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 GOD AND
THE PERMISSION OF EVIL
 Christian Culture and Philosophy Series

GENERAL EDITORS

Donald A. Gallagher, Ph.D. and

Idella Gallagher, Ph.D.
BOSTON COLLEGE

The colophon for the Christian Culture and Philosophy Series

consists of the Greek letters X and P, symbolizing Christianity, em¬
braced by C, a variant of 2, representing the Greek word sophia.
Jacques Maritain

GOD AND
THE PERMISSION
OF EVIL

Translated by JOSEPH W. EVANS

The Bruce Publishing Company

Milwaukee
NIHIL obstat:

John A. Schulien, S.T.D.

Censor librorum
imprimatur:

►f> Roman R. Atkielski

Auxiliary Bishop of Milwaukee
December 3, 1965

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 66-17003

© 1966 The Bruce Publishing Company

MADE IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
To Raissa
... to whom also
Existence and the Existent
was dedicated
 FOREWORD

This book has grown out of three seminars which

I gave in May, 1962 to the Little Brothers of Jesus
who take their studies in Toulouse. Their teachers are
the theologians of the Dominican House of Studies
in Toulouse. My job as a teacher is completely ended;
what remains to me to do here on earth is of another
order. The seminars in question were simply friendly
conversations, altogether personal, by way of play, if
I may so put it, and by way of a goodbye. Before send¬
ing the manuscript to the printer I reinserted a few
passages of my rough draft which I had omitted so as
not to be too tedious, and I added some footnotes. But
I have kept the tone of simplicity and freedom suitable
to discussions of this kind (my remarks had been tape
recorded and I made few changes). The reader will
excuse a familiarity of language that is quite unusual
in works where one treats of such grave matters, and
in which out of respect for them one feels himself
obliged to put on a professor’s cap. However, a cer¬
tain humor, as Kierkegaard remarked, is, in the face
of that which so greatly surpasses us, a sign of greater
respect.
The subject discussed in these seminars, and which

vii
is one I had already considered in two works, is in
my opinion particularly crucial. I have long desired to
take it up once more, in order to make certain points
more precise, and, let us hope so at least, to give a
clearer expression of my thought. The occasion has
thus been afforded me to reply, warranted by our
mutual and faithful affection, to the objections formu¬
lated by one of my friends, who caused to rain down
on me all sorts of projectiles issuing from a formidable
theological arsenal (less formidable, I venture to say,
than it has the appearance of being, as is the case with
so many arsenals). Nevertheless the criticism was to a
large extent incidental to my main thesis, and my es¬
sential aim was not to reply to criticisms of whatever
sort; it was rather to try to deepen questions about
which I have thought all my life, and to deepen a man¬
ner of facing them which more than ever I think to
be well founded. If in my philosophical work there
has perchance been some actual contribution (how¬
ever imperfectly it may have been able to be pre¬
sented) to the progress of thought, and to the
researches which announce a new age of culture, it is
indeed, so I am persuaded, the one with which this
little book has to deal.
J. M.
February 15, 1963
 CONTENTS

FOREWORD vii

CHAPTER I 1

I. Preliminary Remarks on the Inno¬

cence of God 3
II. The Embarrassments of the “Tradi¬
tional” School 13

CHAPTER II 32

I. The Positions of Existence and the

Existent 32
II. Reply to the Objections of Father
Jean-Herve Nicolas 44

CHAPTER III 67
I. How Is Evil Known by God? 67
II. The Eternal Purposes 77
III. Predestination and Reprobation 99

ADDITIONAL NOTE TO THE THIRD

FRENCH EDITION 114

INDEX 121
ix
 GOD AND
THE PERMISSION OF EVIL
 CHAPTER I

In these three seminars I would like to take up

again and make more precise certain points I discussed
in Existence and the Existent.1 Note well that it will
be a question here solely of moral evil — evil of fault,
or sin.2 As regards evil in general, I send you to Mon-
1 New York: Pantheon, 1948; Image Books, 1957 (Translated from
the French text Court Traite de VExistence et de VExistant [Paris:
Paul Hartmann, 1947] by Lewis Galantiere and Gerald B. Phelan).
2 This follows from my title itself, for, strictly speaking, only
moral evil is permitted by God without being in absolutely any way
willed or caused by Him.
Evil of nature, or suffering, is the object neither of a permission
nor of a will properly so called of God — let us say rather that it
is admitted by God, in this sense that from the very fact that God
wills and causes, as transcendent first Cause, the good of the ma¬
terial universe and of the things of this universe, He causes at the
same stroke, but indirectly and per accidens or in an extra-intentional
manner, the losses and evils linked inevitably and by nature to the
goods and to the gains in question (no generation without corrup¬
tion, no life without some destruction, nor any passage to a superior
form of fife without some death — these are infrangible laws due
to the very essence of material reality, and, analogically, of all
created reality: unless the grain of wheat . . .).
Let us add that, created in the state of innocence, man found
himself in the beginning preserved from death and suffering (al¬
though he had to “die the death of the angels” in sacrificing his
own will in order to ebey purposes which infinitely surpassed him).
It is through his fault that he became subjugated to the laws of
material nature, to suffering, and to death.
As to moral evil or evil of fault, it is absolutely not willed by God
or caused by Him. Of course, to permit is something voluntary and
free; it is not to will to prevent. But to say that for certain reasons

1
signor Charles Journet’s book The Meaning of Evil,I * 3
and also to the chapter in which I have tried to discuss
the question of evil in De Bergson a Thomas d’Aquin.4
Permit me to list the questions treated. First of all,
I shall propose some preliminary remarks on the Inno¬
cence of God. Second, I shall speak of the embarrass¬
ments of the “traditional” school; third, of the positions
taken in Existence and the Existent, that is to say,
above all, of the non-consideration of the rule, of shat-
terable motion, and of the consequent permissive de¬
cree (consequent to the non-consideration of the rule).
Fourth, it will be necessary to say something about the
criticism of the positions of Existence and the Existent
made by Father Jean-Herve Nicolas. Fifth, I shall have
to discuss How God knows evil; sixth, The divine
eternal plan; seventh, and last, Predestination and
reprobation.

I permit or do not will to prevent a thing I abhor, is not at all to

say that I will this thing even the least bit; it is not at all to say
that I “will this tiling permissively” — wretched jargon devoid of
meaning, a purely verbal and intrinsically contradictory formula
(“I will it without willing it”). It is what Christian common sense
knows very well when it says that nothing happens which is not
willed or permitted by God (either . . . or, — either willed or
permitted . . .).
3 New York: P. J. Kenedy & Sons, 1963.
4 New York: Editions de la Maison Frangaise, 1944; Paris: Paul
Hartmann, 1947.

2
 I

Preliminary Remarks on the Innocence of God

1. The fundamental certitude, the rock to which we

must cling in this question of moral evil, is the abso¬
lute innocence of God.
In proportion as the conscience of men, under the
very influence of Christianity, became more sensible
of the dignity of the human person and of the out¬
rages which are inflicted on him by evil, while on the
other hand the dimensions of evil, of injustice, of
cruelty, of all the kinds of crimes at work in history
were more and more revealed to it in depth as well
as in extension (today one has only to open the news¬
paper to see the iniquities which pride or stupidity
linked to hardness of heart cause to be committed at
the four corners of the earth) — in proportion, conse¬
quently, as such a process developed, the problem of
evil has taken on a more tragic importance for the
human conscience. It is this problem which is at the
origin of many forms of atheism, at the origin also of
what one could call in many the bewildered Chris¬
tian conscience.
Some great writers and poets have been much more

3
deeply affected by the tragic importance of which I
speak than have philosophers and theologians; in
this they have been prophets of a sort. The greatest
of these prophets, the greatest of these bewildered and
tortured souls, has been, in my opinion, Dostoyevsky
(I am thinking especially of The Brothers Karamazov
and The Possessed). One could also name poets like
Jean-Paul Richter, and above all the author of Chants
de Maldoror, Lautreamont, of whom Leon Bloy has
said that he brought “the good tidings of damnation.”
Lautreamont sought all the possible means of insult¬
ing God, because he was enraged at the abomination
of the world. I quote a passage (which, by chance, is
not blasphemous, but highly typical, and besides it is
very beautiful): “I am,” he said, “the son of man and
of woman, according to what I am told. This astonishes
me — I thought I was more! Besides, what does it mat¬
ter to me where I come from? If it could have de¬
pended on my own will, I would rather have wished
to be the son of the shark’s wife, whose hunger is the
friend of the tempests, and of the tiger, who is re¬
nowned for his cruelty; I would not he so wicked.”
It is advisable to be attentive to the warnings of
such prophets. An old jack-of-all-trades curious about
everything like Georges Sorel knew this well. That is
why, as I note in De Bergson a Thomas d’Aquin, he
said that if philosophers lived up to their calling in
the new age into which we have entered, the crucial
work for them would be to renew the theory of evil,
that is to say, by examining it more profoundly.
In other words, the day of the theodicies a la Leibniz
or of the justifications of God which have the air of

4
pleading mitigating circumstances is decidedly past.
Something else is needed in order to meet contempor¬
ary atheism, the militant atheism of the Marxists as
well as the infantile and pretentious atheism which
the existentialists advance in competing with it.
And now, by a very remarkable paradox, it happens
that the pure and simple affirmation that one must
oppose to all this, and which must at no price be per¬
mitted to become obscured however so little, has been
enunciated by Lautreamont himself. Violently retract¬
ing his past, at the end of his short life, he wrote in
his Preface a des Poemes Futurs, in his poet’s lan¬
guage: “If one recollects the truth from which all
other truths flow, the absolute goodness of God and
His absolute ignorance of evil, the sophisms collapse
of themselves. We do not have the right to interrogate
the Creator about anything whatsoever.” (And he
added — let us note this sentence in passing — “All the
water of the sea would not suffice to wash away a
single intellectual bloodstain.”)
Lautreamont expressed himself poorly in saying
that God is absolutely ignorant of evil; God knows evil,
to be sure, and He knows it perfectly, through the
good of which evil is the privation. But what Lautrea¬
mont meant is that God is absolutely innocent of evil,
and also that God does not have the idea or the in¬
vention of evil. There is in God, as Saint Thomas
Aquinas teaches, no idea, no intelligible matrix of evil.
This is a point to which we shall return later on.

2. Well, Saint Thomas recognized this absolute inno¬

cence of God, and affirmed and taught it, much better

5
indeed than did Lautreamont. I would like to quote
to you two texts of his, which in their simplicity
sovereignly command the whole question, and which
we should inscribe on our walls; let us call them our
two most sacred axioms:
First axiom: Deus nullo modo est causa peccati,
neque directe, neque indirecte (God is absolutely not
the cause of moral evil, neither directly nor in¬
directly).5 You notice the import of these words “nullo
modo,” absolutely not, and “neque directe, neque in¬
directe” neither directly nor indirectly. Every shadow
of indirect causality must be excluded.
Second axiom: Defectus gratiae prima causa est ex
nobis (the first cause — he says indeed, the first cause —
of the absence of grace comes from us).6 It is in us,
it is in the creature that the first cause of moral evil
(first cause in the order of non-being or of nothing¬
ness) is to be found. The creature has the first initia¬
tive of moral evil; it is in the creature that the
initiative and the invention of sin have their origin.
Here we have the two texts which command every¬
thing. The second one (the first cause of the absence
of grace comes from us) had been enunciated at
greater length by Saint Thomas in his Commentary
on the Sentences, I, dist. 40, q. 4, a. 2: “It is . . . evi¬
dent that the first cause of the absence of grace is
purely and simply on the side of the man to whom
grace is lacking (because he has not been willing to
receive it); on the side of God, there is no cause of
5 “Deus . . . non potest directe esse causa peccati. Similiter etiam
neque indirecte. . . . Et sic patet quod Deus nullo modo est causa
peccati.” Sum. theol., I—II ,79, 1.
6 Ibid., 112, 3, ad 2.

