology can discuss whether the fact of their existence has been revealed to us. But what can science say? that it has never seen one? Naturally: they are immaterial and so beyond the reach of sight as of all other senses.
After all, men exist who know and will: there is nothing un-scientific in believing that beings higher than men exist who know and will. What science does it offend? Or why should science in general be offended that the tests it has developed for things in space should not be applied to beings outside space?
Among men, there are good and bad: there is nothing un-scientific in believing that among pure spirits there are good and bad.
Again, men intervene in the affairs of beings less than themselves, often enough without those lesser beings having the faintest notion of it— the cats and dogs of Hiroshima could hardly have known that their catastrophe was man-made: since men do thus intervene all the time, there is nothing unscientific in believing that angels do.
Perhaps the feeling that angels and science do not fit is merely a sense that
angels would be too marvellous or mysterious an element in the sober prosaic
world that science has analysed for us.
But that will not do.
Science has shown us a world at once fantastic and mysterious.
Angels are no more incredible than atoms, and a great deal more comprehensible.
Ah, you say, but atoms are not persons and angels are.
Why this terror of persons?
We are persons ourselves.
As we have seen, there is no iron law that only one sort of person can exist
in the universe.
It is simply a question of fact:
do angels exist or not?
Science is not equipped to answer the question, but that does not keep it from
being a question.
The answer is not less important because science cannot provide it.
The answer is not less certain because God has provided it. God has told us
that angels exist.
Scripture, I say, is full of them.
Actually their first two appearances in Scripture would seem to constitute
rather a bleak beginning of their relations with us,
for the first appearance
is of a bad angel tricking man out of Paradise,
and the second appearance
is of good angels keeping him out.
This Scriptural division of angels into good and bad we shall examine later.
For the moment we may make some rough analysis of what Scripture has to tell
us of the function of angels in God's plan.
The word angel itself is from a Greek word meaning messenger:
that we should make this the name by which we habitually know them is perhaps
evidence of man's tendency to think of himself as central:
there are countless instances in which God has used these pure spirits as messengers
to men,
and theologians teach that God uses them to convey illumination from
Him to one another,
yet that is not the reason for their existence or their
chief function.
Their chief function, their proper life work is to glorify God.
Adore Him, all you His angels (Psalm xcvi.7)
puts it with perfect succinctness, and in the great vision of Daniel (vii.9-10) we have the same truth in resplendent detail:
I beheld till thrones were placed and the ancient of days sat: His garment was white as snow, and the hair of His head like clean wool: His throne like flames of fire: the wheels of it like a burning fire. A swift stream of fire issued forth from before Him: thousands of thousands ministered to Him, and ten thousand times a hundred thousand stood before Him.
Beside the adoration and service of God, they have certain other functions, which can be understood only in the light of a certain vital truth about God's dealings with His creatures. All that any creature is, all that any creature has, is from God. There is no other possible source than Existence Itself from which even the tiniest scintilla of existence should come to any creature. But God has shown us with overwhelming evidence that He wills to give His gifts to creatures through other creatures, that we may learn, by the receiving of God's gifts from one another and the transmission of God's gifts to one another, our family relationship within the great household of God. Our human life comes from God, yet God chooses to give it to us through a father and mother; the bread that sustains our bodily life comes from God, but by way of the farmer and the miller and the baker; the truth that nourishes the soul comes to us from God, but through men— the men who wrote the Bible and the Bishops of His Church.
I have picked a few more spectacular instances of a rule which is the norm of God's dealings with His creatures. In the light of this rule we can understand the second great function of angels: God uses them to implement His will, in relation to one another, in relation to the physical universe: in relation to the whole functioning of the laws of nature and of grace. This is magnificently put by the Psalmist:
Bless the Lord, all ye His angels: You that are mighty in strength and execute His word, hearkening to the voice of His orders (Ps.cii.20).
Thus angels are in charge under God of the universe as a whole, and of the
various parts of it.
They are responsible for the operation of the general laws by which God rules
the universe,
and for such special interventions as God chooses to make in
the affairs of men:
as when He sends an angel before the camp of Israel during the flight out of
Egypt (Exod.xiv.19),
or when He sends an angel to strike Jerusalem with a pestilence as a punishment
for the disobedience of David, the king (I Par.xxi [1 Chr.xxi.] ).
