Walter Farrell, O.P., A Companion to the Summa, volume 1
(Q. 106-109)
1. A fundamental truth -- integrity: (a) The view of the slave. (b) The view of the coward (c) The view of a man.2. Fact of the activity of corporal creation.3. It The mode of this activity: (a) Philosophic explanations. (b) Principle of this activity. (c) Influence on human actions: (1) Distinction of human action and acts of man. (2) Direct influence on human action. (3) Indirect influence. (d) Influence on the spiritual world.4. Fate: (a) Its definition in general. (b) Its harmony with and distinction from providence. (c) Its inevitability and universality.5. The role of man: (a) Physical action on the material world. (b) Strictly human action: (1) of man's intellectual powers: a. On the minds of others. b. On the material world. (2) of his generative powers. (3) of his nutritive powers.6. Man's place in the government of the world: (a) Relative to divine and angelic action. (b) Relative to the material action of bodies and of other men. (c) Man's own power and place.Conclusion: 1. Summary of this volume. 2. The Lord of the world. 3. The divine architect.
OLD things may be best but if so they are badly cheated, for we give them nothing like the proper attention excellence deserves. Old things become so familiar, so comfortable that they seem to mould themselves to our shape, abandoning their own, as though at the same time to wrap their arms about us and proclaim their surrender of themselves to be merged with us. They do really become a part of us to such an extent that we see as little of them as we do of ourselves; it is almost shocking to have an old thing brought sharply to our attention, as confusedly embarrassing as a suddenly realized excess of introspection. These are to be taken for granted, as we take our hand, our eyes, our minds for granted; which is to say, they are to be persistently overlooked.
A fundamental truth -- integrity
All through this book a fundamental truth has cropped up again and again; it is no surprise to meet this old friend in this final chapter we are so accustomed to this familiar truth by this time that it seems like an old friend; and, like an old friend, we can easily take it for granted, pass it by, overlook it, sure that there will be no recriminations, no enduring enmity as the result of our blindness. Perhaps we can best express this familiar truth by pointing out that a coward multiplies the dangers he must face and dies a thousand times; or that one lie must always be patched up by several others The reason for both of these is that one fact cannot be dodged without a hundred others crashing into us head on, one stone of truth cannot be crushed without an instant need for extensive repair work to prevent a collapse of the building. In other words, a man cannot toy with any part of the divine plans without defacing the edifice.
If through cowardice, aversion from unpleasant truths, ignorance, pride or any reason whatsoever, we take away any least thing from God, the universe, or any part of that universe, we reduce the whole to chaos; undoubtedly because the whole is so perfectly ordered on the model of divine truth that it is not patient of the least error. The fact remains that if we try to run away from the omnipotence of God, we throw ourselves into the remorseless maws of a heartless machine; if we exalt man above all else, we destroy him; if we attempt escape from the bitterness and struggle of a material world by fleeing from it, we become lost in a shadowy world of phantasy; if we exalt the material world, we are helpless before a monstrous divinity fabricated by falsehood.
In a word, there is no substitute for truth, the whole truth. There is no corner of the universe so distant that in it we can bury an unpleasant fact of that universe beyond all discovery. The facts must be faced, all of them. The truth must be admitted, all of it. In spite of himself, man cannot turn his back on a fact, a truth, a detail of the plans of the universe; he can only pretend to, shouting his pretensions the louder as the ominous tramp of truth's boots pounds down the avenues of his mind.
The view of the slave
There is no cause for astonishment, then, in the fact that the view of men on the activity of material creation in the affairs of the universe profoundly affects their views of God and of man, particularly when the original view has something in it of fact-dodging. In the concrete, the interrelation of our views of the material world, man and God is startling. Take, for example, the view that is almost universal among modern philosophers today, the view that cedes supreme activity to matter, in fact, insists that there is nothing else, no other source of perfection. This is a slave's view of the world, of man and of God; in such a world, man is just a part of an unthinking aggregation or process, without significance in his beginning, without hope in his life, with no goal to crown his death. God, in such a world, is non-existent.