6
this absence of grace, except once admitted that which
is the cause on the side of man.”7
Naturally every Thomist theologian, indeed every
Catholic, whether simple man of faith, philosopher, or
theologian, is ready to die for the two axioms which
I have just mentioned. The misfortune is that at the
same time, especially if they are learned people ac¬
quainted with the difficulties of things, they can hap¬
pen unwittingly to compromise these axioms more or
less seriously and to tarnish their luster in the con¬
ceptualization that is made of them.
I remember having spoken of this absolute inno¬
cence of God, which was blasphemed by Hegel, with
one of my friends, a renowned professor and a man
greatly versed in the Bible. “Yes, yes, of course, that’s
true,” he replied to me, “but in the end it is not so
clear; there still remain the expressions that Holy Scrip¬
ture uses so often, when it says, for instance, that God
blinded Pharaoh, that He sent to this or that man
a spirit of darkness, a spirit of error, etc.” This profes¬
sor knew very well that it is a question here only of
turns of speech peculiar to the Semitic languages, and
which amounted to saying that God had permitted
that Pharaoh become blind, etc. However he let a
kind of doubt insinuate itself into his mind, by the
help of these expressions, and while holding that God
is not the cause of moral evil he went and lodged in
7 . . Istum autem carere gratia, ex duobus contingit: turn quia
ipse non vult recipere> turn quia Deus non sibi infundit, vel non vult
sibi infundere. Horum autem duorum tabs est ordo, ut secundum
non sit nisi ex suppositione primi. . . .
“Patet ergo quod hujus defectus absolute prima causa est ex parte
hominis qui gratia caret; sed ex parte Dei non est causa hujus de¬
fectus nisi ex suppositione illius quod est causa ex parte hominis.

7
the obscurity of the divine transcendence a vague
doubt on this matter.
Or else again, and it is of this that I am thinking
especially, one will find philosophers and theologians
who also affirm, and certainly without doubting them
in the least, the two most sacred axioms recalled a
moment ago, but who, at the same time, seeking to re¬
concile them with other equally sacred truths, explain
them by means of notions and reasons which in reality
sap them at their very base, without the effort of con¬
ciliation to which they are attached permitting them to
be aware of this; or else, if they suspect in the least
some inconsistency, they proceed, like the friend of
whom I have just spoken, to lodge it in the obscurity
of the divine transcendence.
Attention here! It is important for us to understand
that the incomprehensible mystery of the things of
God is not, as Hegel said of Schelling’s absolute, a
night in which all the cows are black, and in which we
could shelter, under the pretext of the divine trans¬
cendence, theories which do harm to the primary cer¬
titudes which we propose to defend and to explicate.
The divine transcendence is obscure for us, it is
a night for our reason. And it embraces truths which
at first seem irreconcilable. But what we must do is
to push to the extreme, to their divine extreme, these
at first glance contradictory truths of which we seek
some understanding; it is never to sacrifice one of them
while pretending to save it and while hiding our mis¬
fortune in the obscurity of the divine mystery. How¬
ever obscure this mystery may be, the aseity or
absolute independence of God on the one hand, and

8
the divine absolute innocence on the other, shine there
with a sovereign brightness, and it is this radiance
itself which our eye has difficulty in enduring. Rather
than sacrifice or destroy however so little one of these
truths at the expense of the other, it would after all
be better to confess that our reason is too weak to
reconcile them.

3. I do not think that we are reduced to this here.

But if we do not wish to spoil everything in the ques¬
tion of God and the permission of evil, we must from
the beginning set down a principle which is like a bea¬
con illuminating the whole debate: this is the prin¬
ciple of the dissymmetry, the fundamental, irreducible
dissymmetry, between the line of good and the line
of evil.
Ens et bonum convertuntur. The good is being, and
plenitude or completion of being. When we reason in
the line of good, we reason in the line of being, of
that which exercises being or bears being to its
accomplishment.
Evil, on the contrary, of itself or insofar as evil, is
absence of being, privation of being or of good. It is
a nothingness which corrodes being. When we reason
in the line of evil, we reason in the line of non-being,
for evil is in nowise being; evil is only a vacuum or a
lack of being, a nothingness and a privation.
It follows, then, with absolute necessity that there
will be a dissymmetry between our manner of look¬
ing at and explaining things in the perspective of good
and our manner of looking at and explaining things in
the perspective of evil.
9
 It is a radical mistake to make use, in order to ex¬
plain tilings in the line of evil, of types of explanation
by which we explain and must explain things in the
line of good.
Let me give a first example: in the line of good,
God is the first and transcendent cause of our liberty
and of our free decisions, so that the free act is wholly
from God as first cause and wholly from us as second
cause; because there is not a fibril of being which
escapes the causality of God. Our liberty has the
initiative of our acts, but this is a second initiative;
it is God who has the first initiative. Yes, this is true
for good acts; but for evil acts, or more exactly for
the evil itself which vitiates these acts, it is just the
contrary: in the line of evil we have our two very
sacred axioms which I unite in one same statement:
God is absolutely not the cause of the evil of our free
acts; it is man who is the first cause and who has the
first initiative of moral evil.
Second example. In the line of good: all that which
God knows in created existence, He knows because He
causes it. His ‘science of vision’ is the cause of things.
Yes, this is perfectly true in the line of being, or of
good; but, in the line of evil, well! the evil accom¬
plished by creatures is known by God, and yet God
is absolutely not the cause of the evil, neither directly
nor indirectly. There is, then, something (which is
not a thing, a being, but a non-being, a lack or priva¬
tion of being), which is known by God in created
existence without having been caused by Him. Evil
is known by God without having been in any way
caused by God.

10
 To deny or shake the two truths concerning the
line of good which I have just mentioned is very
serious — it is to meddle with something sacred, the
divine aseity.
To deny or shake the two truths concerning the line
of evil which I have also mentioned is likewise serious,
and it is likewise to meddle with something sacred:
the absolute innocence of God.
I shall further add, speaking for once in the man¬
ner of Hegel: there is no sense in tackling the problem
of evil, one will make no advance at all, if one does
not have the courage to sojourn close to non-being
and to look it in the face - and to employ the con¬
ceptual equipment that is needed in order to treat of
it; that is to say, to take seriously, without regarding
them as mere figures of speech, these things that I
call to nihilate, initiative of nothingness, nihilating or
nihilation, fissure of being, etc.
For the fact is that in order to express anything at
all of that which is most real but which belongs to
the realm of non-being, we must inevitably have re¬
course to paradoxical statements which envelop, in the
measure to which they seem to substantify non-being,
the formation in our mind of a certain auxiliary entity
of reason. Is not this already the case each time that
we say evil (as if evil were a being)? Because, given
the nature of our human intellect, we can conceive
evil, and non-being, only ad instar entis, after the
fashion of being., God alone knows this privation which
is evil without having to form the slightest being of
reason, and it is God’s privilege.
Without this auxiliary entity of reason, presented in

11
an idea, there is no means for us to know the lack of
being that is evil. And this lack of being, itself, is in
nowise a being of reason; it is indeed very real in
things. It is in order to signify this, that we do not
hesitate to say “evil” (which is a non-being, a priva¬
tion) just as we say “intelligence” or “beauty” (which
are beings). Why, when it is a question of signifying
that we evade a motion, an influx of being coming
from the first Cause, should we hesitate to say that we
nihilate, that we cause nothingness?
And all this is true of that non-being which is simple
negation (absence of a good which is not due) as well
as of that non-being which is privation (absence of a
due good). If I wish to express that a negation comes
to occur in existence like a vacuum or a cavity, in
other words, that it has an existential or existentializ-
ing value and not simply a grammatical or logical
value, I shall be able to do so only by saying, for
example, that it is (as in the case of the voluntary
non-consideration of the rule) a “fissure of being” or
a nihilation.

12
 II

The Embarrassments of the ‘Traditional’ School

4. I call the “traditional” school the one which holds

firmly to the two primordial truths concerning the
line of good. Stated anew, these are:
1° God is the absolutely universal first cause, on the
motion of whom depends the action of the creature
down to the least iota — even and especially the action
of the free will, I say “especially” because this action
is in the intellectual creature that which is most rich
in being and in activity: the action by which it dis¬
poses of itself.
2° The science of God is the cause of things, God
knows things because He makes them, He knows them
in His “science of vision” through the creative or fac-
tive idea itself which causes them to come into exis¬
tence, in other words, through the decree of His
intelligence finked with His will.
This “traditional” school, the school to which I have
the honor of belonging, is the school of the disciples
and commentators of Saint Thomas Aquinas.
The misfortune is that in the beginning it insisted
with so much vigor on the two principles concerning
the fine of good that it seemed to leave more or less

13
in the shadows the two other primordial principles
which concern the line of evil: 1° Of evil as such God
is in nowise the cause even indirectly — it is the crea¬
ture who is the first cause of evil; 2° Evil is known by
God without being in any way caused by Him. In
other words, the “traditional” school envisaged every¬
thing, it endeavored to explain everything, even evil,
in the perspective of being or of good.
God thus seemed — one tried everything to avoid
this, but finally God seemed — the initiator of the evil
which He punished, as well as of the good which He
rewarded.
It is thus that our masters, Banez, John of Saint-
Thomas, the Carmelites of Salamanca, those whom one
calls rigid Thomists, but whom as regards the ques¬
tion which concerns us I would rather call ‘Cyclopean’
Thomists (because they had their eyes fixed solely
on the perspective of being, or of good, even when
they spoke of evil —it is thus that these Thomists
taught not only that unthinkable thing (we shall re¬
turn to it later on) that one calls “negative reproba¬
tion,” which precedes any demerit, but they made it
consist in the positive exclusion of beatitude. Just as
God predestines the elect to glory ante praevisa merita,
without consideration of their foreseen merits, so like¬
wise He condemns (oh, “negatively,” is it not?) the
others by His own sole initiative, and He decides to
exclude them from beatitude ante praevisa demerita,
without consideration of the foreseen demerits. And
if one remains solely within the perspective of being,
if one refuses to enter into the perspective of non-being
with the dissymmetry which it implies, it is these rigid

14
or “Cyclopean” Thomists who are right; it is they who
are logical to the very end. One can understand that
Saint Francis de Sales, in order to escape from a
spiritual crisis which was putting him at the gates of
despair, preferred to shake off the “traditional” school
and to take a plunge into the absurd, I mean into the
system of Molina, where at least one insisted, be it to
excess, on the role of created liberty in the destiny of
the creature and on the fact that no one is condemned
in advance.
I can naturally allude to this history only in the most
summary fashion, and without taking account of the
subtleties and artifices of vocabulary by which so many
theologians of every school (Saint Thomas, himself,
never did this) seek to hide the break in the armor.
It will suffice for me to say that in order to save the
two primordial truths concerning the line of evil,
Molina sacrificed the two primordial truths concerning
the line of good, and attributed to man in the line of
good first initiatives which he has only in the line of
evil. In other words, Molina, too, disregarded the
principle of the dissymmetry between the line of good
and the fine of evil, but on behalf, this time, of the
type of explanation appropriate to the case of evil, and
in order to put the good act as well as the evil act
under the dependence of a first initiative of the
creature.
One thus abandoned Saint Thomas’ admirable view
on the subordination of causes, which has us under¬
stand that the transcendent causality of God, which
moves each created agent according to its own mode,
and consequently free agents according to their liberty

15
itself, in other words, which causes the liberty itself
of the free decision, is — in the case of the good — the
cause (first) of the free act in its entirety, whereas
the human will moved or activated by God is the cause
(second) of the free act likewise in its entirety. In¬
stead of this, one no longer has but two concurrent
causalities, each of them causing, for its part, the total
effect, as in mechanics, in the composition of forces,
or as in the case of “duo trahentes navim,” of two
men pulling a boat. The human causality adds itself
to the divine causality. It is the human will which
gives a final determination, in one direction or the
other, a last finishing touch to an indeterminate divine
motion. And to this extent, in this same measure, the
good free act, the free act of the saints escapes the
divine universal causality. This is why I said a moment
ago that to throw oneself into the system of Molina
is to take a plunge into the absurd.
Thenceforth there can no longer be a question of
God knowing from all eternity the free act because He
causes it. God no longer knows this act in its factive
idea, or (a rather infelicitous expression, it must be
said) in His pre-determining decree; God knows the
free act by what Molina called the super-comprehen¬
sion of causes which is the privilege of His intelligence.
As if the impossibility of being foreseen with absolute
certitude was not a property of the free act as such,
whatever comprehension or super-comprehension of
causes one may have!

