Predestination

11. The illustrious prelates of the Gallican church who wrote to Pope Innocent XII against Cardinal Sfondrati’s book on predestination, being of the principles of St. Augustine, have said things well fitted to elucidate this great point. The cardinal appears to prefer even to the Kingdom of Heaven the state of children dying without baptism, because sin is the greatest of evils, and they have died innocent of all actual sin.

The prelates have observed that this opinion is ill founded. The apostle, they say (Rom. iii. 8), is right to disapprove of the doing of evil that good may come, but one cannot disapprove that God, through his exceeding power, derive from the permitting of sins greater goods than such as occurred before the sins.

It is not that we ought to take pleasure in sin, God forbid! but that we believe the same apostle when he says (Rom. v. 20) [130]that where sin abounded, grace did much more abound; and we remember that we have gained Jesus Christ himself by reason of sin. Thus we see that the opinion of these prelates tends to maintain that a sequence of things where sin enters in may have been and has been, in effect, better than another sequence without sin.

12. Use has ever been made of comparisons taken from the pleasures of the senses when these are mingled with that which borders on pain, to prove that there is something of like nature in intellectual pleasures.

A little acid, sharpness or bitterness is often more pleasing than sugar; shadows enhance colours; and even a dissonance in the right place gives relief to harmony.

We wish to be terrified by rope-dancers on the point of falling and we wish that tragedies shall well-nigh cause us to weep. Do men relish health enough, or thank God enough for it, without having ever been sick? And is it not most often necessary that a little evil render the good more discernible, that is to say, greater?

13. But it will be said that evils are great and many in number in comparison with the good: that is erroneous.

It is only want of attention that diminishes our good, and this attention must be given to us through some admixture of evils. If we were usually sick and seldom in good health, we should be wonderfully sensible of that great good and we should be less sensible of our evils. But is it not better, notwithstanding, that health should be usual and sickness the exception?

Let us then by our reflexion supply what is lacking in our perception, in order to make the good of health more discernible. Had we not the knowledge of the life to come, I believe there would be few persons who, being at the point of death, were not content to take up life again, on condition of passing through the same amount of good and evil, provided always that it were not the same kind: one would be content with variety, without requiring a better condition than that wherein one had been.

14. When one considers also the fragility of the human body, one looks in wonder at the wisdom and the goodness of the Author of Nature, who has made the body so enduring and its condition so tolerable.

That has often made me say that I am not astonished men are sometimes sick, but that I am astonished they are sick so little and not always. This also should make us the more esteem the divine contrivance of the mechanism of animals, whose Author [131]has made machines so fragile and so subject to corruption and yet so capable of maintaining themselves: for it is Nature which cures us rather than medicine. Now this very fragility is a consequence of the nature of things, unless we are to will that this kind of creature, reasoning and clothed in flesh and bones, be not in the world. But that, to all appearance, would be a defect which some philosophers of old would have called vacuum formarum, a gap in the order of species.

15. Those whose humour it is to be well satisfied with Nature and with fortune and not to complain about them, even though they should not be the best endowed, appear to me preferable to the other sort; for besides that these complaints are ill founded, it is in effect murmuring against the orders of providence.

One must not readily be among the malcontents in the State where one is, and one must not be so at all in the city of God, wherein one can only wrongfully be of their number. The books of human misery, such as that of Pope Innocent III, to me seem not of the most serviceable: evils are doubled by being given an attention that ought to be averted from them, to be turned towards the good which by far preponderates.

Even less do I approve books such as that of Abbé Esprit, On the Falsity of Human Virtues, of which we have lately been given a summary: for such a book serves to turn everything wrong side out, and cause men to be such as it represents them.

16. There are disorders in this life, which appear especially in the prosperity of sundry evil men and in the misfortune of many good people. There is a German proverb which even grants the advantage to the evil ones, as if they were commonly the most fortunate:

Je krümmer Holz, je bessre Krücke: Je ärger Schalck, je grösser Glücke.

And it were to be desired that this saying of Horace should be true in our eyes:

Raro antecedentem scelestum Deseruit pede poena claudo.