At the Last Judgment
The angels shall go out, and shall separate the wicked from among the just, and shall cast them into the furnace of fire (Mt.i.4).
They are responsible for individual countries: Daniel tells us of the angel of Persia, and the angel of Greece; they have a mission of guardianship to individual men. The angel Raphael tells Tobias:
I offered thy prayer to the Lord (Tob.xii.12).
And the Epistle to the Hebrews says (i.14):
What are they all of them, but spirits apt for service, whom He sends out when the destined heirs of eternal salvation have need of them.
It is not absolutely of faith that each one of us has a guardian angel,
but
it would be rash to deny it in face of the unanimous teaching of theologians,
in face, above all, of the obvious suggestion of Our Lord:
See to it that you do not treat one of these little ones with contempt; I tell you they have angels of their own in Heaven, that behold the face of My Heavenly Father continually (Mt.xviii.10).
One further thing we learn from Scripture,
with certainty as to the main fact though cloudily as to the detail.
We learn that there is not one undifferentiated level of pure spirits,
but
that they are of different levels of excellence,
according to the degree of
His power that God has willed to make manifest in them.
Scripture gives us
nine names, and it is the general view of Catholic writers that these are the
names of nine choirs in one or other of which all the countless myriads of
angels come.
Five of these names we owe to St. Paul.
Writing to the Colossians with the purpose of correcting certain faulty and
exaggerated notions about angels which had taken hold of them,
he writes in the first chapter:
In Him [the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity] were all things created in Heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether Thrones or Dominations or Principalities or Powers.
Three of these four recur together with a fifth in the Epistle to the Ephesians, where he tells us that Christ is raised
above all Principality, and Power, and Virtue, and Dominion, and every name that is named, not only in this world, but also in that which is to come (Eph.i.21).
To these five names we may add the word angel which occurs throughout the Scriptures, "archangel" which occurs twice in the New Testament, together with the Cherubim with flaming sword who guarded Paradise against fallen Adam, and were in Ezechiel's vision (i.14) like flashes of lightning; and the Seraphim (the name is from a Hebrew word meaning to burn or flame) who touched the mouth of Isaias with a live coal (Is.vi.6).
St. Thomas adopts a division of the nine choirs into three groups,
according to their intellectual perfection and consequent nearness in being
to God—
Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones;
Dominations, Virtues, Powers;
Principalities, Archangels, Angels.
Other writers suggest different arrangements;
and there is a mass of magnificent theological speculation as to the difference
of function between one choir and another.
But the Church has defined nothing upon this matter.
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Glorious as created spirit is, it has limitations, deficiencies in being, that God has not. As we have seen, it cannot account for its existence by itself, but needs to be brought into being and maintained in being by the absolute power of God. Mighty as are the angel's powers of knowing and loving, they are not infinite, and it can receive increase of both.
If created spirit lacks perfections of being that God has, matter lacks perfections of being that created spirit has. By comparison with God, we see the angel as diminished; by comparison with the angel, we see matter as diminished. Actually the gulf between God and the highest angel is immeasurably greater than the gulf between the highest angel and the lowest of material things; but owing to our familiarity with material things and our lack of familiarity with God, the lesser gulf impresses us more. And if we must correct our perspective in this matter for the sake of intellectual health, we must correct it by becoming more aware of the difference between finite and infinite, not by becoming less aware of the difference between created spirit and matter. For this lesser difference is still enormous.
Whereas spirit has— conditionally upon the will of God but no less certainly for that— unending permanence in being, matter has not even what we might call temporary permanence: any material object can at any moment be changed into some other, seems in fact almost avid for change, any change, seems so little in love with what it is at any moment that it would almost rather be something else.
Again whereas spirit has all its being at any given moment concentrated in one single simple reality, so that there is no element in a spirit that is not the whole of it, matter has its being dispersed in parts that occupy space; and partly as a consequence of this, partly as a consequence of a deeper deficiency still, a material being is limited in its power to individual material things with which it can make contact, whereas spirit can range over the whole universe and beyond by knowledge and love.