5. In their holy furor against Molinism, the Thomists

of that time (that is to say, of the sixteenth and seven-

16
teenth centuries, of what has been called the Baroque
age), occupied above all in defending the positions of
Saint Thomas in the line of being and of good, thought
scarcely at all of refining and sharpening their doc¬
trine in regard to the fine of evil.
I said a moment ago that they viewed everything,
even evil, in the perspective of being and of good. In
other words, they tried to trace as much as possible
the theory of the evil act from the theory of the good
act, employing in the two cases the same general types
of explanation.
One knew indeed that God is not the cause of evil —
what God causes can only be good. Consequently one
could naturally not say that a pre-determining decree
of the divine will preceded the culpable failure of the
creature. But one invented an antecedent permissive
decree which preceded this failure, and in virtue of
which the evil act took place, as did the good free act,
at once infallibly and freely. God had only not to give
His efficacious grace: the creature, who retained the
power to “do good” afforded by sufficient grace, in
fact did not exercise this power, from the moment
that it found itself deprived of efficacious grace. It
did not put into act the to-do-good itself;8 and this
freely, to be sure, since it is to its own fallible free¬
dom that God left it; and it would be justly punished
for the evil which it committed as a result of Gods
having withdrawn His hand.
Likewise it is not in a pre-determining decree, but
it is in an antecedent permissive decree that God

8 This was the current theory (taught especially by Father Nicolai)

at the time when Pascal wrote Les Provinciates.

17
knew from all eternity the sin that I shall commit
freely today.
All this made a beautiful structure of concepts, but
the dissymmetry between the line of good and the
line of evil was completely forgotten. And what was
to become of the sacred axiom which I mentioned
at the beginning: “God is in no way the cause of sin,
neither directly nor indirectly”? And of the second
sacred axiom: “The first cause of the absence of grace
comes from us”? These two axioms were saved only
by logical artifices. It is God who, before every actual
failure of the creature as first cause of evil, per¬
mitted all the sins and the crimes committed in human
history, which thus took place in conformity with
what He, of His own free will, had infallibly pre¬
conceived and prepared; and one managed at the same
time, by a system of appropriate conceptual distinc¬
tions, to have the whole responsibility of these sins
and of these crimes fall on the sinner, and to exoner¬
ate God, who was not sorry to wash His hands in the
basin which His zealous servants thus presented to
Him.
Well, the “traditional” school has made headway
since the seventeenth century; it has evolved con¬
siderably. A great effort was undertaken to explain
better how it is the sinner who has the first responsi¬
bility for the absence of grace, and how it is by rea¬
son of his demerits and of his own sin that the
praescitus or “fore-known” (this is the word Saint
Thomas uses in contradistinction to “predestined”) is
condemned.
In our day — that is to say, for me, some thirty years

18
ago or even a little more —Father Garrigou-Lagrange
caused the traditional doctrine to progress consider¬
ably in this direction. However, other disciples of
Saint Thomas sought, with greater or less success,
deeper renewals, and finally a great variety of opinions
surged up among the Dominican theologians — which
is the sign of a certain uneasiness; and this uneasiness
is not surprising, because it is without recognizing
squarely the dissymmetry between the fine of good
and the line of evil, and in pilfering the concepts so
as to adapt them as much as possible to the case of
evil, that the disciples of the great commentators,
Father Garrigou-Lagrange for instance, endeavored to
improve the theory of their masters on the permis¬
sion of evil.
It is an attempt similar to that of Father Garrigou-
Lagrange — but, as far as I am able to judge, one linked
up with a Thomism clearly more “hard” and more
Banezian, while being remarkably attentive to all the
difficulties to be resolved, and while striving desper¬
ately, thanks to the most diligent dialectic, to save
that which in this perspective cannot be saved —that
my friend Father Jean-Herve Nicolas has made in three
articles of the Revue Thomiste9 about which I would
like to say a few words, and in which, with a sym¬
pathy and a severity which both deserve my grati¬
tude — magis arnica veritas — he has not failed to
criticize my own positions.
I shall reply to his criticisms in our next seminar.
At the moment I shall begin to criticize his positions.
9 Cf. J.-H. Nicolas, “La Permission du P6che,” in Revue Thomiste,
LX, 1 (janvier-mars 1960); LX, 2 (avril-juin 1960); LX, 4 (octobre-
decembre 1960).

19
 What I wish to say to you first of all is not simply
that Father Jean-Herve Nicolas is a dear friend of
mine, and a theologian for whom I have particular
esteem and respect; it is also that —apart from this
question of the permission of evil, where we apply
the principles of our common master in ways that are
diametrically opposed — we are, he and I, “on the same
side of the fence”; I mean that we understand in the
same manner the exigencies of “living Thomism,
which is all the more attentive to the problematic
of the times and to the renewals demanded by them
because it is more attached to a supra-temporal doc¬
trine of wisdom. Understand that between men who
belong to a same intellectual family there can be
serious disagreements on particular points, without for
all that the unity of their fundamental views and of
their common universe of thought being broken. These
particular disagreements are even a good sign — they
show that their common effort aims only at truth,
and consequently shuns all conformism and fives by
freedom.
I wish to tell you also that I am sincerely grateful
to Father Jean-Herve for his criticisms made in a spirit
of sympathy I greatly appreciate, and which have ren¬
dered me a great service by obliging me to clarify and
complete things that I had sometimes said too briefly,
and also to correct some other things — very secondary
things, I must avow with suitable candor and modesty.
Finally, I shall observe that being a “hard” Thomist,
Father Jean-Herve Nicolas has, like his masters, the
merit of a perfect logical rigor, and that it would cer¬
tainly be necessary to side with him if one remained,

20
as he and his school do, in the perspective of being or
of good in order to treat the problems posed by evil.

6. Let us pass now to the discussions of his positions.

However, as I do not like to deal in personalities, it
is not with him by name that I shall take issue, it is
rather — I hope the word will not displease him — with
what, as regards the question which concerns us, I
shall call “neo-Banezianism.” I shall here leave aside
the neo-Banezian positions which concern reprobation;
we shall come to them in our third seminar. It is only
the question of antecedent permissive decrees that I
would like to examine now.
And first I shall make a preliminary remark: it is
that the fundamental thesis of Saint Thomas, of which
we shall speak at greater length later on, and accord¬
ing to which the cause of moral evil or of sin is a
failure of the will, to wit, the voluntary and free non¬
consideration of the rule, which is not yet culpable,
because it is a mere negation, not a privation — this
fundamental thesis of Saint Thomas is extraordinarily
disregarded and completely extenuated in the neo-
Banezian theory.
According to this theory, there is indeed a non¬
consideration of the rule which is not culpable and
which is but a mere negation, mera negatio, but it is
that which takes place in the course of a time anterior
to the moment when the sinful decision is going to be
taken and which has no actual connection with this
moment. It is clear that while I am walking and gather¬
ing flowers or thinking of a novel, I do not consider
the rule which forbids me to box the ears of an indi-

21
vidual who has slandered me and who is just about
to cross my path. But this mera negatio, this non¬
consideration in a time anterior to all deliberation as
to what I am going to do or not do, is merely — every¬
one is agreed on this — a being of reason10 perfectly in¬
operative as regards the fault that my boxing this man’s
ears will constitute. It is in nowise the cause of the
moral evil in question.
As to the non-consideration which takes place when
I decide to box the ears of my offender, neo-Banezian-
ism, not reflecting on the fact that it precedes this
culpable decision at least by a priority of nature and
that it is really distinct from this decision, considers it
to be a culpable failure, a failure already culpable
(absence of a due consideration, absence of a con¬
sideration which ought to be there, an absence con¬
sequently which one cannot regard as a mera negatio
except by a pure fiction of the mind). In reality it is
a privation, it is not a negation.11
According to the neo-Banezian theory, this non¬
consideration of the rule, far from being a mera nega¬
tio, is already a privation, a moral evil: a fault of
omission, at the center of the evil decision.
Well then, how could it be that cause of moral evil
(it is already moral evil) - how could it be that cause
of moral evil which Saint Thomas was seeking, and
which under pain of a vicious circle cannot be already
moral evil itself? For between the cause and the effect

10 Cf. Revue Thomiste, LX, 2, p. 199.

11 “In reality non-consideration’ on the part of reason, ‘turning
aside’ on the part of the will, together constitute moral evil itself.
Revue Thomiste, LX, 2, p. 203.

22
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there is always real distinction.12 This non-considera¬
tion is not the cause of my sinful action: boxing this
slanderer’s ears; it does but constitute with it one
single sin.
The non-consideration in a time anterior to the de¬
cision and which has nothing to do with it, is not the
cause of evil. Nor is the non-consideration at the mo¬
ment of time when the decision takes place the cause
of evil. You see that poor Saint Thomas has spoken
in order to say nothing, and his theory on the cause
of evil flies into pieces.
As a result of this extenuation of the doctrine of
Saint Thomas on the non-consideration of the rule —
and it was this that I wanted to point out — it follows
that for the whole Banezian or neo-Banezian school
there can be no question of seeking in the moment of
free non-consideration of the rule, or of nihilation, of
fissure of being not yet culpable, which metaphysical
analysis reveals at the origin of moral fault, an essen¬
tial articulation of the theory of the divine permission
of evil.
One is no longer faced, if I may so put it, with any-
12 This real distinction between cause and effect is even found in
the case of immanent activity, where an agent “moves itself” — it
is under relations really distinct (and not distinct merely by a dis¬
tinction of reason) that there is then causation and effect produced.
“Causa distinguitur ab effectu suo realiter: nam quod ab alio realiter
dependet, realiter ab eo distinguitur.” (J. Gredt, Elem. Phil. Arist.-
Thom., t. II, p. 147.) How does neo-Banezianism come to forget
such an evident axiom? “. . . There is not a real distinction,” we
are told, “but a distinction of reason between the defectus voluntatis
which is the cause of the sin, and the defectus actionis which is
the sin itself.” Revue Thomiste, LX, 2, p. 203, footnote 2 (italics
mine. Same assertion in the text, p. 203. Between the non-considera¬
tion as cause of the sin and the sinful election — where the non¬
consideration itself becomes sin of omission — “there is but a dis¬
tinction of reason”.)

24
thing but the moral fault already completely hatched,
a sinful act vitiated by a culpable failure, in short, a
certain being (an operation of the will) deprived of
a good which is due it. One will doubtless distinguish
there between the culpable failure or privation, at¬
tributable to the creature, and the operation itself
which, insofar precisely as being, is metaphysically
good and posited in existence with the co-operation
of God. But who says ‘privation,’ says evil of a being.
The instant of pure negation, the instant at which the
perspective of non-being is introduced, the instant of
the free non-consideration of the rule, has been
neglected. It is in the perspective of being that one
is placed; and it is in using types of explanation
appropriate to the line of being and of good, and
required by the good election, that one will seek to
explain that which concerns the evil election. And one
will break one’s teeth, one will inevitably run smack
into insurmountable difficulties.

