“Wherefore this foreknowledge is not opinion but knowledge resting upon truth, since He knows that a future event is, though He knows too that it will not occur of necessity. If you answer here that what God sees about to happen, cannot but happen, and that what cannot but happen is bound by necessity, you fasten me down to the word necessity. I will grant that we have a matter of most firm truth, but it is one to which scarce any man can approach unless he be a contemplator of the divine.
“For I shall answer that such a thing will occur of necessity, when it is viewed from the point of divine knowledge; but when it is examined in its own nature, it seems perfectly free and unrestrained.
“For there are two kinds of necessities; one is simple: for instance, a necessary fact, ‘all men are mortal’; the other is conditional; for instance, if you know that a man is walking, he must be walking: for what each man knows cannot be otherwise than it is known to be; but the conditional one is by no means followed by this simple and direct necessity; for there is no necessity to compel a voluntary walker to proceed, though it is necessary that, if he walks, he should be proceeding.
“In the same way, if Providence sees an event in its present, that thing must be, though it has no necessity of its own nature. And God looks in His present upon those future things which come to pass through free will.
“Therefore if these things be looked at from the point of view of God's insight, they come to pass of necessity under the condition of Divine knowledge; if, on the other hand, they are viewed by themselves, they do not lose the perfect freedom of their nature.
“Without doubt, then, all things that God foreknows do come to pass, but some of them proceed from free will; and though they result by coming into existence, yet they do not lose their own nature, because before they came to pass they could also not have come to pass.
—from Book 5, Prose 6
That for God all places are a here, and that all times are a now, should help us to grasp that our own human limitations of space and time are causing our problems with foreknowledge.
Providence does not somehow guess at what will happen, but from its absolute viewpoint knows, with complete certainty, what is happening. It also immediately perceives how the particular causes within Nature are bringing about what appears to us like a process or an unfolding.
Our mistake has been to assume that the certainty of such knowledge must be causing the events, when a reflection back our own awareness of the present shows that this need not be the case. Even my narrow mind can know with certainty what is occurring, and that does not make my mind the agent of what occurs.
Now the words can still trip me up, because when I see that God’s understanding is necessary, I will instinctively apply that backwards to the events. Lady Philosophy makes a subtle but important distinction about the range of what we can mean by the term “necessity”:
A simple necessity is one where the nature of something does not allow it to be otherwise, that it must be so without any other possibilities.
That a square must have four sides, or that a cat is a mammal, or that a man has reason follow from the very definitions of the terms. As a wonderful student of mine used to say, “There is no wiggle room on that!”
A conditional necessity is one where the nature of something does indeed allow it to be otherwise, that it can possess any number of possibilities, but once it has followed one path it must be on that path.
That a triangle could have different sides or angles, or that a cat could have various patterns of fur, or that a man could be sleeping or awake are all different options for those things, depending on the presence or absence of other factors. Still, it is then bound to the one or the other. “There’s some wiggle room, but not after you lock it down!”
When it comes to human judgment, which allows a person to make free choices, our actions can be spoken of as conditional. When choices have been made, they can be spoken of as necessary. For us, these are separated by a context of before and after, while for Providence there is no separation of before and after.
A human example will never be entirely accurate, but I think of a memorable moment when my two children were arguing over who could use an old iPad we had asked them to learn to share. They bickered and grabbed, growing ever louder and angrier, and at that very moment I could see, with about as much certainty as is humanly possible, what was going to happen if I did not intervene. I knew their temperaments, and I knew how fragile that piece of electronics was.
I made a call on the spot, hoping it might be an object lesson, and quietly watched them go at it. Needless to say, one of the pushes led to the device flying through the air, then crashing onto the kitchen floor. The screen was now cracked, and both of them stared with silent horror.
“And now,” I said in as fatherly a tone as I could, “neither of you have it. You both made the choice.”
I suppose I am pleased that they both recall this many years later, and that they will gladly tell the story of how it taught them that Dad is occasionally right.
My paternal foresight is hardly Providence, but it has a few things in common. I knew where it was all going, and yet they were the ones that made it go. I could have stopped them, and yet I let them have their own way. They came from me, but now they were making themselves.
Written in 2/2016
No comments:
Post a Comment