Yet matter has this resemblance to spirit that it is not one un-differentiated level: it, too, has different levels of excellence, according to the degree of His power that God has willed to make manifest in each.
The dominating division in the material order is between living and non-living. Animals are living and vegetables are living: stones are not living. So much we all see. But as to what life is, which is in animals and vegetables (to say nothing of angels and God) and not in stones, most of us feel rather as St. Augustine felt about the meaning of time: hat we know what it means provided no one asks us. And to this point at least we are justified, that although there may be borderline cases where it is difficult to tell whether the thing belongs to the living or non-living order, there are vast fields in which we know, and without hesitation. We might find it hard to make a list of just what qualities in a thing mark it as living: the chances are that the reality of the distinction strikes us most violently when we see what happens when life goes out of a living body. It rots; and though again we might be hard put to it to analyse the difference between the rotting of what has once been living and the mere breaking up of what never has, the difficulty arises merely from our lack of skill in analysing a fact, not from any uncertainty about the fact. A rock may wear away from wind and weather, but we should never confuse this with the decay of vegetation once growing on it, to say nothing of the decay of the animals that once lived on it.
This is not the place for any very close analysis of the fact called life. It is a fascinating inquiry, and even one who is neither scientist nor philosopher can gain immense profit from watching scientists and philosophers at work on it. Here we may take the simplest and most fruitful definition: living being is one which has within itself some principle by which it operates: and operates not just anyhow but in fulfilment of its nature, in the development of what it is and the achievement of its proper functions. Living things act from some power or necessity within them, do really (in subordination to God) initiate action; non-living things are only acted upon (though they are, of course, not purely passive in face of such action upon them: they have their own sort of energy and in consequence their own sort of reaction).
What we have said of living being applies to all living beings, fully and supremely to God, in the created order to angels, human souls and all the material beings that have life. But naturally the operations which thus find their source within the nature of each being differ according to that nature. Here our concern is with the operations of material living things—powers of movement (anchored to a root in vegetables, unanchored in animals), nutrition and growth (growth which does not simply mean being added to but developing towards a total shape), reproduction of their kind.
The life principle in a material being is called its SOUL. It is the soul of the vegetable, the soul of the dog, that accounts for the activities of vegetable and dog while they are alive and for the decay of vegetable and dog when they are dead.
Thus there are three divisions of the created universe,
Spirit
Living Matter
Non-living Matter.
Life reaches down from the beings made in, God's likeness to some of the beings that only bear His imprint. At any level, life is a great glory: but living matter is still very much matter. This is obvious if we consider what the proper operations of spirit are— knowing, which means having things present to the mind in their concept or meaning and not simply in their look, or taste, or smell; and loving, which means being attracted to things thus known. The plant may be said to have some sort of rudimentary knowledge and love: it may seem, for instance, to know where the sun is and to move towards it: but all this is so rudimentary that we feel we are using a figure of speech. When we speak of animals as knowing and loving, we feel that we are straining language less— at least when we are talking of the higher animals: we do not feel so sure about oysters, say, as we do about dogs— especially our own dog. But even at the highest we see that the knowledge of an animal (and therefore the love of an animal, since there is always a proportion between love and knowledge) is only a good imitation: it has not the ranging power of spiritual knowledge: indeed animal knowledge is limited in comparison with spirit knowledge very much as the animal's being is limited by comparison with the spirit's being. The spirit can know the universal and the abstract: the animal seems to know only the individual and concrete, and this is so much less that it can only by courtesy be called knowing at all. A very crude example must suffice here instead of the longer discussion the question will find in a book of philosophy. A man, having a spiritual soul, can be aware not only of this or that dog, but of the general notion of dog which is expressed in all the dogs that have been or will be or could be. When he remarks that the dog is a useful animal, he is employing— and employing with the ease of an entirely natural operation— a universal concept. He is not thinking of any individual dog of a particular shape and size and colour; he is abstracting that essence of dog which is common to all the numberless combinations of size and shape and colour in which dogs are found. He can do this precisely because his soul is a spirit. His body, which is material, cannot make any sort of contact, enter into any sort of relation, with that universal dog. His eyes can see only individual dogs, each dog with its own shape and size and colour. That is what we mean by saying that matter is limited in its contacts to the individual and concrete.