7. Let us return now to the neo-Banezian positions

on the divine permission of evil and the way in which
evil occurs.13
One distinguishes there several moments which have
a priority of nature (not of time, clearly) one to
another.14
First moment: the antecedent permissive decree. —
This is a will of God by which He wills to permit that
this or that individual fail morally or not do a certain
13 Cf. Revue Thomiste, LX, 4, pp. 514-518.
14 Dependent on distinctions of reason founded solely in our hu¬
man manner of conceiving, these moments of nature that one thus
distinguishes in God are clearly only moments of reason.

25
good (and therefore, in consequence, he will commit
such or such sin).
In other words, a certain good in the free act of this
individual, the good of which this sin is the priva¬
tion — God decides not to cause it. He is under no
necessity to cause it, is He? And by that very fact,
since He knows evil only through the good, as absence
of a good, He knows, in His antecedent permissive
decree, the evil of which this creature will render him¬
self guilty.
There, that’s all. God does nothing, causes nothing,
He simply decides not to cause (a certain good). He
contents Himself with not willing to cause in this or
that creature the good which is the opposite of a cer¬
tain sin.
Note well, this permissive decree presupposes no
actual failure in the creature — this is why it is an
antecedent permissive decree. All that is presupposed
on the side of the creature is its fallibility (in nowise
any actual failure of the creature — only its fallibility).
It is fallible, it can fail. And from the sole fact that
God has decided not to cause in it a certain good, there
it is left to its fallible liberty, it is going to fail for
certain. Thus God has the first initiative of that which
happens in the case of the evil act as well as in the
case of the good act. The permissive decree of evil is
conceived, by means of certain appropriate arrange¬
ments, certain plannings, on the type of the causative
decree of good.
Second moment: the culpable failure of the crea¬
ture. — From the moment that the creature is thus left
to its own fallibility, it in actual fact fails inevitably.

26
But it is the sole cause of this failure (God has not
caused anything at all).
This moment of culpable failure is the moment of
the culpable non-consideration of the rule, and of the
turning from God. In not considering the rule of the
operation which it is about to commit, the creature at
this same stroke turns away from God.
Third moment: the pre-determining decree which
bears on all the positive, on all the being that there
is in the affair, especially on the exercise in act (on-
tologically good in itself) of freedom of choice, viti¬
ated in other respects by the culpable failure of the
creature; in short, the pre-determining decree of the
evil act.
This is the moment where efficacious grace is re¬
fused. (You see, the neo-Banezian theory does not put
the refusal of grace at the beginning, as did Father
Nicolai in the seventeenth century; it puts it at the
third moment.)
Fourth moment: the evil action or election itself
which, insofar as act, has been able to come into exis¬
tence only with the cooperation of God, but which,
insofar as evil, depends solely on the causality of the
creature.
What more could one ask for? With moments of
reason so finely carved out, is not one strong enough
to parry all blows?
Neo-Banezianism holds that in this view of the issue,
the refusal of efficacious grace presupposes the culp¬
able failure of the creature, and is even in some way
its chastisement: the creature has failed and it has
culpably non-considered the rule — well, now grace is

27
refused to it, and it will sin; it is a chastisement.
Yes, doubtless. But this culpable failure itself, at
moment No. 2? It is itself preceded by the permissive
decree of God, by that decree by which He wills, of
His own sovereign and absolutely independent initia¬
tive, to permit that such or such sin take place in
human history; in other words, by which He wills that,
without Himself being in any way the cause of it, such
or such sin occur on earth. And it is here that one
breaks one’s teeth.

8. A first question at once presents itself: at moment

No. 2, at the moment of the culpable failure of the
creature, why does this failure occur? Because the crea¬
ture has been left to its fallible liberty. God has con¬
sequently left it to itself; as we have seen, He has
decided (at moment No. 1) not to cause in it a cer¬
tain good which its free act ought to have included.
What does this mean, if not that God has not given
the creature the help, assistance, support, however one
wants to say it, by which He would have moved its
free will and caused in it the good in question, so that
it not evade His grace? Is it, therefore, that from that
moment He has refused it efficacious grace? I am only
a philosopher, I shall refrain from saying anything on
that question. But I shall say that in any case God
has not given it at that moment the motion or activa¬
tion under which, and under which alone, its fallible
liberty would not have failed.15 He has of His own
15 In other words “that preservation against itself, which He does
not owe it, and which would prevent it from rendering itself cul¬
pably unfaithful to the love of God. . . Revue Thomiste LX 4
p. 537. ’ ’

28
initiative decided not to do that without which evil will
infallibly occur. God has withdrawn His hand. Con¬
temporary neo-Banezianism can try or say as it will
but it cannot escape this conclusion, no more than can
any of the doctrines that maintain the theory of an¬
tecedent permissive decrees.
And to allow a thing to be done by withdrawing
one’s hand, is this not to cause it indirectly? A child
can write straightly only if I hold the pen with it; if
I withdraw my hand, the child’s hand makes only a
scribble. It is clearly the cause of the scribble, and
the sole direct cause. But have I not been the indirect
cause by withdrawing my hand?
For my part, I answer “yes.” This seems obvious to
me. But at bottom this does not matter to me essen¬
tially. Even if it would be time that thanks to the
resources of logic and of skillfully elaborated defini¬
tions and distinctions one succeeded in completely
eliminating the concept and the word “cause,” even
indirect (I mean of cause considered under the relation
of efficiency), a second question remains, and this is of
capital importance.
Supposed, hut not conceded that God is not, in
withdrawing His hand, the indirect cause of the culp¬
able failure of the creature, it in any case remains that
He Himself has first willed, with a will not causa¬
tive but permissive, that this failure occur in the
world. For it is on Him alone and on His sole first
initiative, the neoJ3anezians clearly point out, that de¬
pended the first moment, the moment of the permis¬
sive decree itself, which has a priority of nature over
the failure of the creature.

29
 And on the other hand the divine causality is not
only efficient causality; it is also, and first of all,
intellectual causality; it is in conceiving His plan or
His eternal purposes (and in willing the execution of
them), as the author of a drama conceives the plot
and its unfolding, that God causes things — as Father
Jean-Herve rightly emphasizes. And consequently
the consideration of the plan comes before that of
efficiency.
So, supposing (without conceding) that God is not,
under the relation of efficiency, in withdrawing His
hand the indirect cause of the failure which succeeds
the antecedent permissive decree, the fact remains
that on the side of the plan conceived by God, it is
God who in His thought, His creative design, His
eternal purposes, has first had the idea, the idee-matrix,
the idea infallibly followed by effect, of the culpable
failure in question. In permitting it in advance as
integral part of the plan of which He alone is the
author, without consideration of the nihilations of
which the creature is first cause (we shall return to
this point later on), God first has the initiative, not
causal but permissive, in virtue of which all the faults
and all the crimes which soil human history are there,
and enter into the composition of the drama which has
been unfolding here on earth since Adam.
Let me speak frankly. In the theory of the antece¬
dent permissive decrees, God, under the relation of
efficiency, is not the cause, not even (that which I do
not at all concede) the indirect cause, of moral evil.
But He is the one primarily responsible for its pres¬
ence here on earth. It is He who has invented it in

30
the drama or novel of which He is the author. He
refuses His efficacious grace to a creature because
it has already failed culpably, but this culpable failure
itself occurred only in virtue of the permissive decree
which preceded it. God manages to be in nowise the
cause of evil, while seeing to it that evil occurs infal¬
libly. The antecedent permissive decrees, be they pre¬
sented by the most saintly of theologians — I cannot see
in them, taken in themselves, anything but an insult
to the absolute innocence of God.

31
 CHAPTER II

The Positions of Existence and the Existent

1. I should like immediately to remark that the merit

of the neo-Banezianism of which I have spoken in the
preceding seminar lies in the fact that it is a “hard”
Thomism. In general, in the intellectual domain, it is
hard positions which are the good ones; “soft” posi¬
tions are not worth very much. I remark at the same
stroke that the positions of Existence and the Existent
are also — I am flattered to say — hard positions. It
would be a great mistake to regard them as diluted
Thomism; it is hard Thomism, but hard Thomism
which has finally decided to open onto the avenues of
non-being windows as large as those open onto the
avenues of being. Now the paths of non-being — once
one has, by a kind of inverted intuition, become con¬
scious of it and of its formidable role in reality —
are as difficult as those of being. The perspective of
evil demands as much rigor as that of the good, even
if on this account it is necessary to overthrow many
accepted ideas.

32
 2. The leading idea of Existence and the Existent is
very simple. It is a question of following through to
the end that dissymmetry between the line of good
and the line of evil on which I have already insisted
so much; and consequently of recognizing all the bear¬
ing of this assertion that the first cause or the inventor
of moral evil in the existential reality of the world is
the liberty of the creature — I mean, this liberty in the
line of non-being. All of this implies that at the very
first origin of the evil act — and, above all, of the evil
election, which takes place in the depths of the heart
— there is not only the fallibility of the creature, but
an actual failure of the creature, a created initiative
which — since it is not caused by God — can only be
an initiative of non-being, of deficiency in being, of
lack, what I have called a nihilation.
At bottom the whole affair is contained in a Gos¬
pel saying: Sine me nihil potestis facere, it is said in
Saint John, 15:5.
Well, this text can be read in two ways.
It can be read: Without Me you can do nothing —
nothing good. This is the line of being or of good,
where God has the first initiative.
And it can also be read: Without Me you can do
nothingness, without me you can introduce into being
that nothingness or that non-being of the due good, that
privation, which is evil. And this even, this initiative
of evil, you can have it only without Me (for with
Me it is good jonly that you can do). Here we have
the fine of non-being or of evil, where created liberty
has the first initiative.
Such a view involves a series of positions which I

33
purposely set forth in summary fashion (because it
was the first sketch, in a work destined for the public,
of ideas that I had been pondering for twenty years)
in Existence and the Existent. I am going to recall them
rapidly, and I shall return to them again in the sec¬
ond part of this chapter.

3. There is in the first place the theory of Saint

Thomas on the non-consideration of the rule. This
theory is a metaphysical discovery of first importance,
an absolutely fundamental one and one without which
no philosophy of evil is possible. But Saint Thomas
had such a lofty and magnanimous genius that he
gives us this treasure only in passing. Besides, why
should he cling to a metaphysical discovery? It was
theology that mattered to him.
I have tried to summarize this theory in the chapter
“Saint Thomas Aquinas and the Problem of Evil” of
my book De Bergson a Thomas d’Aquin. The cause of
evil of action is always a lack or a failure, a defectus
in being or in the operative powers of the agent. The
action of limping has for its cause a defectus of the
motor system.
If it is a case now of the evil of action of free will,
the defectus in question must itself, clearly, be volun¬
tary and free. And yet on the other hand it must not
already be an evil of free action, for then we would
be in a vicious circle, and would be assigning, as cause
of a certain effect (that is, of moral evil), this effect
itself. We would be arguing in a circle.
Well, says Saint Thomas, we must posit at the origin
of moral evil, as cause of it, a voluntary and free
34
defectus which itself is not yet an evil or a privation,
but which is a mera negatio, a mere withdrawal from
being, a mere lack of a being or of a good which is
not due: a mere absence which I introduce voluntarily
into being.1
You see, it is Saint Thomas who has opened the
window onto the perspective of non-being. This de¬
fectus, this free failure which is the cause of moral
evil without being itself an evil, is the non-considera¬
tion of the rule — which is not, note well, an act of
non-consideration, but a non-act of consideration. To
consider the rule is not, of itself, something due. That
a craftsman not hold his ruler in hand — this is not,
of itself, an evil. But it is the cause in virtue of which
he will saw a piece of wood wrongly. And this very
fact, not having his ruler in hand, becomes an evil, or
the privation of a due good, in the application to the
act or the operation itself, in the very act of cutting
the wood.
Note well that this non-consideration of the rule is
something real, since it is the cause of the sin; and it is
something free, it is therefore a free initiative of the
will. And it is the cause of the evil of the act of choice
only according as the act of choice takes place at an
instant of time when it is present. And yet, being
cause of the evil, it precedes the evil, at least by a
priority of nature.
When Saint Thomas says that non-attention to the
1 Cf. De Malo, q. 1, a. 3, corp. and ad 13; Sum. iheol., I, 49, 1,

ad 3; I—II, 75, 1, ad 3; Sum. contra Gent., Ill, cap. 10; and my book
De Bergson d Thomas d’Aquin, Ch. VII (Paris: Hartmann, 1947)
[English version of this chapter. Saint Thomas and the Problem of
Evil, Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1942].