Yet it often comes to pass also, though this perchance not the most often,

That in the world’s eyes Heaven is justified,

and that one may say with Claudian:

Abstulit hunc tandem Rufini poena tumultum, Absolvitque deos…

17. But even though that should not happen here, the remedy is all prepared in the other life: religion and reason itself teach us that, and we must not murmur against a respite which the supreme wisdom has thought fit to grant to men for repentance.

Yet there objections multiply on another side, when one considers salvation and damnation: for it appears strange that, even in the great future of eternity, evil should have the advantage over good, under the supreme authority of him who is the sovereign good, since there will be many that are called and few that are chosen or are saved. It is true that one sees from some lines of Prudentius (Hymn. ante Somnum),

Idem tamen benignus Ultor retundit iram, Paucosque non piorum Patitur perire in aevum,

that divers men believed in his time that the number of those wicked enough to be damned would be very small.

To some, it seems that men believed at that time in a sphere between Hell and Paradise; that this same Prudentius speaks as if he were satisfied with this sphere; that St. Gregory of Nyssa also inclines in that direction, and that St. Jerome leans towards the opinion according whereunto all Christians would finally be taken into grace.

A saying of St. Paul which he himself gives out as mysterious, stating that all Israel will be saved, has provided much food for reflexion. Sundry pious persons, learned also, but daring, have revived the opinion of Origen, who maintains that good will predominate in due time, in all and everywhere, and that all rational creatures, even the bad angels, will become at last holy and blessed.

The book of the eternal Gospel, published lately in German and supported by a great and learned work entitled ‘Αποκαταστασις παντων, has caused much stir over this great paradox. M. le Clerc also has ingeniously pleaded the cause of the Origenists, but without declaring himself for them.

18. There is a man of wit who, pushing my principle of harmony even to arbitrary suppositions that I in no wise approve, has created for himself a theology well-nigh astronomical.

He believes that the present confusion in this world below began when the Presiding Angel of the globe of the earth, which was still a sun (that is, a star that was fixed and luminous of itself) committed a sin with some lesser angels of his department, perhaps rising inopportunely against an angel of a greater sun.

Simultaneously, by the Pre-established Harmony of the Realms of Nature and of Grace, and consequently by natural causes occurring at the appointed time, our globe was covered with stains, rendered opaque and driven from its place; which has made it become a wandering star or planet, that is, a Satellite of another sun, and even perhaps of that one whose superiority its angel refused to recognize; and that therein consists the fall of Lucifer.

The chief of the bad angels, who in Holy Scripture is named the prince, and even the god of this world, being, with the angels of his train, envious of that rational animal which walks on the surface of this globe, and which God has set up there perhaps to compensate himself for their fall, strives to render it accessary in their crimes and a participator in their misfortunes. Whereupon Jesus Christ came to save men.

He is the eternal Son of God, even as he is his only Son; but (according to some ancient Christians, and according to the author of this hypothesis) having taken upon him at first, from the beginning of things, the most excellent nature among created beings, to bring them all to perfection, he set himself amongst them: and this is the second filiation, whereby he is the first-born of all creatures.

This is he whom the Cabalists called Adam Kadmon. Haply he had planted his tabernacle in that great sun which illumines us; but he came at last into this globe where we are, he was born of the Virgin, and took human nature upon him to save mankind from the hands of their enemy and his.

When the time of judgement shall draw near, when the present face of our globe shall be about to perish, he will return to it in visible form, thence to withdraw the good, transplanting them, it may be, into the sun, and to punish here the wicked with the demons that have allured them; then the globe of the earth will begin to burn and will be perhaps a comet. This fire will last for aeons upon aeons.

The tail of the comet is intended by the smoke which will rise incessantly, according to the Apocalypse, and this fire will be [134]hell, or the second death whereof Holy Scripture speaks.

But at last hell will render up its dead, death itself will be destroyed; reason and peace will begin to hold sway again in the spirits that had been perverted.

They will be sensible of their error, they will adore their Creator, and will even begin to love him all the more for seeing the greatness of the abyss whence they emerge.