If we examine all that we can of the animal's awareness of things, there is nothing to suggest that this awareness ever goes beyond the individual and concrete to make any sort of abstraction of essence, that it ever goes beyond the sight and the taste and the smell to what the thing profoundly is. As someone has observed, if one met a pig capable of knowing that it was a pig it might be safer to baptize it, on the ground that it must have a spiritual soul to be able to arrive at the general idea pig and apply it to itself as one realization of that general idea. As I say, none of the animal activities that we call knowing seem to go beyond awareness of the individual and concrete, that is to say none of them seem to go beyond the material order, for that is the material order. Nothing that the animal's psyche does takes us so obviously out of the range of matter that we are forced to postulate a spiritual principle. The animal's soul does nothing that leads us to feel that some higher than material principle must be in operation. Therefore there is no reason to believe that it is not a material soul, "immersed" in the matter of the animal's body, and ending with it.
Neither by permanence in being, nor by rational knowledge and love, do even
the highest material beings, those that have life, transcend the sphere of
matter.
The gulf between matter and spirit remains.
But if it is a real gulf, it is a bridged gulf, too, bridged at one point—man.
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That man has at once a material and a spiritual element, and therefore belongs to both worlds, we might know merely by looking at him and thinking about what we see. But on the whole, though man is much given to looking at himself, he is not at all good at thinking about what he sees. Nothing in the world is more fantastic than the variety of answers man has proposed to the simple question:
What is man? ortunately we are not left to our own incompetent devices: God has told us, through the men whom He inspired to write His Scriptures.
The account of creation in the first two chapters of Genesis gives us two principal statements about man:
Let us make man to our image and likeness (Gen.i.26) And the Lord God formed man of the slime of the earth: and breathed into his face the breath of life and man became a living soul (Gen.ii.7).
There you have the two-fold element in man, the slime of the earth and the likeness of God. And both elements belong. The matter of our body is not simply an extra, something we should be better without, something to be grown out of as the butterfly grows out of the grub, something in some happier future to be discarded as the butterfly discards the cocoon. Matter is part of the very nature of man, he would not be man without it: and he would not perform his function in the universe without it. For it is precisely his function to join the two worlds of matter and spirit into one universe, and he does it by belonging essentially to both of them. We are to think of creation not as two closed circles which nowhere meet, but as a kind of figure eight with man on both sides of the join.
Thus if man is not as he sometimes thinks the centre of the universe in the sense of that upon which all revolves, he is in this other sense at the centre of the universe, bestriding the lower world of matter and the upper world of spirit. In both worlds he has the closest and most vital contacts: it is a pity that he is so much more keenly aware of the lower one, and so sketchily and intermittently aware of the upper, for both are realities and realities that affect him profoundly. Angels can guard him, cows can nourish him and so can sunsets. Angels, again, can tempt him, insects can bite him. The trouble is that we are more concerned about insects than about devils, more concerned that cows should nourish us than that angels should bless. We must recover a total view of our universe if only in order to know where we are, and that in the interest of sanity. As to the question how did angels get to tempting, how did man become temptable and biteable— so very biteable that he bites himself more fatally than any insect can bite him— these things, too, we must get to know. They will begin to appear a little later in the story, when we come to see what man made of himself. Here we are concerned with man as God made him.
He is, we have seen, a union of spirit and matter. But what does this mean? The meaning at the first level may be set out simply enough. Man has a living body, therefore there is some principle in him which makes his body to be alive; and whether a body be vegetable or lower animal or man, that principle in it which makes it living is that we call its soul. Man, then, has a soul, so has a dog, so has a cabbage: and his soul does for his body what their souls do for theirs, makes it a living body. But whereas their souls are material, limited to matter, not producing any operation that goes beyond matter, man's soul is spirit. It does not only the things that souls do, but the things that spirits do. By intellect and will it knows and loves as spirits know and love: in its thinking it handles the abstract and the universal. Man, having a body and soul is an animal; but he is a rational animal, for alone of the animals he has a soul which is a spirit.