The view of the coward
This picture is so monstrous it is no wonder men have turned coward in the face of it. It leaves no room for God or moral responsibility, thus apparently releasing man from burdens; but at the same time it leaves no room for order, for intelligence, for purpose, for value or for meaning. That is too much for a race whose first question is "whys", and whose constant quest is for happiness. Some men of today have tried to run away from this horror by denying its existence, much as a frightened boy on a lonely road will try to still his chattering teeth by assuring himself there are no ghosts. There is no material world: or, if it does exist, its activity is not its own in any sense but that of a spirit, preferably our own human spirit. Other men have not had the energy for even this much of a gesture of protest against the horror. In them, cowardice reached its supreme goal of abject surrender in the suicide of humanity when men said that while material creation did not exercise the only activity, its particular action was wholly irresistible. Material creation operates, they say, with a necessity and inevitability that admits of no control, no interruption, no escape; men, in the face of this inexorable movement of the material world, are helpless pawns.
The view of a man
In contrast to this distorted view of the plans of the divine architect, there is the human view which, since man is a shadow of divinity, is also the divine view. It sees in the material world a real activity, operating at the command of physically necessary laws; but an activity that is only a part of a world activity, a subordinate causality with its definitely subordinate place in the workings of an orderly universe. The material creation is subject, above all, to the supreme mover; it is controllable by those shaven in divine providence, the intellectual creatures we call men and angels. True enough, this is a hard view: it demands courage, insists upon responsibility, on action, on persevering effort, but it also gives room for meaning, for hope, for success, for human life. It is a view that has all the brilliance, the inflexibility, the suavity and peace of the whole truth.
Fact of the activity of corporeal creation
If it is remembered that the activity in question here is not that of living things but of inanimate creation, the fact of material activity can hardly be seriously questioned. The activity of living things has already been treated at some length in this book. Here we are interested, not in that immanent activity that is within and for the agent, but in the transient activity that passes from the subject to the outside; the kind of activity that we see, for example, in a chemical reaction, radio-active substances, in the long, graceful sweep of the wind, the rush of the rain or the hushed falling of snow.
A few men deny the existence of such activity; but not many, perhaps for the very good reason that such a denial is much more than open violence to common sense. The denial is itself a reflection on the power of God, as though He were a weakling tyrant Who did not dare share any of His power, guarding His causality in niggardly fashion lest another, sharing it, should discover His fundamental weakness; to protect Himself, He made all creatures merely puppets of His omnipotence. The denial, if sustained, would mean that the whole order of cause and effect had absolutely no existence in the material world; with the result that the investigations of science were sterile, empty gestures fruitless of result, that the whole field of human activity, of moral responsibility and purposive action were no more than the hazy illusions of a mind too long locked up in solitary confinement.
Indeed, it would have results even wider than this. For it would mean that the material world had absolutely no reason for existence. The perfection of substance is in its function, that is, the reason for activity on the part of creatures is the attainment of perfection lacking to them or, in other words, they exist for the attainment of their ends. Deny this activity and you blast out the rational foundation for the existence of the material world. To put the thing in modern words, you destroy the dynamic character of the world, reduce it to stagnation, to decay, to ultimate nothingness.
The mode of this activity: Philosophic explanations
By far the greater number of men readily admit the fact of the activity of the material world. In trying to explain this evident fact, philosophers have offered a variety of opinion that pretty well exhausts the possibilities and the impossibilities. So true is this, that practically every vagary of modern philosophers is reducible to the three following explanations of older philosophers. According to the Jewish philosopher, Avicebron, material activity was only an apparent activity; really that activity was the result of a spiritual power that penetrated all bodies. Plato and the Arabian philosopher, Avicenna, (with considerable difference of detail) explained this material activity by saying the part played by matter was only a preparation, a stage-setting, a disposition; the real activity was due to an immaterial, spiritual principle. The Greek materialist, Democritus, would have it that the action of the corporal creatures was merely a case of the flow of atoms from one body into another.