Simultaneously (by virtue of the harmonic parallelism of the Realms of Nature and of Grace) this long and great conflagration will have purged the earth’s globe of its stains. It will become again a sun; its Presiding Angel will resume his place with the angels of his train; humans that were damned shall be with them numbered amongst the good angels; this chief of our globe shall render homage to the Messiah, chief of created beings. The glory of this angel reconciled shall be greater than it was before his fall.

Inque Deos iterum factorum lege receptus Aureus aeternum noster regnabit Apollo.

The vision seemed to me pleasing, and worthy of a follower of Origen: but we have no need of such hypothesis or fictions, where Wit plays a greater part than Revelation, and which even Reason cannot turn to account.

For it does not appear that there is one principal place in the known universe deserving in preference to the rest to be the seat of the eldest of created beings; and the sun of our system at least is not it.

19. Holding then to the established doctrine that the number of men damned eternally will be incomparably greater than that of the saved, we must say that the evil could not but seem to be almost as nothing in comparison with the good, when one contemplates the true vastness of the city of God.

Coelius Secundus Curio wrote a little book, De Amplitudine Regni Coelestis, which was reprinted not long since; but he is indeed far from having apprehended the compass of the kingdom of heaven.

The ancients had puny ideas on the works of God, and St. Augustine, for want of knowing modern discoveries, was at a loss when there was question of explaining the prevalence of evil.

It seemed to the ancients that there was only one earth inhabited, and even of that men held the antipodes in dread: the remainder of the world was, according to them, a few shining globes and a few crystalline spheres.

Today, whatever bounds are given or not given to the universe, it must be acknowledged that there is an infinite number of globes, as great as and greater than ours, which have as much right as it to hold rational inhabitants, though it follows not at all that they are human.

It is only one planet, that is to say one of the six principal satellites of our sun; and as all fixed stars are suns also, we see how small a thing our earth is in relation to visible things, since it is only an appendix of one amongst them.

All suns might be peopled only by blessed creatures. Nothing constrains us to think that many are damned, for few instances or few samples suffice to show the advantage which good extracts from evil.

Moreover, since there is no reason for the belief that there are stars everywhere, is it not possible that there may be a great space beyond the region of the stars?

Whether it be the Empyrean Heaven, or not, this immense space encircling all this region may in any case be filled with happiness and glory.

It can be imagined as like the Ocean, whither flow the rivers of all blessed creatures, when they shall have reached their perfection in the system of the stars.

What will become of the consideration of our globe and its inhabitants? Will it not be something incomparably less than a physical point, since our earth is as a point in comparison with the distance of some fixed stars?

Thus since the proportion of that part of the universe which we know is almost lost in nothingness compared with that which is unknown, and which we yet have cause to assume, and since all the evils that may be raised in objection before us are in this near nothingness, haply it may be that all evils are almost nothingness in comparison with the good things which are in the universe.

20. But it is necessary also to meet the more speculative and metaphysical difficulties which have been mentioned, and which concern the cause of evil.

The question is asked first of all, whence does evil come? Si Deus est, unde malum? Si non est, unde bonum? The ancients attributed the cause of evil to matter, which they believed uncreate and independent of God: but we, who derive all being from God, where shall we find the source of evil?

The answer is, that it must be sought in the ideal nature of the creature, in so far as this nature is contained in the eternal verities which are in the understanding of God, independently of his will.

For we must consider that there is an original imperfection in the creature before sin, because the creature is limited in its essence; whence ensues that it cannot know all, and that it can deceive itself and commit other errors.

Plato said in Timaeus that the world originated in Understanding united to Necessity.

Others have united God and Nature. This can be given a reasonable meaning. God will be the Understanding; and the Necessity, that is, the essential nature of things, will be the object of the understanding, in so far as this object consists in the eternal verities.

But this object is inward and abides in the divine understanding. And therein is found not only the primitive form of good, but also the origin of evil: the Region of the Eternal Verities must be substituted for matter when we are concerned with seeking out the source of things.

This region is the ideal cause of evil (as it were) as well as of good: but, properly speaking, the formal character of evil has no efficient cause, for it consists in privation, as we shall see, namely, in that which the efficient cause does not bring about. That is why the Schoolmen are wont to call the cause of evil deficient.