Part I

In omnibus requiem quesivi (Eccles. 24,,). St Augustine says, “My soul was created by thee and for thee wherefore she is ever restless. till she finds thee. In all created things, which I search
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in understanding, there is no refuge for my soul, but in thee, God, alone. In the love-spring of thy substance are gathered up to one the perfections of all creatures, which in them are scattered and divided.’ Were there any single creature with all creaturely perfections both in quality and number then God would not have made more than that one alone, as I have pointed out in my discourse, * Whosoever would follow me let him take up his cross.’ Now the whole happiness of creatures depends on resting in the sovran good which is the fount of all good things, and hence our Lady Mary says these words about herself wherein she counsels our interior man to cultivate in lowliness the habit of divine repose in which the soul is most of all united, and without it not. She says, ‘ In all things have I sought rest for my inner man.’
In this connection mark how the divine essence carries pent up in itself all creaturely perfection, creaturely existence being the reflection of God’s essence. St John says, Quod factum est, in ipso vita erat: that which was made, in God was life. Creatures in their pre-existing form in God have been divine life for ever. Hence the opening words of our quotation from the Book of Wisdom, ‘all things,’ mean that our Lady sought peace for her inner man in the eternal good of the divine nature wherein as in a magic mirror creature-nature as a whole is one in God eternally. Referring to the paradigm of all things in God, they being one divinity. a
Theologians put three fundamental questions about these pre- existing forms in God, whereto attach some admirable doctrines and stimulating facts. The first question is, whether ideas of all the creatures exist in God eternally or not ? The second question is, whether these ideas are one or more in number ? The third question is, whether the divine mind has ideas of all the things it knows or does it know at all without ideas ?
To the first question Doctor Thomas answers that, it is necessary to suppose in the divine being ideas of all the creatures. And his argument is this. The three terms, form, idea and semblance are identical in meaning. Now the form, idea or semblance of a thing, a rose for instance, is present in my soul and must be for two reasons. One is, because from the appearance of its mental form I can paint the rose in corporal matter, so there must be an image of the rose-form in my soul. The second reason is, because from the subjective rose-idea I recognise the objective rose although I do not copy it. Just as I can carry in my head the notion of a house I never mean to build. In both these ways [ü.e. as types and principles of knowledge] ideas exist in God, for with all natural things it is the rule for the natural form or char- acter of the progeny or fruit to exemplify the type belonging to
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its species ; as with mankind, for instance, the generative power of the father’s manhood is repeated in the son’s born manhood so that a man breeds men, a lion lions and a falcon falcons. The rose grows on a rose-bush not a cabbage-stalk ; fire engenders fire.
And sometimes the idea of the work is in the practical power not as a natural species but theoretically, as the house of wood and stone is designed in the architect’s practical mind, who makes the outward house as much like his ideal as he can. Now since God created this whole world (not that all creatures are by natural birth descended from God’s nature like the eternal Word of the Father, for in that case all creatures would be God, which no sane mind allows: creature-nature rejects it as an impossible, false thing), therefore God created all creatures by practical understanding of divine nature. So there must be eternally in the divine understanding the pre-existing form or idea to the likeness of which God created this creature and not another whereof God had no pattern in his mind.
The second question is, whether the idea is one or more in number? To this the Doctor answers that, the ultimate end of the work is ever the real intention of the work’s first cause. Now the ultimate end of the world is its good, i.e. the divine ordering of all creatures, as Aristotle says. Hence this ordering of the world must be eternally foreknown and foreordained in God, who is its first cause. Ergo, he:has in him the particular ideas appropriate to that order, whence it follows that he must carry in him ideas of individual creatures. For just as no architect can carry in his head the plan of a whole house without the plans of all its details, so there must be in God as many forms as there are natural grades of created things emanating from him; the rose, for instance, has one special form, the violet another; man has one distinctive type, an angel has another, and so with other things.
The astonishing thing is that this multiplicity of forms should consist with the simplicity of God in whom all essential things are one. We can explain it thus. The idea of the work exists in the worker’s practical mind as an object of his understanding which regards it as expressing his idea to which he forms the material work, and is not in the mind of the worker as a form of under- standing informing his mind and setting up active intellection. The plan of the house in the architect’s mind is (something under- stood by him). It is not repugnant to the simplicity of divine understanding to see and understand more than one thing as object. But it would be repugnant to his simple nature if by a plurality of objective forms it were stimulated and reduced to the subjective act of understanding as opposed to the mirror of God’s
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essence. Countless ideas exist in God in the sense that he sees and understands them, not in the sense that his intellect sees in them. To resume. God knows his essence perfectly so far as it is knowable both in itself and so far as all creatures in their natural mode are exemplified in divine essence; and this express image of all creatures in the divine essence is their prototype, their idea. It . follows that there are as many types as there are grades of nature to be typified.