Aristotle and St. Thomas went deeper into the question and solved it by answering the question why bodies act at all, rather than the question of how they act They decided that the principle of activity was the individual perfection of the acting body; and very reasonably, too, for few men are seriously hurt by being struck by an imaginary automobile, it is only a real body that can act, and only insofar as it is real. The proportion, in other words, of the activity of a body corresponds to its possession of perfection, to the actualization of its potentialities; it can act on other bodies only insofar as these other bodies lack perfection, that is, have unfulfilled potentialities. To put this into the ruthless brevity of scholastic terminology, we would have to say that a body can act insofar as it is an act and according to the potentialities of the subject upon which it is acting.
To Aristotle and Thomas, this immediately brought to the fore a continuation of that hierarchy of being we have seen so often; for there will be a scale of activity in bodies corresponding to the scale of their perfection. If there exist bodies which have completely realized all their potentialities, whose form has completely exhausted the possibilities of their matter, then these will be the supremely active bodies, the first corporal movers. The science of their times offered Aristotle and Thomas just such perfect bodies in the celestial bodies; these were then placed at the top of the scale of material activity, influencing all other corporal action.
Principle of this activity
The scientific basis of this conclusion has long since gone into the discard; it has been decided scientifically that the stars and planets are not bodies of a different kind from those that exist here on earth. But the metaphysical principle explaining the activity of the material world -- the principle of individual perfection -- has lost none of its validity. The seeds of material activity are the potentialities, realized and unrealized, whose interplay works steadily to the ordered perfection of the material universe.
Influence on human actions
Though he believed the heavenly bodies were the first corporal movers, directly playing their part in the activity of every lesser material thing, Thomas made it plain that the influence of these bodies did not upset or destroy the field of human activity. These heavenly bodies, after all, were but another part of a well ordered universe, as also is man; they have their specific nature, as has man. One does not destroy the other; rather, both take their proper, orderly place in the divine plans.
Distinction of human action and acts of man
To see the exact influence of material agents of the human order, it is necessary to understand that there is much about man that is outside his control; the growth of his beard, for example, his size, what he says in his sleep, the blunders he makes in his absent-mindedness. All these, as distinct from specifically human acts, are called "acts of man." The distinctly human acts proceed from man's intellect and will; of these man is the master. The distinction could be put simply by saying that the spiritually controlled acts of the human race must be distinguished from those that escape the spiritual control and which are material in their origin and fulfillment.
Direct influence on human action
Stated in these terms, it is not difficult to see that human acts have no direct relation to the activity of the material bodies, much less any direct subordination. This is no more than saying that the material cannot act upon the spiritual, that a dust storm cannot soil an angel, a star cannot affect the free will of a man, nor can a planet pour ideas into a human mind. If it were otherwise, there could be no human actions. Man would act like the rest of material nature, following necessary physical laws; that is, he would have no free wills no Choice of action, no responsibility, no control over himself or anything else. In a word, the human world would no longer exist.
The direct action of the stars on the human intellect or will is a metaphysical impossibility and is in flagrant conflict with the unquestionable facts of humanity and human activity. Nevertheless the belief in the subordination of man's life to the stars has been for centuries a cowards refuge from the struggle of being human, and never more so than today. Thus, a famous American newspaper columnist, recently dead, could write that today astrology is no longer a dubious calling practiced by and for the shabby inhabitants on the fringe of the underworld. Today especially it is a straw for a sinking world whose following is in the highest stratum. One reader of the stars could leave a quarter of a million dollars at her death; another, of distinctive lineage and social impressiveness, makes her engagements for February in Palm Beach; for March, April and May in New York; for June, in London.