35
rule must be considered as prior to moral evil, it is
above all a question then of a priority of nature. In
this concrete whole, to act without considering the
rule, there are two instants to be distinguished, if not
according to time — this is a point we shall see pres¬
ently — at least according to ontological order. First
instant of nature: not to consider the rule, which is a
mere withdrawal from being, a mera negatio, a mere
absence of a good that is not due. And, second instant
of nature: to act with this absence, which, from the
sole fact that one acts with it, becomes a privation,
the absence of a due good, and causes the operation
to deviate. And these two instants of nature are really
distinct one from the other, since the first instant is
that of the cause of evil, and the second that of evil
caused, and since there is always a real distinction
between the cause and the effect.
Now we know that our human intellect can con¬
ceive non-being, and therefore evil, only ad instar
entis, after the fashion of being, and consequently by
speaking of it as of some thing, as of a kind of so-called
quality. If in spite of this, through or beyond the
auxiliary being of reason which we have thus con¬
structed, we have seized non-being in its existential
reality in the bosom of being rendered “lacking” or
“deprived” by it — well then, in order to treat of evil
in its existential reality itself, by disengaging it as
much as possible from the being of reason which
reifies it, we shall find it absolutely necessary to em¬
ploy a language which does violence to our natural
manner of thinking and does violence to words. We
shall have to say that when the creature takes the free

36
initiative not to consider the rule — mera negatio, non-
act, mere lack — it dis-acts, it nihilises or nihilates;
and that moral evil, the evil of free action, is likewise,
as such, a nihilation, which this time is a privation,
privation of a due good.
Finally, a last observation on the subject of the
problem of evil. We must hold with Saint Thomas that
every creature is naturally fallible; God can no more
make a creature, angel or man, naturally impeccable
than He can make a square circle. I have spoken of
this in the chapter on Saint Thomas and the problem
of evil which I mentioned a moment ago, and also in
an essay on “The Sin of the Angel,”2 which is, I think,
that which displeases me least in all that I have writ¬
ten on freedom.
But the fallibility of an intelligent and free creature,
of a person, is something awesome, and something
which has awesome consequences. For God plays fair
with beings, He deals with them according to the
mode of their nature, and, if they are free beings,
according to the proper, and therefore fallible, mode of
their liberty; in other words, He permits that they fail.
From the moment that created persons are naturally
peccable, there will be some who will in fact sin; and
even, if it is a question of human beings after original
sin, all will sin to some extent or other, except in
Heaven (and excepting Jesus —whose person is di¬
vine — and His Mother). Hence we must conclude that
in fact God would
* not have created nature if He had
not ordained it to grace and to that charity by which
2 “Le Peche de l’Ange,” Revue Thomiste, LVI, pp. 197-239
[English translation: The Sin of the Angel. Translated by William
L. Rossner, S.J., Westminster, Md.: The Newman Press, 1959].

37
man becomes, under grace, freely the friend of God;
and that sin is the ransom of glory.

4. The second essential idea for me is that of shat-

terable motion.
The creature acts only under the motion of the
First Cause. I call shatterable motion el divine motion
or activation which causes the free agent to tend to a
morally good act, but which includes of itself, by
nature, the possibility of being shattered. Shattered
how? By a first initiative of the creature which in
nihilating under this motion withdraws from it, posits
the cause of moral evil, in other words ceases freely
to consider the rule. (Attention! Understand well, I
insist again, that in taking the initiative of not con¬
sidering the rule, the creature does not take the initia¬
tive of an act of refusal; its initiative is absolutely not
the initiative of an act, it is the free initiative of a
non-act, of a nihilating, of a not to consider the rule.)
First complementary remark: this shatterable mo¬
tion corresponds to the naturally fallible mode of our
liberty. A shatterable divine motion — it is exactly this
which corresponds to a fallible human liberty. It is
therefore consonant with our nature that we should
receive shatterable motions to moral good, and nothing
is more normal and philosophically grounded than the
notion of shatterable motion; it connotes a conformity
with human nature which founds an altogether gen¬
eral law.
Now it goes without saying that God can give to
certain ones motions unshatterable from the very first.
Their liberty will be, to this extent, divinely preserved

38
from its natural fallibility, will act well without run¬
ning the risk of failing, will be divinely protected
against the eventuality of a non-consideration of the
rule. But it is clear also that this is not the ordinary
case, since, as I have just noted, it is a general law
that God deals with us according to the mode of our
nature. A motion unshatterable from, the very first is
something extraordinary, exceptional, supra-human;
God gives such motions at His pleasure, to be sure, to
whomever He wills in whatever cases He wills. This
is the mystery of the divine free predilections.
But ordinarily, normally, according to the fallible
mode called for by our fallible nature, what God gives
to free agents is shatterable motions, which are shat¬
tered if at the moment of time when the election is
about to be made the free agent nihilates in not con¬
sidering the rule; and which, if they are not thus shat¬
tered, fructify of themselves, I say of themselves or
by the very love of God from which they proceed,
of God Who has loved us first — fructify of themselves,
without having need of being completed by the
slightest actuation or determination coming from the
creature, into unshatterable motions (let us say, if you
will, into efficacious graces) which replace them and
under which the creature, freely and infallibly, will
consider the rule in its very operation and will pro¬
duce the good act to which it is moved by God.
Second remark: from the very fact that it can be
shattered by the creature as first (deficient or nihilat-
ing) cause, the shatterable motion of itself implies a
general permission, indeterminate and conditional,
that the creature opt for evil if it wishes — if it takes

39
(which by itself it can do) the first initiative of
nihilating.
You see here another example of the dissymmetry
between the line of good and the fine of evil. In the
line of good the idea of an indeterminate or undiffer¬
entiated divine motion, which it would depend on
created liberty to complete or terminate in one direc¬
tion or in the other, is an inadmissible idea, since of
the smallest good determination God has the first initi¬
ative, is the first cause.
But in the line of evil a permission (I do not say a
motion), an indeterminate or undifferentiated divine
permission, in virtue of which, if the creature wishes,
shatterable motions will be shattered and fissures or
abysses of nothingness, of moral evil will be intro¬
duced into being — such an indeterminate divine per¬
mission is a valid and necessarily required concept,
because in the line of non-being it is precisely the
creature, and not God, who is the first cause, and who
takes the first initiative.
Third remark: we finally begin to see how the deci¬
sion to enter frankly, when one treats of evil, into the
perspective of non-being, and of the initiatives of
nothingness taken by the creature, breaks the iron-
collar of logical impossibilities in which the human
mind seems imprisoned with the problem of the rela¬
tions between God and man according as the latter
does good or does evil.
We read in the Koran, Sura IV, verse 79 (transla¬
tion a little forced, but which, a great Islamologist
whispers to me, can be justified by the glosses of cer¬
tain Moslem commentators): “All that you do which

40
is good comes from God, all that you do which is evil
comes from you.” And this is indeed what we Chris¬
tians are perfectly convinced of in our instinctive con¬
sciousness and the spontaneous certitudes of our faith.
But when it comes to learned reflection, philosophical
or theological, how reconcile these two assertions?
If all that you do which is good comes from God,
then when you do evil it is indeed necessary that
nothing has come to you from God, and therefore evil
as well as good are fatalities of which Allah is the
cause.
If all that you do which is evil comes from you,
then it is indeed necessary that you are free also to
do the good that you do not do, and Allah contents
himself with contemplating that which you do freely
in one direction or in the other.
Louis Gardet tells me that the Moslem theologians
(let us not speak of other theologians) have never
gotten out of the impasse. It is because the idea of
frankly recognizing the line of non-being and the dis¬
symmetry between it and the line of being has never
dawned on them.
In reality, all that I do which is good comes from
God and all that I do which is evil comes from me,
because God has the first initiative in the line of being
and because I have the first initiative in the fine of
non-being.
If I do the good, it is because God has moved my
will from end to end, without my having taken any
initiative of nothingness which would have shattered
His motion at the stage where it was shatterable. All
the good that I do comes from God.

41
 If I do evil, it is because I have myself taken a first
initiative to shatter, by nihilating, the shatterable mo¬
tion by which God inclined me to the good, and to
introduce into my acts the nothingness which vitiates
them. All the evil that I do comes from me.

5. There is a third essential idea for me, namely

that of CONSEQUENT permissive decree (consequent
to the shattering of the shatterable motion, in other
words, to the free initiative not to consider the rule).
As I shall have to explain this idea in replying to the
neo-Banezian objections, I only mention it now.
And I arrive therefore at the second part of our
seminar, at the answers which I propose to the objec¬
tions of Father Jean-Herve Nicolas, or at least (for
he has made a great many objections against my
views) to those which have most held my attention.
I am not unaware that it is often dangerous for a
philosopher to reply to the objections of a theologian,
because these objections risk leading him onto a ter¬
rain which is not his and into a problematic which is
not his.
In principle one does good intellectual work only by
strictly limiting oneself (it is a discipline very mani¬
fest in Saint Thomas) to saying only that which one
has really seen or grasped by the operation of one’s
reason. But if a theologian asks me to reply to one of
his questions — a question which does not belong to
my own problematic, and which comes to me from
without like a ready-made picture frame which I must
fill — I run the risk of replying to him by a construc¬
tion of concepts whereby I adjust as best I can to what

42
he sees, without having really seen myself; in which
case I run the risk of talking nonsense. This is what
happened to me in a too hastily written footnote in
Existence and the Existent, about which I shall speak
presently.
But let us leave this and pass on to our subject.