But how are we to conceive a union of two beings one of them in space, the other not. And note that it is not just any kind of union, but a union so close that the two constitute one being. The soul, which is spirit, is in every part of the body, no smallest part of the body is outside the union. Now it is obvious that in all this the effort to give the soul some sort of shape in order to make the union seem easier to grasp is waste of time. There is no gain in trying to think of the body as thinly buttered all over with soul, or as a sponge interpenetrated with soul, or of the soul as shaped like the body so that it can have a point by point contact with each part of the body, only made of some spirit stuff more refined than matter.
A moment's reflection will show us why imagination is driven to such odd acrobatics.
In its efforts to make the problem easier for itself, it is introducing a difficulty
that is not there.
It sees it as the problem of how a body so large that it occupies quite a lot
of space can be totally occupied by a soul so small that it occupies no space
whatever.
But the soul is not outside space because it is too small to occupy even the
smallest section of space,
but because it lacks the limitations which would
make space necessary for it.
If we are to think of a difference of largeness between soul and body, then
we must think of the soul as larger:
for it has more being in it, has fewer limitations to diminish it, is every
way greater in being.
Thus for the intellect the question how can spirit totally occupy matter is
simply the question how the greater can totally occupy the less and the answer
is simple—by superiority of being and of energy.
A spirit is not in space, but it can act upon a being that is in space.
And this is the only kind of spatial presence that a spirit can have.
It is where it acts.
The soul acts upon every part of the body,
and its action is to vivify, to
make alive
(indeed according to St. Thomas the soul not only makes the body
alive, it makes it a body).
In some ways the presence of the soul in every part of the body is comparable
to the presence of God in every part of the universe.
There is in the purely material order a comparison which the mind may find
helpful provided that it gets what is to be got from it and then resolutely
throws it away.
When a pot of water is boiling over a flame, there is a sense in which the
flame is in every part of the water, although the flame itself occupies none
of the space that the water occupies.
It is the energies that come from the flame that set every part of the water
bubbling and hissing.
The casual onlooker might easily be deceived into thinking that the water is
the energetic thing and might overlook altogether the flame with its utter
stillness.
If the flame happened to be invisible, there would be men to assert that all
this talk of flame was super-stitious nonsense.
But all the movement of the water is due to the superior energy of the flame.
And the water, if it could think about the matter at all, might easily think
that the flame had no other business than to heat it.
But the flame has a life of its own and can continue as a flame whether the
water is there or not.
All this can be applied easily enough to the relation of soul and body.
The body is so very alive and clamorous that the soul can be overlooked altogether.
But all the vitality of the body is due to the energizing upon it of the soul.
One need not be told what happens to any part of the body,
the finger, say,
if it gets separated from the body and thus removed from the field of the soul's
energies.
Which reminds us that the union of soul and body has this double flower of
intimacy,
that the soul acts upon every part of the body, but only upon that
particular body:
with no other material thing can it make direct contact at all.
My soul is meant for the vivifying of my body.
It is the perfect specialist.
The illustration, I have said, must be used for what it has to give and then
discarded.
For it is only valid up to a point.
The flame and the water are two separate realities brought into relation for
a specific purpose,
but each quite capable of existing fully as itself apart
from the other.
But soul and body are not thus casually brought together; they are united to
form one complete individual reality;
they would not come into existence without each other;
if they are separated, they suffer loss—
the body ceases to be a body and the spirit, although it survives,
survives with a large part of its powers idle within it for lack of a body
to use them on.
You must never think of your soul simply as a more powerful thing which dominates
your body:
soul and body are partners in the business of being you.
So much, for the moment, for the nature of man. Let us return to the account of his creation.
The Lord God formed man of the slime of the earth, and breathed into his face the breath of life, and man became a living soul.
It would be difficult to conceive anything more compressed. The word "formed" for instance tells us of the fact but not of the process: there was an assembling of elements of the material universe, but was it instantaneous, or spread over a considerable space of time? Was it complete in one act or by stages? Were those elements, for instance, formed into an animal body which as one generation followed another gradually evolved— not, of course, by the ordinary laws of matter but under the special guidance of God— to a point where it was capable of union with a spiritual soul, which God then created and infused into it? The statement in Genesis does not seem actually to exclude this, but it certainly does not say it. Nor has the Church formally said that it is not so. What the Church would say if She ever felt called upon to make a statement on the matter, I do not know. So far She has made no explicit statement. On the surface, no specifically religious question seems to be involved. Whether God formed the body of man in one act or by an unfolding process, it was God who formed it. But man does not come into being until God creates a human soul: if anyone should teach that that evolves from some lower form, he will not have to wait long for the Church's comment.