Indirect influence
That the stars, or any other bodies, might well have an indirect influence on the actions of man is self-evident from the very nature of man. He is material as well as spiritual and his material side can, of course, be acted upon by any other corporal force; undoubtedly, his material side has an influence on his spiritual actions. This is news to no one at all. lt has been no secret that a full moon and a smooth sea have done a noble part in arranging human romance.
Coming down to the particulars of the influence of these things on the intellect of man, it is evident that a man in physical agony does not do his best thinking: that the disturbance of his sense faculties by the racket of a boiler factory, the stormy arousal of his passions or the churning of his imagination all upset the workings of his intellect. The same things have an undoubted part in influencing or upsetting man's free choice. But no matter what the disturbance on the organic side of man's nature, the fact is that it is on the organic side, not on the spiritual side There is no question of direct action on the intellect and will; nor can the will be forced to act, disturbance or no disturbance, precisely because it is a free will. Its action is forced only by the universal, supreme good: anything less may present a seductive appearance, but never an utterly convincing one.
Influence on the spiritual world
Of course the angels or devils do not have to scurry for cover in April showers or sigh sadly under a spring moon; floods or blizzards, stars or suns can have no influence, direct or indirect, on the activities of spiritual substances for there is no point for material contact. As a matter of fact, material activity is limited even in the material world. Even if there were such supremely perfect corporal movers as the ancients visualized, their action on purely material creation would not proceed with nearly such inevitability and necessity as astrologists would have us believe it does in the human field; for there still remain inexplicable from the point of view of order those accidents or clashes of material causes which cannot be reduced to any one natural physical cause.
Fate
The astrologic enthusiasts must be enrolled among the rationalists and modern fatalists who rather indignantly deny the idea of a divine providence as unworthy of either God or man and then, paradoxically, turn wholeheartedly, for a solid foundation of the world and of life, to a juggernaut called fate. If for no other reason than that the idea of fate plays so large a part in the lives of so many men, it is worthy of examination.
Its definition in general
Generally speaking, fate might be defined as a hidden cause from whose activity nothing can escape. Actually, this definition is capable of widely different interpretation. In one sense, this hidden cause may be taken to be the disposition of the stars; from this disposition absolutely everything comes about necessarily, even the most intimate acts of knowledge and love. This is the sense in which the fatalist takes the word; and the sense which has been roundly condemned as heretical by the councils of the Church.
Its harmony with and distinction from providence
Another, and perfectly sound sense, identifies fate with divine providence: either with divine providence immediately or with the effects of divine providence, that is with the orderly disposition of all creatures and their activities in view of the end of the universe. In this sense, fate is no more than a restatement of the Catholic doctrine which we have already seen in treating of divine providence; and, in this sense, there is no question of an inescapable necessity that destroys human freedom, whatever be the infallible efficacy of divine ordination.
The attempt to read our fate is the mighty task of trying to read the mind of God; for, if we are looking for the reason of this orderly arrangement of the things of the world, the reason, the ultimate answer, is not to be found in the stars, in the entrails of chickens, in the turn of a card, in the leaves of a teacup or in any of the rest of the trappings of the readers of the future. It is to be found in the plans of the divine architect of the universe. The actual execution of those plans is to be found, of course, in the universe itself; that is, the formal carrying out of the divine plans, the formal disposition of creatures which is the effect of divine providence and might be called fate in a Catholic sense, is all about us. In foretelling the weather, then, we are not trying to climb inside divinity; in a very real sense, however, we are reading the plans of God as they are executed by secondary causes.
Its inevitability and universality
If we keep in mind the distinction between causal fate, which is divine providence, and formal fate, which is the effect of divine providence, the degree of inevitability in fate (taken only in the Catholic sense) is easily and rightly understood. That causal fate which is divine providence is, of course, completely infallible and certain; God makes no mistakes and receives no news from the world. But it is the mysteriously omnipotent infallibility of an infinitely good God, whose every action is a guarantee of the integrity of every created nature. The formal fate, which is the effects of divine providence or the disposition of secondary causes and their activity, has no metaphysical inevitability in itself. Secondary causes are interfered with every day in the week; in fact, it is precisely to thwart a secondary cause that we carry umbrellas on rainy days and laugh at the rain. The purely material world produces its effects with a physical necessity; while the human world suffers only the moral rule of the law of God.