43
 II

Reply to the Objections of Father Jean-Heme Nicolas

6. The first objection of Father Jean-Herve relates

to the non-consideration of the rule. I have criticized
in our first seminar the manner in which he himself
understands this theory. Now I should like to reply to
his criticism. But first I must observe, so as to fasten
ideas, that in order to understand well the theory of
the non-consideration of the rule, it is not without
profit to place it in its concrete context, by thinking
of what takes place within us when we make a sinful
moral decision. It is an excursion into the theory of
free will.
Well, there is first of all the speculativo-practical
plane, where I envisage my conduct in the sole light of
universal moral values and norms, anteriorly to my
practical decision.
On this plane, and as long as I consider my possible
acts and my possible comportment according to the
value that they have of themselves, abstraction made
of the inclinations of my subjectivity in the given
situation —in other words, as long as I listen to my
conscience — I feel myself bound by the moral obliga¬
tion to do good and avoid evil. In short, as long as I
actually consider the law, I feel myself restrained by

44
it, prevented from willing that which is morally bad.
It is when I pass to the other plane, to the plane of
the practico-practical judgment and of the free election
itself, that I can act against the law. In this case it is
a good which is not the moral good, a good-for-my-
desire but which is morally an evil, — for example,
vengeance to be taken on an enemy, which I constitute
my good here and now, and so much the worse for the
law! Yes, but this is possible only if at that moment,
though knowing well the law, I cease to look at it.
This means that on the first plane, on the plane of
the speculativo-practical judgment, while I was de¬
liberating, however rapidly it may have been, on that
which I was going to do, I considered the rule or the
law of human beings. This is very evident, otherwise
there would be no advertence in sin.
And on the second plane, the plane no longer of
the judgment of conscience, but of the practico-prac¬
tical judgment and of election, I can evade the moral
obligation — yes, on condition that I voluntarily with¬
draw my glance from the perspective of the moral, in
other words, on condition that I cease freely to consider
the rule.
The initiative not to consider the rule is, each time
the sin of which it is the cause is a deliberate sin, a
cessation of considering the rule — not by an act, to be
sure, but by a free mere nihilation, a mera negatio,
a voluntary mere slipping into non-being, non-acting.
These remarks enable us to see better that the non¬
consideration of the rule which is the cause of moral
evil or of sin, and which of itself is not yet an evil,
occurs (let us speak approximately) at the same mo-
45
merit of time at which the election is going to occur,
and has over it (however it may be with the question,
on which I shall touch shortly, of priority in time) a
priority of nature.
What reproach, now, is made to me by the neo-
Banezian school?3
I am told first of all that for anyone who is familiar
with the doctrine of Saint Thomas on evil every
defectus is an evil, a privation, either ontological, or
moral. The idea of a defectus, of a failure which is a
mere negation, not the privation of a due good, is there¬
fore entirely inadmissible. It is an idea contrary to
Saint Thomas, “excluded by his whole metaphysics of
evil.”4
The misfortune is that, as neo-Banezianism even
concedes, it is Saint Thomas himself who made use
of the formula: the non-consideration of the rule is a
defectus which is neither an evil of suffering nor an
evil of fault, but a mera negatio. Saint Thomas employs
this formula each time that he explains himself on the
non-consideration of the rule, the cause of sin. If it
is an anti-Thomist idea, Saint Thomas would all the
same have had to be aware of this.
It is nevertheless true that it is only in the case of
the non-consideration of the rule that he speaks of a
defectus which is but a mera negatio. If I seek why he
expresses himself thus, I find in the first place that the
word defectus imposes itself “from the rear,” so to
speak, because Saint Thomas has begun by positing
as an absolutely general principle that the cause of evil

3 Cf. Revue Thomiste, LX, 2, pp. 200-205; 4, p. 517, footnote 1.

4 Revue Thomiste, LX, 2, p. 204, note.

46
of action is always a defectus in being or in the opera¬
tive powers. Even if, as in the case of free will, it is a
question of a mera negatio, this will remain true.
But this is an altogether secondary remark. What is
important is that the word defectus imposes itself here,
if I may so put it, “from the front”: because on the
one hand this same mera negatio which is the non¬
consideration of the rule as cause of the sinful election
becomes a privation, the absence of a due good, in the
sinful election itself; and because, on the other hand,
insofar even as cause (and mera negatio) it already
contains within it its effect, is pregnant with it, with¬
out yet being it. Let us be suspicious of purely gram¬
matical objections, especially when they reprove an
author as exact as the Angelic Doctor. Here the objec¬
tion has not seen that the effect pre-existing always in
some manner in the cause, and, moreover, in the
particular case, this cause of evil becoming evil itself
from the instant that it produces its effects, by this
very fact the cause of moral evil, which is a mere
absence or a mere cessation, merits the name of defectus
or failure.

7. After this, let us not be surprised to see this same

grammatical objection appear under another form, and
this time in an apparently more menacing manner,
since I most certainly do not have a right to the same
considerations as Saint Thomas, and since this time
it is no longer the language of Saint Thomas but my
own which is under attack. The use that I make of the
concepts of non-consideration of the rule, of failure,
nihilation, fissure of being, etc., is, I am told, an

47
ambiguous use, relating now to mera negatio, the cause
of sin, now to the sin itself — ambiguity which suffices
to ruin my views on the subject.
Well, I do not believe at all that the use which I
make of these concepts and of these words is ambigu¬
ous, if one takes care to be attentive to the context
every time, which indicates clearly in what sense they
are to be taken.
And if they nevertheless entail of themselves, yes,
a certain ambiguity, it is precisely because the reality
to which they refer is itself ambiguous. This is what
I mean:
As is indicated in Schema No. 2, the correct notion
of the non-consideration of the rule, such as Saint
Thomas conceived it and as we must conceive it, is
altogether different from the neo-Banezian notion, of
which I spoke in our first discussion.
The fact is that at a same moment of time we have
two instants of nature really distinct one from the
other. First instant of nature: the free non-considera¬
tion of the rule, which is a mera negatio. Second instant
of nature: the sinful act of election, deflected by this
non-consideration; and in the effectuation itself of this
act, the non-consideration of the rule becomes 'priva¬
tion, privation of a due good, sin of omission, implied
in the deflected or sinful election, as well as the turning
from God and the turning toward goods which are
not the moral good. All this —the failure to consider
the rule, the turning from God, the turning toward
false goods — constitutes the privation, the nihilation
which is the moral evil proper to the sinful act of
election.

48
 First instant of nature j-.N°f the^mle^0" =\ Mera negatio

J
1
1 sc3
G

(D
m
a
G
4-*

<
«4-l
in O
<D

v.
d
cq

i
Z

The two instants of nature at the instant (temporal) of causation.

 You see, then, that as I just remarked, the same
non-consideration of the rule — the same failure, the
same fissure of being, the same nihilation, is now, at
the first instant of nature, mera negatio and cause of
the sin; now, at the second instant of nature, privation
and sin of omission at the center of the sinful election
itself.5 This sort of ambiguity of the non-consideration
of the rule is essential to the genesis of moral evil. It
is the same non-consideration of the rule which at a
first instant of nature is mere negation, and at a second
instant of nature becomes privation; and this is indeed
why Saint Thomas calls it a defectus which is but a
mera negatio and in nowise an evil at the first instant,
and which is moral evil at the second. This non¬
consideration of the rule at the instant of causation
covers the two cases — it is ambiguous in this sense.
And at the first instant of nature, where it is in nowise
an evil, it already merits the name of defectus, because
at this first instant of nature, it is the cause of the evil
of election, the cause of the sin, and in the cause the
effect is virtually contained. (Attention! I do not say
5 By the fact of the effectuation of the act of choice — by the
fact that my will actually passes to election without considering the
rule (which at this stage ought to be considered, it is at this stage
a due good) — the non-consideration of the rule is changed from
a negation into a privation: and it is a question here of a real dis¬
tinction, and of a real change (not, indeed, effected by non-being,
which does not produce at all, but effected by being: as long as
the will did not posit any act of decision, it involved, by its simple
not-looking-at-the-rule, but a mere absence; now that it posits, with
this not-looking, an act of decision, it involves the absence of a due
good). It is thus that in the order of non-being the same non¬
consideration of the rule is, at the moment of the act of choice,
changed from a mera negatio into a privation, just as, in the order
of being, the same man, at the moment of death, is changed from
living being into corpse.

50
that at the first instant the non-consideration of the
rule is virtually an evil! I say that at this instant it
contains virtually evil, just as any cause, without being
itself virtually its effect, contains virtually its effect).

8. I would now like to make a remark concerning

my schema. I beg your pardon in advance for five
minutes of headache. This schema, indeed, can be
interpreted in two different ways.
In the first interpretation it would be necessary to
say that everything takes place at the same instant of
time. So that the non-consideration of the rule would
occur in existence at the same instant of time at which
the act of election occurs, and would have as regards
the sinful act of election only a priority of nature. No
sort of anteriority in time could be envisaged. This is
what was suggested by my manner of speaking in
Existence and the Existent, in which I proceeded very
rapidly in order to simplify the exposition. But to tell
the truth, I do not much like this single instant of
time in which so many things would take place (let
us not forget that in the instant of choice there are
also the last practical judgment and the election which
mutually envelop each other). I would much rather
— see Schema No. 3, where the heavy vertical line
corresponds to the first instant of non-consideration
of the rule, and the broken vertical line to the instant
of election — I would much rather say, and really I
prefer bluntly to say, that the first instant of non¬
consideration of the rule occurs, in what concerns
time, in the last lapse of time, however brief, in other

51
 &JD
•S$
r-£>I 0)
.9 A
s
o
0 C ,
•S
First instant of the non-bein

<u .!
4= J c*
0 -G ^

•5 MW
o QJ

non-consideration of the rule and of sinful election.

M-t
o 4J ^ « 0
G ^ 6 13
si m a
o ~w
!_ 3

The two first instants (temporal) of

T3 3w-
<> a
C -S
co

o
o

Schema No. 3

S3
o
Co cS
S3
O
§ 0
•-Da N
u <5d 0
*to -d
0
i-Q
13 s «
Q 2-S
words in the course of the ultimum tempus6 of the
deliberation, which ultimum tempus ends with a first
instant of the non-being of the deliberation which is
the first instant of the being of the sinful act of election.
Thus the first instant of the non-being of the con¬
sideration of the rule does not coincide with the first
instant of the non-being of the deliberation; it takes
place a little before, during the ultimum tempus of the
deliberation, the non-consideration of the rule con¬
tinuing during the remainder of this ultimum tempus,
and afterwards.
In this view, we have to envisage on the one hand
the ultimum tempus of the deliberation in the course
of which the first instant of non-consideration of the
rule takes place, and on the other hand another first
instant — subsequent — the first instant of the non-being
of the deliberation, and of the being of the sinful act
of choice, the instant at which the non-consideration of
the rule becomes itself a privation, a moral evil. And
at this instant of time there is most certainly to be
distinguished — this goes without saying — the two
instants of nature indicated in Schema No. 2, — just
as there are two instants of nature to be distinguished
in every causation (where, the effect commencing to
be at the same instant of time at which the action of
the cause asserts itself, this action of the cause has a
priority of nature over the effect produced). In our
case, the first instant of nature is the one in which, in
the fiat itself of actual causation, the non-consideration
of the rule (which has already begun previously)
6 On this notion of ultimum tempus, cf. Sum theol., Ill, 75, 7, ad
7; and Guerard Des Lauriers, Nature de Vlnstant, in Revue Thomiste,
janvier-mars 1961, p. 85.

53
causes (negatively), insofar as mera negatio, the evil
of the act of election (from the sole fact that the will
passes to operation without considering the rule); and
the second instant of nature is the one in which the
effect in question occurs, and in which the non-con¬
sideration of the rule becomes itself privation — these
two instants of nature coinciding with the instant of
time which is the first instant of the being of the sinful
act of election.
The fact remains that there is a certain anteriority-
in-time of the non-consideration of the rule as mera
negatio over the instant in which this same non-con¬
sideration of the rule becomes privation — in other
words, a certain anteriority-in-time of the ultimum
tempus of the deliberation, and of the first instant of
the non-being of the consideration of the rule, over
the first instant of the non-being of the deliberation
and of the being of the sinful act of election; this
election itself, let us not forget, occurs instantaneously
but it remains then and is continued by the imperium,
the usus, etc.
As between the two interpretations of which I have
just spoken, I do not declare myself ex professo,
although I decidedly prefer the second. At my age
one no longer has enough time, nor perhaps good
enough eyesight, for these works of logical watch¬
making with magnifying glass whose importance, how¬
ever, I in no way deny, and for which I had a passion
in my youth. One of you (I do not name him, but I
see him in the room) will perhaps apply himself to
solving the question inter sapientes.