What may have been happening to the elements of the human body before it was a human body is not of the first importance and Genesis does not tell us. What is of the first importance, it tells us: that man was made of the slime of the earth in the image and likeness of God; and it tells us one other thing that has never ceased to matter. In the first chapter of Genesis we read:
And God created man to His own image: to the image of God He created him: male and female He created them. And God blessed them saying: increase and multiply.
In the second chapter the origin of woman is given in more detail:
And the Lord God said: It is not good for man to be alone: let us make him a help like unto himself ... then the Lord God cast a deep sleep upon Adam: and when he was fast asleep He took one of his ribs, and filled up flesh for it. And the Lord God built the rib which He took from Adam into a woman: and brought her to Adam. And Adam said: this now is bone of my bone, and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called woman because she is taken out of man. Wherefore a man shall leave father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife; and they shall be two in one flesh.
It would take a long time to unwrap all that is contained here. At a first glance we see certain obvious elements in it. We see, for example, that the first woman came from the first man. The mind shudders at the thought of all the jokes that have been made about this, largely perhaps because man has always found something comic in his ribs. Genesis seems to make it clear, anyhow, that woman was made from some element of the body of man: there is nothing particularly comic about this, nor indeed anything improbable, considering that every human being is made of elements taken from the body of other human beings. And there is an enormous importance in it, for it preserves the unity of the race: we are all from one.
The second truth that leaps to the eye is that God, in giving a wife to Adam, revealed His plan for the co-operation of the sexes in the continuance of the race. The moment man and wife exist, Adam sees them as father and mother, and this by the revelation of God: it was from no experience of his own that he talked of a man leaving father and mother. Thus God made the production of all other human beings to depend upon the co-operation of man and woman. He did not so act with the angels. Angels have no progeny, they were not told to increase and multiply and fill the heavens. There is no race of angels. They are related to one another as children of one God, and so are we; but they are not, as we are, related to one another as children of one father of their own kind. The fatherhood of God is shadowed forth to us as it is not to them by a fatherhood of our own. And indeed our part in God's creative act— what we call procreation— is man's greatest glory in the natural order, it is the act in which he comes closest to the creative power of God. And it is a glory peculiar to man. For the angels do not procreate at all, and the animals reproduce their kind without rational choice or any awareness of the majesty of that in which they take part.
We must not exaggerate this procreative power into some fancied superiority of ourselves over the angels. Man's body comes from his parents, but not his soul. That is still the direct creation of God. God still takes slime of the earth and breathes a soul into it, only that now He takes it not from the earth but from the children of Adam. The reason why we do not generate our children's souls is the reason why angels do not generate at all: namely that the spirit, mightier in being than the body, has no parts, no constituent elements, one of which may be separated from it and set up in being on its own account. Thus our power to reproduce is bound up with the lesser perfection of our material bodies, and the angels do not envy us. It comes from our lowliness, but in our lowly way we can glory in it.
Meanwhile they remain our superiors and there is profit for us in their contact.
It is a pity that any man should be so very conscious of the material beings
below him, and altogether ignore these spiritual beings above him.
It means that he is spending too much of his life in the company of his inferiors—
not,
one imagines, through mere preference for low company, but through mental inertia.
It is not for nothing that the Church lists Sloth among the capital sins.
There may, of course, even among those who accept the existence of angels,
be a feeling that there is not much we can do about them—
they are above our heads and there they must stay.
But we are not so helpless.
We can habituate the mind to the fact of them, exercise the mind in the comprehension
of them, and pray to them for aid.
The Church is rich in suggestions for prayer.
We might take this (from the Mass for the Apparition of St. Michael) as a model:
we ask God
that our life upon earth may be protected by those who are always present with Thee in heaven, ministering to Thee.