On the basis of this same distinction, it is not hard to determine the subjects of fate and the extent of its kingdom. For absolutely everything is subject to causal fate, the plans of the divine architect which are divine providence. To formal fate, or the action of secondary causes executing divine providence, only those things are subject which are naturally subordinate to secondary causes; that is, God Himself, the angels and the spiritual faculties of man must be excepted.
The role of man: Physical action on the material world
Coming now to the last phase of the government of the world, the part man plays in cosmic activities, it is clear that the material side of man needs no special treatment. He cannot lift up a mountain, though he may lift up the baby; he can be drowned, shot, run over, suffocated or done away with in thousands of other more or less artistic ways. His material being and activity is subject to the same laws, the same limitations and enjoys the same possibilities as the rest of material creation. His distinctive activity is an intellectual one. A question of distinctively human activities in the workings of the universe it a question of what man can do about that universe with his mind.
Strictly human action:
Of man's intellectual powers. On the minds of others
Let us restrict the question still more and ask what man can do with his mind to the minds of others. More simply, can one man teach another? The fact of man's ability to teach another by sharing with them his ideas is solidly established by the routine experience of human life; if this teaching ability is not a fact but an illusion, then it is the grand illusion or modern life on which untold hours and incredible fortunes have been totally wasted. What is not so clear in this matter is how this transfer or communication of ideas takes place.
One explanation, that of Averroes, declared that one man taught another by giving the student the teacher's own ideas, much as one plane refuels another by giving away its own gasoline. The sense of this explanation was not that only the thing known was the same, that the subject matter of ideas was identical, but that the very intelligible species of both intellects were one and the same. Plato made education a kind of alarm clock; its purpose was merely to jog the memory of the student. For the ideas are all in every mind from the very beginning and have only to be aroused to be converted into actual knowledge. Aristotle, and Thomas after him, insisted that every man starts life with a blank mind; that each mind is a distinct, personal faculty to be perfected by distinctly personal ideas. This blank mind has potentialities; education is nothing more than the actualization of these potentialities, the reduction of the power to know to actual knowing. The teacher, in this case, is not a refueling plane, not an alarm clock, but a hod carrier bringing the materials to bricklaying students.
Moreover, as we have already seen at some length, the channel through which knowledge enters the mind is that of the senses: for the human mind, short of direct action by God, can gather ideas only from the phantasms of the imagination which, in turn, are the product of sense activity. The teacher's work then is not directly to place ideas in the mind of the student, that would be too much to ask even of an angel, but rather to furnish the material for ideas, to offer the sensitive and imaginative approach, or, as St. Thomas puts it, to take the student by the hand and lead him slowly, carefully from what is known to that which is as yet unknown.
Consequently, the very first condition for the teacher is knowledge of what he is trying to teach: he must know where he is going if he is to lead others to a goal of definite knowledge. His actual procedure, like the procedure of all art, must be modelled on the procedure of nature for, as St. Thomas points out, a man, left to himself, proceeds from the things he knows step by step to what he has yet to learn. He goes from the naturally known principles to the conclusions that follow from those principles. Nature is always the principal cause as well as the model; art takes the tricks of nature and then by them helps nature along.
To put it still more concretely, the teacher takes his student in hand, leading him on to the things to be known from the student's own slender stock of knowledge by proposing sensible examples, similitudes and contrasts, stepping up bit by bit from the less universal to the more universal truths, or stepping down the same way from the first principles to less universal conclusions. But his particular job as teacher is to show the connection between the principles and conclusions. In the trenchant phrase of Aristotle: proof (demonstration, teaching) is a syllogism causing knowledge.