54
 9. The second objection bears on the very notion of
shatterable motion.
It is here that I have to make a mea culpa, not,
indeed, concerning what I wrote in the text itself of
Existence and the Existent, but concerning an un¬
fortunate footnote (pp. 94-99)* which Father Jean-
Herve Nicolas has every reason to criticize.7 I have
been greatly vexed with myself in re-reading this foot¬
note now and I gladly repudiate it, for it added to the
notion of shatterable motion — sufficiently clear by
itself, to speak the truth — only so-called complement¬
ary precisions badly arrived at.
I shall tell you the story of this footnote. My book
was already completed and sent to the publisher, when
I had the pleasure of meeting in Cannes Fathers
Labourdette and Leroy, whom I hastened to consult
on the new ideas I was proposing. Louis Gardet was
present at this discussion.
A theological objection was quickly proposed by
Father Labourdette: Every divine motion, he said,
has in the soul a certain effect or a certain term which
it produces infallibly. What is, then, this shatterable
motion of yours that can miss its term? What effect
can it indeed produce infallibly in the soul?
The question was valid. But it was outside my
problematic and I confess that I had neglected it. In
order to reply to it I added in the page proofs a foot¬
note hurriedly written and badly conceptualized, with
an unjustifiable dichotomy between exercise and speci¬
fication. It is this footnote, the result of my inadvert-

• Image Books edition, pp. 101-106.

7 Revue Thomiste, LX, 2, pp. 195-196.

55
ence, which was to permit Father Jean-Herve, some
ten years later, to accuse my shatterable motion of
being an undifferentiated divine motion. Not guilty!
Please God, no! I have never admitted undifferentiated
divine motion.
My misfortune has been that in preparing that foot¬
note I did not distinguish as I should have between
the effect which the divine motion produces in the
soul and the final object to which it tends. Let us try
now to correct this mistake, and may God grant that
I do not fall from Charybdis into Scylla!
It is clear that a shatterable motion is by definition
a motion which can not-attain the final object to which
it tends. As to the effect which, being divine motion,
it produces in the soul infallibly — well, it’s quite simply
a movement or a tendency toward the same final object
— shatterable tendency, this also.
The final object toward which tend both the shat¬
terable motion and the tendency which it produces in
the soul, is the morally good act — in particular, the
good act of choice — to be effected by the free will.
On the other hand when I speak of movement and
of tendency in the soul, I am speaking of psychological
realities more and more recognized today, and which
can depend in us on anything at all, on a truth grasped
by the mind, on a prudential consideration, on a
natural or supernatural inspiration, on any sort of
weight tugging on the will, on a love, on a desire, on
an allurement, nay even on a pressure from the un¬
conscious, or even on some advice received, on an
example, on some reading, etc. All these things can
elicit under the divine action a movement or a tendency

56
determined toward the good, toward this or that good
option to be made. And the movement or tendency in
question toward the good (and at the same stroke
toward the consideration of the rule) which the action
of God causes to be born in us from anyone of the
above-mentioned occurrences — this is the effect pro¬
duced in the soul by the shatterable motion: an effect
which will itself be shattered if and when this motion
from which it proceeds is shattered.
And now, this shatterable motion, if it is shattered,
what is it that shatters it? We have already seen, it is
a nihilating initiative of the created will, the free non¬
consideration of the rule, principle of moral evil al¬
though it is not yet culpable itself.
We have likewise noted: if the shatterable motion
is not shattered, it gives way of itself, as the flower to
the fruit, to an unshatterable motion under which the
good act will be infallibly and freely produced.
And if it is shattered? Well, if it is shattered, it no
longer exists, quite simply, just as the tendency toward
the fruit ceases to exist in a flower that has been bitten
by the frost. The shatterable motion toward the moral
good ceases to exist in order to give way to that motion
— how to call it, “ordinary” or “common”? — by which
God moves all things, with a motion certainly not
undifferentiated but perfectly differentiated as such,
toward the operation to which their powers are dis¬
posed in such or such given conditions, themselves
willed or permitted by the divine providence. Let us
say that all ordination to the moral good being sup¬
pressed by the fact of the nihilation of the creature,
the shatterable motion toward the moral good gives

57
way to a simple pre-motion to all that there is of the
ontological in the act of election — sinful — which is
going to be accomplished. We shall return to this point
in a few minutes.
These, then, are the precisions that I ask you to sub¬
stitute, in Existence and the Existent, for my unfortun¬
ate footnote of pp. 94-99.8

10. There is a third and final point to be examined

here: the question of consequent permissive decree.
8 At the same time I think that I have replied to another objec¬
tion, which rests on a sheer misunderstanding. How, asks Father
Jean-Herve Nicolas (Revue Thomiste, LX, 4, p. 545), can there
be “refusal by God of efficacious grace” by reason of a “nihilation”
(the non-consideration of the rule) which “is not yet a sin”, a
culpable failure? How, in nihilating thus, has the creature rendered
itself “unworthy” of the unshatterable motion?
But to speak here of a refusal on the part of God is entirely
improper, for in the proper sense one refuses something offered or
something requested; but it is God who — in the shatterable motion
— “offers” efficacious grace (as in the flower the fruit), and it is
the creature who, far from requesting it, “refuses” it (by the very
fact that it shatters the shatterable motion). Let us say simply that
the efficacious grace or the unshatterable motion is not given by
God, and this in virtue of the very nature of tilings, since the
shatterable motion which would have fructified of itself into un¬
shatterable motion if it had not been shattered, has been shattered
in fact by the free initiative of non-consideration of the rule, which
at the same stroke is the free initiative of evil. It is the liberty of
the creature which bars the gift of efficacious grace by positing,
through its nihilating, the cause of evil.
And the creature has not rendered itself unworthy of efficacious
grace or of the unshatterable motion — as if it were necessary that
it be already culpable before falling into evil (which is the vicious
circle that Saint Thomas warns us to avoid). The creature, through
its free initiative of non-consideration of the rule, has itself intro¬
duced into being the principle or the cause — which is of itself but
a mera negatio — of moral evil. And, as I remarked earlier, the
cause contains virtually the effect; the cause of moral evil, which
is not an evil itself, already contains virtually moral evil. The crea¬
ture has not rendered itself unworthy of the unshatterable motion
— it has itself prevented, by its nihilating, that the unshatterable
motion come to be; and in positing the cause of moral evil it has,
for as much as in it lies, rendered inevitable that it fall into moral
evil.

58
At the same stroke I shall reply to the neo-Banezian
objections concerning this Chapter IV of Existence
and the Existent, but without mentioning them ex¬
plicitly, so as not to be too tedious.
In the theory that I propose it is indispensable to
posit the existence of a consequent permissive decree
(consequent to the instant of nihilation or of non¬
consideration of the rule, where the shatterable mo¬
tion is shattered). — I do not much like the words
“permissive decree”; why not say simply permission
(determinate)? Still, let us do with the accepted
expression, which signifies decision not to prevent.
The creature has played its part in the genesis of
evil; it has posited, by nihilation, the cause of evil.
But the effect of this cause — the evil of the free action
— comes into existence only with the free act itself,
which is a being — wounded or deprived being, but a
being. And for this — for wounded being, a bad act,
to come into the world — there is necessary a permis¬
sion of the divine will, a permissive decree. Let us
insist on this point more explicitly than it was fitting to
do in Existence and the Existent.
This permissive decree, let us remark immediately,
bears on diverse articulations of the operation of free
will. A first articulation, a first moment, is the free
election itself, the sinful election, which insofar as
sinful, comprises nihilation or privation, but, insofar
as election, is an act, the act par excellence of free
will. How can I Say that there is free permissive decree
in regard to it, since the cause of evil has already been
posited by the creature?
My answer is that God, instead of letting, according
59
to the order of things, the shattered shatterable motion
give way to a simple pre-motion to the ontological or
the “physical” of the sinful act, could, at least by His
‘absolute’ power, give to the creature an unshatterable
motion to the good election. Such a substitution is
possible of itself — this is why God’s permissive decree
does not follow in an absolutely necessary manner the
failure of the creature not considering the rule; it is
free. But such a substitution, preventing the cause of
evil once posited from producing its effect, would not
only be miraculous, would not only be an exception to
a fundamental law of nature and to the order of things
constituted by God, but would also be this without
reason: for why wait, so to speak, until a shatterable
motion has been shattered by a free agent, in order to
give to the latter an unshatterable-from-the-very-first
motion? Is not an unshatterable-from-the-very-first mo¬
tion by its very nature a motion which brings it about
that infallibly the agent considers the rule and does not
posit the mera negatio which is the cause of evil? Here,
on the contrary, we are by hypothesis in the case where
the non-consideration of the rule has shattered the
shatterable motion and where the cause of evil has
already been posited. This is why I think that in actual
fact the freely conveyed permissive decree always
leaves, in what concerns the interior act of election,
things to follow their normal course, and the choice
to come into being along with the privation which
wounds it.9
9 When Father Jean-Herve Nicolas — I note parenthetically_
considers that according to me the divine will permits arbitrarily
the non-consideration of the rule to produce in this or that creature
rather than in this or that other one the evil which vitiates the act
of election, he attributes to me just the opposite of what I think.
60
 How is it now with the operations of the will which
are consecutive to the election, and, in particular, with
the execution of the free act, passing from the recesses
of the heart into the tissue of the interactions of the
world and of the history of creation? It is there that
we must insist on the absolute liberty of the consequent
permissive decree. For if of itself an evil design
nourished in the heart of a man asks to be exteriorized
in evil action, this is — due to the entanglements of
our psychology — very far from happening always, or
even most frequently; and not only can God turn to
account these entanglements, but even when the de¬
cision to execute the evil action is completely resolute
it is clear that the means are not lacking to Him — to
Him, the master of second causes — either to prevent
this evil action from taking place, or to cause that it
deviate more or less from the intention of the one who
commits it. If (to have, Father Jean-Herve and I, each
our policeman)10 a criminal decides to kill the police¬
man who comes to arrest him, his hand can shake at
the moment of shooting, or the gun can fail to go off,
or the bullet can wound — seriously or slightly —the
poor policeman instead of killing him; or another police¬
man can arrive unexpectedly at the opportune moment,
etc., etc. The events in which the liberty of the creature
wills to introduce or introduces an evil remain, like all
of the created, plastic under the hand of the All-
Powerful.
In short: the bad act of election occurs only if it is
permitted by God, 1° by the undifferentiated permis-

10 Cf. Revue Thomiste, LX, 2, p. 194. It is a question there of a

policeman killed in a demonstration.

61
sion of evil included in the shatterable motion; 2° by
the consequent permissive decree consequent upon the
created initiative of non-consideration of the rule. But
it is apropos the execution of the evil design that there
is verified in an altogether special manner the axiom
that no evil occurs unless it is permitted by God. It
is to this that the use which the Christian conscience
makes of this axiom is above all directed; it is this
which Saint Cyprian meant above all, when he wrote:
“The adversary can do nothing against us without the
prior permission of God.”11

11. This axiom is completed by another axiom of

Christian thought, which Saint Augustine formulated
when he said that God “would never permit evil if
He was not strong enough and good enough to draw
good even from evil.”12 In other words, for I hold the
two formulas to be identical,13 God permits evil only
in view of a greater good, that is to say, by referring
or ordaining this evil to a greater good.
I shall return to this point, briefly, in our third
seminar. Here I should like merely to note that the
consideration of the why (in view of) and that of the
II Saint Cyprian, De Orat. domin., n. 25, P.L., 4, 536.
12 Enchir., Ill, 11, P.L., 40, 236.

13 In this I part company with Father Jean-Herve Nicolas (Revue

Thomiste, LX, 4, pp. 538 sq.), whose positions, moreover, I do not
succeed in grasping (for God acts for ends, vult hoc esse propter
hoc; and what is, then, the end of the permissive decree, or, more
exactly, the end for which what it permits is, if it is not the greater
good to which this evil is ordained?). The text of Sum. theol., I,
22, 2, ad 2, cannot be evaded. And as a matter of fact the other
texts cited by Father Jean-Herve do not signify anything else
(Comp, theol., c. 142) or merely denote (I Sent., d. 46, q. 1, a. 3
and 4) the aspect “originating reason” (according to our human man¬
ner of conceiving), of which the other face is the aspect “finality”.