With regard to this question of how the countless forms in the divine essence consist with their being the essence of God, they being many in number and the essence of God only one, it may be looked at in this way. We call these ideas the essence of God, not as such but inasmuch as the essence of God is a mirror reflecting all creatures. And since in the impartible essence of God we have the exemplar of all things, which we call their idea, therefore the form is many and the essence only one. Even as in a mirror there are many forms reflected, but an eye placed in the mirror would see all these forms as one object of its vision; they would not be innate in it nor would they form the eye’s intrinsic faculty of active present or passive and potential sight, for in that case the image would be no more than one.
The third question was, whether God has in him ideas of all the things he knows or does he know at all without ideas? Doctor Thomas answers this as follows: These pre-existing forms are the origin or principle of the creation of all creatures, and in this sense they are types and pertain to practical knowledge. These forms, again, are the principle of all knowledge of creatures and as such they are really essential images of creatures; wherefore of everything he knows and his conception of it he must have ideas.
This fact prompts the question, How does God know evil, which has no being in itself but is a privation of being? The answer is this. A’s I said above, all creaturely existence has its idea in God, but since evil or sin has no being that is aught (as Dionysius says), but deprives good of good or virtuous being, as blindness of eye has no positive existence but it deprives the eye of sight, even so God’s mind perceives all sin and evil in the idea of the corresponding good, not in the form of sin; for instance, he knows lying in the idea of truth.
Consider next how God knows virtue. In the eternal mirror of his works God knows all creaturely perfections both natural and ghostly, perceiving in their pre-existing forms all accidents as substantial being. But accidents are various. Basic character- istics of the abiding nature of their subject God has no ideas of apart from the ideas which are proper to their subject: the whiteness of the daisy, for example, not its whiteness as a separate
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idea. But accidents subsequently added to the abiding nature he knows in particular ideas apart from the idea of any host. Whence it follows that all noble human attributes like acquired virtues and spiritual wisdom, God knows in separate eternal forms reflecting the wisdom and virtue of souls in general.
Moreover, since grace is not natural to creature therefore grace is communicated to the soul in the guise of accident, and by the same token, faith and other godly virtues are inspired super- naturally in the soul, and love and sometimes divine wisdom as with the prophets and apostles. Again, the seven gifts of the Holy Ghost are supernaturally instilled into the soul. And spiritual sweetness too is an inspired accident. Wherefore of all the graces in mere creatures God has ideas wherein he knows the contingencies of grace.
In the divine essence there exist then also particular ideas reflecting the certainty or hope and divine charity of the soul, albeit she is but a creature. In their own ideas there exist as well all the gifts of the Holy Ghost, which have an adventitious character. This I affirm because the prime gift of love wherein he gives all gifts, this love he is himself in Person and in essence. And because, again, all the sacred rites of the seven sacraments, wherein the soul is sanctified and initiated into godly life, because all these were instituted to show forth the workings of grace in the soul, therefore God must know all the seven sacraments in eternal pre-existing forms and each in a distinct one. The cathartic virtue of baptism by natural water comes springing out of the eternal formal baptism of the mirror of God’s nature. So, too, the primordial perfect conception of that nature survives in marriage, wherein the mutable nature of the father is reborn into the immortal and impersonal nature of the soul of his child, where nature, no longer ridden by the race-instinct governing creatures, is in that sense performing the work of all creation. Marriage is true to its exemplar as long as we preserve it in its natural purity and free from animal intention which is all opposed to its divine ideal. And the same I say about the other sacraments. God then has ideas of every longing, love and godly intuition, whether of sweetness or of inwardness, wherein he feels and knows at once all thy desires when thou dost call on him in prayer; and in these same ideas the soul of any saint whom we invoke sees all our prayerful longings from the beginning of the world down to the very end in one flash of God’s essence, just as an angel sees creatures and their prototype in God all at once in the vision of God, in the dawn, not in the evening light, or else they would not know our . longing for them. Here ends the first part of this sermon.
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