The limitations and extent of this ability of man to teach are evident from this process of teaching. A garage mechanic, as such, cannot teach a statistician to play with figures; nor can the statistician, as such, enlighten the mechanic on the inner life of an automobile. Yet there is no man however wise who cannot learn something; nor is there any man, however ignorant who has not gathered some knowledge that another lacks. In fact, this can be pushed a little farther by saying that the humblest child with the use of reason can tell things to the greatest of the angels, things that the angel, of itself, could not knows for the mind of man is an inner sanctuary where only God enters freely, so that the thoughts of our mind can be known to another only through our condescension in revealing them. It would undoubtedly be presumptuous for the most learned of men to attempt to teach an angel natural truths; for one of the precise notes of angelic superiority over human nature is their absolutely perfect knowledge from the first instant of creation.
On the material world
The power of our mind over matter not formally joined to the human soul amounts to absolutely nothing; we can blow out a candle with a whiff of breath, but no amount of mental concentration will snuff out the flame. Even relative to our own body, the effects we can bring about by the use of the mind must be through the instrumentality of the material faculty of imagination; an imaginary ocean crossing can make us sea-sick or a broken thermometer make us shiver with cold in an overheated room. But imagination will never break one of our legs; nor will any amount of mental effort coupled with imagination knit a broken leg. This instrument of the imagination, in other words, has very definite limitations. It is possible for intense mental concentration to render us impervious to sensible stimuli; so St. Thomas could have an ulcerated leg cauterized and be quite unconscious of the pain and the cauterization. It is to be noticed, however, that the concentration does not destroy the external stimuli it ignores; Thomas undoubtedly would have been a joy to a very poor cook, but the spoiled food would still have been spoiled food.
Death's separation of body from soul, rather than increasing the power of man's mind and will over material creation, naturally speaking decreases that power; by death, man loses his one medium of contact with the material world. From that time on, even such a relatively simple activity as local movement, like pushing an enemy downstairs, is beyond human power.
Of his generative powers
As for the other powers of man, well, they naturally have the same limitations as the physical world of which they are so intimate a part. Thus, the generative powers of man can have only physical results. In the lower animals, the sensitive or animal souls are directly caused by generation; after all, they are no more than material forms and are produced, as other material forms are produced, by the action of material causes. But man's soul is spiritual; and a spiritual substance can be produced in only one way, by the direct creative action of God. Certainly it cannot come from material causes, for it far exceeds them; nor can it come from the spiritual, which, by their very nature, are utterly simple, incapable of division, increase or diminution. To claim that human parents produce the soul of their offspring really amounts to a denial of the spirituality and immortality of that soul; which means, really, a denial of the humanity of that soul, putting it in the same class as the souls of plants and animals coming from material, dependent on material and corrupting with the corruption of matter.
The human soul, then, comes directly from the hand of God. However proud a young father may be of his child, he must give God credit for the greater work; the child is more God's than the parents'. The work of the parents is to dispose the material of the body, prepare the home for the reception of the immortal guest which is the human soul.
Of his nutritive powers
On the side of nutrition, man, in common with every other living thing, has that extraordinary and mysterious activity by which food and drink are changed into integral parts of his nature. As the individuals of the human race increase, the original deposit of humanity is not split up or spread thinly to make it go farther; there is a definite and substantial conversion of nourishment into the human material which makes up the human bodies.
Man's place in the government of the world:
Relative to divine and angelic action
Before concluding this final chapter, it might be well to sum up the forces of the government of the world precisely as they affect men and women. We have seen that man is completely subject to the government, the movement of God. That movement, far from being an affront to his nature, is its guarantee and, indeed, the sole cause of man's existence, his life, his soul, his liberty, his fulfillment. The angels cannot directly act upon our intellects or wills. Whatever their power, they are helpless before the individuality of man's free will. The good angels exercise their power in guarding man, protecting him from external evils, teaching him subtly, anonymously, working effectively on his senses and his imagination, encouraging and comforting him. The devils use that same angelic power to tempt man or, sometimes, to attack him physically, but always within the limits placed by the mercy of God.