Here then is the created universe in its broadest division from non-living matter through living matter, through man who is a union of matter and spirit, to the angels who are pure spirits. God brings it into being from nothing. God sustains it in being, and unsustained by Him it would be nothing as before. His will which is love is the sole reason for its existence, therefore His will must be the rule of its operation, its law. But even as law His will is still love. The laws which govern this universe and all things in it are the result of God's knowledge of what the universe is, and this knowledge is perfect knowledge since there is nothing in the universe which is not His.
But a very brief consideration of the laws by which our universe is run shows us two rather different sets of laws, what we may call physical law and moral law. The practical distinction for us is that physical law is God's ordinance as to how all things must act, moral law is His ordinance as to how spiritual beings ought to act. There is an element of choice in the operation of the moral law which does not exist in the operation of the physical law. But the element of choice, although it is there, may not be precisely what we think. That fire burns is a physical law, at times extraordinarily useful for man, at times catastrophic. But, useful or catastrophic, fire still burns. At first sight the moral law seems different. It tells us that we ought to do this and ought not to do that, and in those very terms implies that we are free to choose whether we will do this or that, whereas there is no freedom of choice about being burned if we put our hand in the fire. But in actual fact the moral law merely casts into the form of a command something that is already as much a law of nature as that fire burns. God's command to us not to bear false witness implies that we are free to bear false witness if we choose; but to bear false witness— even if we do not know of God's command and no question of sin arises— will damage us spiritually just as certainly as to put our hands into the fire will damage us bodily. We can if we choose bear false witness: we can if we choose put our hand into the fire: in either event we shall be damaged. In other words physical laws and moral laws are laws because we are what we are. If we were asbestos instead of flesh, fire would not burn us; if we were stags, adultery would not damage us either. Physical law or moral law, to know what it is is to know the reality of things: to act in accordance with it is to act by the reality of things. And that is sanity.
God's laws are there to enable the universe as a whole and each being in it to achieve what God meant it to achieve. For the universe as a whole and for each being God has a purpose, and He has made provision that each being should fulfil His purpose. This over-ruling provision which God has made that His plan be not stultified or any way frustrated is His Providence. The universe is not crashing towards a chaos, for it would not have been consonant with God's all-wisdom and all-knowledge to bring something into existence which would escape His control and by its own aimlessness mock Him rather than mirror Him. The universe is not crashing towards a chaos but growing towards a harmony. All that anything is, all that anything does, has its part in the harmony. Nothing must be left out. Into the harmony are woven the actions of beings who have no choice but to act according to the nature God has given them, and the inweaving of these presents no difficulty to our mind: what does seem difficult is that into the harmony are woven also the acts of beings who can choose, and can choose to act inharmoniously. But God Who rules all things knows what they will do to wreck the harmony and knows what He will do to turn their discord into concord, so that the harmony is not wrecked. God, says the Portuguese proverb, writes straight with crooked lines.
Nor are we in this to figure God anxiously watching us to see what note we
will play wrong and feverishly rushing to play the notes that will harmonize
our discord into concord.
God does not match the successiveness of our acts by a successiveness in His,
so that every wrong act of ours is counteracted by a right act of His.
Just as the spirit can dominate every part of the body by not being in space,
so God can dominate every part of time by being outside of time.
In the objection mentioned on page 18, the opening phrase—" If God knew
last Tuesday "—shows unawareness of this.
God did not know last Tuesday!
Tuesday is a period of time and part of the duration in which I act.
But God acts in eternity, which has no Tuesdays.
God acts where He is:
we receive the effects of His acts where we are.
He acts in the spacelessness of His immensity and the timelessness of His eternity:
we receive the effects of His acts in space and time.
He acts in the singleness of His simplicity,
and we receive the effect of His action in the multiplicity of our dispersion.
We find this hard to comprehend, because we have no direct knowledge of eternity.
Like our concept of infinity, our concept of eternity is far stronger and clearer
on the side of what it is not than of what it is.
Even the smallest extra glimpse of what it is would make a world of difference.
After all, we should never have guessed that infinity was Triune;
there will be similar fruitful surprises about eternity.
Meanwhile the truth stands:
God knows all things and provides for all things:
we choose, and He lets us choose, but He has His own way of acting upon our
choice:
and all in one single timeless operation of wisdom and love.
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