Relative to the material action of bodies and of other men
Man's own power and place
Physical creation cannot get past the barriers of man's spiritual nature any more effectively than can the angels; his intellect and will stand supreme in their privacy. But, of course, man's animal nature is open to the influence of material action; and so, indirectly, his intellect and will can be affected to some degree by this extrinsic, physical activity. The efforts of his fellow men leave a man serene in his independence; again his intellect and will acknowledge no master save God. His fellows can teach a man, ministering the materials of knowledge: they can act upon his physical nature; but no one, no thing, can take away his mastery over his own life and the consequent responsibility he bears for the failure or success of that life.
Conclusion: Summary of this volume
The work of this volume might be stated with extreme simplicity by saying that it was devoted to a study of God and the world; broken down to its full significance, that certainly means that it studied almost everything. Obviously that is too much for any one volume to do; nor did this book attempt to study everything in all its details. Rather it kept a steady eye on the universal harmony of the world and its Creator, concentrating on the broad outlines of the plans of the divine architect, lest the beauty of the plans be hidden by a mass of details. Even those broad outlines of the architect and His plans are awesome. There was, for example, the question of the existence of God, then a study of His nature and attributes, as well as a glimpse into the inner divine life which is the Trinity, the distinction of the three divine persons in one divine nature.
The next step was the processions of creatures from God, which included the production of these creatures, or creation, and their distinction into angelic, corporal and human. A study of the natures of each of these culminated in the question of their conservation and harmonious interaction by the universal government of the universe.
From this study two facts stood out in bold relief as a sharp challenge to modern thought: the fact of the importance of the human individual and the fact of the orderly planning of the divine architect.
The Lord of the world
These two are a challenge to modern thought. For the first is a sharp denial that man must reconcile himself to existence on a purely material plane where he it individually, totally unimportant; a part of a process, a moment in cosmic development, a unit in a mass whether of race, class, party or mere earth. It is a flat repudiation of the cowardice that would surrender rights, hopes, ideals, success, independence and control in order to escape responsibilities, disappointments, failure, labor and self-control. It is an indignant attack on the theories that urge a man to resignation, cynicism in all the fields of distinctively human endeavor: in knowledge, love, controlled action, attainment of a goal worthy of manhood. For from this study it is clear that man is indeed lord of the world and lord of himself; a provider for himself and for others, a governor of himself and others, a giant on the earth who, with no more than his reason and his hands, makes use of all the material creation and cannot be made use of by anything in the world. He is intelligent, he is free, he is responsible; his life has meaning, it is going to a definite goal that is intimately personal. And he alone, of all creatures in the material world, can say that he will or will not go along the path that alone will lead him home. He is the master; the rest, his servants. He is the lord of the world.
The divine architect
The second fact is an even more fundamental challenge to our times. It is an open revolt against the madness that holds for a world without meaning, a god without intelligence and a man without purpose. It refuses to keep submissive silence in the face of absurdities such as the assumption that order came from disorder, something from nothing, progress by chance or without explanation and government from anarchy. It challenges the modern world to attempt to put these absurdities into concrete living of human life; and scorns the intellectual dishonesty that preaches one doctrine and lives another. For from this study, it has become apparent that God exists, a supremely intelligent, completely omnipotent, infinitely wise, utterly perfect God. The imaging of the perfections of divinity in the world of creatures was nowhere seen more clearly than in the orderly hierarchy of perfection and limitation; on the basis of fact, of authority, of reason the order and wisdom of the divine planning and government stood out. While, on the same basis, the attempt to deny divinity, to explain the world without God, science without divine government, or philosophy without first truth was shown to be impossible. In other words, from the irrefutable evidence of His edifice of the universe, the existence and nature of the divine architect was shown to be visible to those images of His divinity to whom He consigned the lordship of earth.
| «-- Back | A Companion to the Summa - v.1, ch. 20 |