62
in consequence of which, far from excluding one
another, complement one another.
I shall therefore say that in what concerns, first of
all, the undifferentiated and conditional permission of
evil included beforehand in the shatterable motion —
and in the fallibility of the creature, and in the free
divine decision itself to create a world in which there
would be free agents (which, we know, cannot be
created without being naturally peccable) — well, this
undifferentiated permission that the free creature do
evil if it takes the first initiative of it as nihilating first
cause, is included beforehand in the shatterable motion
1° because it corresponds to the fallible nature of cre¬
ated liberty, 2° because God is certain that He will
draw a greater good from the evil which the creature
will be able to commit.
As regards now the permissive decree (consequent to
the non-consideration of the rule), it seems to me that,
first, the sinful acts of election, secondly the sins and
crimes by which they pass to execution, are permitted
(determinately permitted) both (on the side of the
originating reason) in consequence of God’s respect
for the liberty of the created person, and of the fair
play with which, by very reason of the latter’s dignity,
He deals with it — and on the other hand (on the side
of finality) in view of the greater goods which He
wills to draw from them, principally and above all
in the order of eternal life, but also, secondarily, in the
order of temporal history itself. In the last analysis it
is to grace that everything is ordained. And do we not
know, from Paul and Augustine, that for those who love
God all things, and even sins, cooperate to their good?

63
 12. I have two further little remarks to make, and
we will have finished.
Let us first recall that the permissive decree does not
as such do anything but decide not to prevent; it does
not cause as such. It is causative decrees taking account
of the evil permitted by the permissive decree that will
make enter into the context of actual realizations the
ordination of this evil to a greater good.
Nevertheless it is the permissive decree, it is the
decision to permit made in view of this greater good,
which is at the origin of all of this actual ordination.
From the very fact that the divine permission permits
such or such evil in view of such or such good; and,
in particular, from the very fact that as far as the
execution, the passage into the interactions of the
world, is concerned, it depends on this divine permis¬
sion to extend itself or not to this execution, and, if it
extends itself to it, to permit it either in its entirety or
only in some one or other of its ingredients (let us
think of the possibilities of endless diversity evoked
a moment ago in the case of the poor policeman) —
from these facts, I say, the permissive decree itself
must be said to be formative (although without causal
action and by reason only of the “plan” conceived).
As an author particularly dear to me has said,14 “God’s
permission is not a weakness of God — it is as forma¬
tive as the will of God.”
In the second place it is clear that by the very fact
that it permits that a certain sinful act be accomplished,
the permissive decree itself is accompanied by or has
added to it — I indicated this in passing — a causative

14 Cf. Journal de Raissa, Paris: Desclee De Brouwer, 1963, p. 342.

64
or determining decree, in virtue of which God gives
His cooperation to all of the ontological and therefore
of the ontologically good (and to this only) in the act
in question. What to call the causal motion implied by
such a decree? I have said in Existence and the Ex¬
istent15 that it was the general motion which activates
the whole physical order, and which is not withheld
from the physical content of the evil act. But the
expression “general motion” runs the risk of being
understood in the wrong way, in the sense of un¬
differentiated motion. Let us leave aside, then, this
expression “general motion” since it lends itself to
misunderstanding.16 And let us merely say, employing
a phrase that is barbarous and badly coined on twofold
grounds, but which is time-honored — let us merely say,
“physical pre-motion” to the ontological content in the
evil act.
It is the privilege of the Cause of being to be able to
sustain in things such a pure and sharp distinction that
the exclusively ontological or “physical” co-operation
given by God to an evil act of the free creature pre¬
scinds absolutely from the slightest contact with the
evil with which this act is wounded (wounded by the
initiative of created liberty as nihilating first cause).
And it is obvious that God could only by destroying
15 P. 110, n. 19 [Image Books edition, p. 117].
16 I continue, however, to think that unless one has a prejudiced
mind one cannot misconstrue the expression I used in Existence and
the Existent: general motion (which does not at all mean undifferen-
tiated motion) to the physical content of the evil act — the word
“physical” being synonymous here with ontological, as in many
formulas in use among theologians (“physical pre-motion”, for
instance!), and applying therefore to all of the ontological content
in the order of human action as well as in the order of physis itself.

65
to this extent the order or course of nature,17 refuse
to an agent — which, though taking the free initiative
of the non-consideration of the rule, exists in full opera¬
tive dynamism — such a physical pre-motion inclining
to the second act of operation the powers of this agent.
And this whether it is a question of the sinful election
itself or of the acts of execution which will follow
and which, if and in the measure to which God de¬
cides, will be able to be prevented, but according as
God governs the second causes which within or outside
the agent can interfere with the acts in question, not
according as He would refuse to the created agent the
motion required, in such or such given conditions, by
its nature and by the whole order of creation.
17 By His ‘absolute power’, we have seen above, God could give
to a creature, once the non-consideration of the rule has been posited
by it, an unshatterable motion to the good. But we have also seen
that by His ‘ordained power’ He does not do this at all. This has,
besides, nothing to do with a refusal of the physical pre-motion
inclining to the act of operation, as in the case considered here.
Such a refusal would not be a miracle, but the annihilation of a
fundamental law of created being.

66
 CHAPTER III

How Is Evil Known by God?

1. We come now to the fifth point of my program:

how is evil, moral evil, known by God? I am not speak¬
ing of possible evil, which poses no particular problem
(from the sole fact that God, in His 'science of simple
intelligence,’ knows all the possible goods, He knows
— through them — all the possible evils, which are
nothing other than the privation of these goods). I
am speaking of existing evil, which God knows by
His ‘science of vision.’
The problem is a difficult one. It is even to all ap¬
pearances the most difficult problem in the view that
I am proposing. However, it does not worry me exces¬
sively, since I know in any case, with certain knowl¬
edge, that God is absolutely not the cause of moral evil;
it is therefore absolutely necessary that — contrary to
the thesis universally valid in the line of good, where
the ‘science of vision’ knows only because it causes —
it is necessary that the ‘science of vision’ know evil
without having caused it.1
1 Cf. I Sent., dist. 38, q. 1, a. 5: “Cum scientia sit certa cognitio,
ex ipsa ratione certitudinis, etiam exclusa causalitate, requirit certi-

67
 No theory can escape this difficulty. And less than
any other, certainly, the theory which, while positing
as a principle that God is in nowise the cause of moral
evil, nevertheless has recourse, in order to explain how
He knows this evil, to divine causality itself modestly
concealed under dialectical contrivances, and invents
antecedent permissive decrees by means of which God
knows the sin of the creature because — oh, it’s purely
negative, He is careful not to cause anything! — He
Himself has decided not to do that without which the
sin in question will certainly take place. . . .
In the view that I am proposing there are two things,
— which are not things, but pure nihilations — which
are known by God without being in any manner (and
neither straightforwardly nor surreptitiously) caused
by God: in the first place, that mera negatio, that mere
negation which is the free non-consideration of the
rule and the cause of evil, and which, on the side of the
divine will presupposes only the undifferentiated per¬
mission of evil which is enveloped in the shatterable
motion; secondly, that privation which is the evil itself
with which the sinful act is wounded. How is it pos¬
sible that something, be it a mere negation or a mere
tudinem et determinationem in scito. . . . Et quod scientia ex ratione
certitudinis suae requirat determinationem in scito patet in scientia
nostra, quae non est causa rerum, ET IN SCIENTIA DEI RE-
SPECTU MALORUM.” In other words: no more than our science
is the cause of the things that it knows, is God’s science the cause
of the evil that it knows.
Likewise, I Sent., dist. 36, q. 1, a. 2, ad 2: “Scientia Dei nullo
modo a re causata est; nec tamen est causa omnium quae cognoscit,
sed HORUM TANTUM quorum est per se cognitio, scilicet bonorum.
Mala autem cognoscit per bona, ut dictum est” (that is to say
per ea quae ab ipso sunt, through the things — good insofar as they
are — which have existence from Him, as is said in the body of
the article. Cf. footnote 3, p. 75).

68
privation, be thus known by God without our having
to admit that metaphysical abomination: a determina¬
tion of the act of divine knowledge, that is to say, of
God Himself, by the creature?
What causes the question to be not so terrible as
it seems is that we know perfectly that even in the
line of being, and in the case of created substances, of
created perfections and of the good acts of the crea¬
ture, such a determination of divine knowledge by the
created is already completely excluded. Attention here
to the divine transcendence under the sign of which
this whole third seminar is specially placed! Suppose
(which is not the case, but creation is an act of
liberty), suppose that God did not will that things
should be; in other words, if God had created nothing
at all, if there were neither world, nor angels nor men
nor saints nor blessed, nor even the sacred humanity
of Christ — well, there would be absolutely nothing
changed in the divine act of knowledge, which is God
Himself. Think a little about this. And yet all the
things that He has freely decided to create are truly
and really known by Him, just as they are truly and
really loved by Him. It is always necessary to have
present before the mind such a mystery of trans¬
cendence when one is speaking of problems like those
of which we are speaking now.
The act of divine knowledge, you know, has and can
have but one single object properly speaking, one single
specifying object, namely, God Himself, the divine
essence itself. And by such an object the divine knowl¬
edge is infinitely” and eternally filled to overflowing.
Whence follows that great Thomist thesis that all

69
the other things besides Himself that God knows,
He knows them in His essence and His own un¬
created intelligibility, the sole determining object of
His knowledge.
Now it is important for us to be on guard here
against a crude mistake of interpretation. You know
that Descartes — it’s the origin of modern idealism —
invented the theory of idea-pictures, which would be
the sole thing attained by our intellect, whereas the
real things would remain hidden behind these ideas,
and unattainable by our mind, and would supposedly
be “known” only because these idea-pictures are re¬
sembling portraits of them. Well, we must be careful
not to transfer to God a similar, though inverse, theory;
we must be careful not to imagine that in the divine
‘science of vision’ — where the creative will is linked
with intelligence — God would attain or would prop¬
erly speaking know only His own essence and His own
ideas, which would be as it were models of the things
produced in being by the creative will, and hidden in
created reality behind these model-screens, in such a
way that things would supposedly be known only be¬
cause they would resemble the models in question, at
which alone the divine knowledge would stop.
Let us be on guard against sheltering in our uncon¬
scious a conception of this kind. God is not a Car¬
tesian, God is not an idealist. His knowledge of things
does not stop at His essence. He knows their essences
in His uncreated essence which is His sole specifying
object. But at the same time — because, by means of
the creative idea which causes things to be in then-
own existence, this sole object quod, the divine essence,

70
performs also the function of an object quo — the
‘science of vision’ descends even to things themselves
in their existential singularity. It attains them even in
the most profound recesses of their being and of their
contingent existence, it probes the loins and the heart,
the ‘science of vision’ is par excellence a science of
presentness. The divine knowledge thus attains fully,
exhaustively, existentially, all that there is of being, of
the positive, of good, of the ontologically good and of
the morally good, in creatures, because it itself causes
or makes all of this. In the uncreated eternal intel¬
ligibility as light and in the uncreated essence as sole
specifying object, it grasps as secondary term the cre¬
ated existent in its concrete singularity itself and its
created existence itself totally and perfectly penetrated.
And in spite of this it is not determined by things!
No, most certainly not; it remains in respect to them
in the unimaginable liberty of the infinite transcend¬
ence. As I recalled a moment ago, there would be
absolutely nothing changed in the immanent act of
divine knowledge if God had created nothing at all.
It seems to me that this is a point on which in
general one does not insist enough; and I think that
here the key-notion is provided to us by John of
Saint-Thomas when he treats of immanent acts such
as willing and loving in God (cf. Cursus Theologicus,
t. II, disp. 17, a. 2; t. Ill, disp. 4, a. 4 and 5). What he
tells us on this subject clearly applies also to the ‘science
of vision.’ Created being, which is in nowise a specify¬
ing object for divine knowledge, is for it a terminus
materialiter attactus, a term materially attained, which
is itself posited in esse cogniti, which is itself consti-

71
tuted known or caused known but has not the slightest
function of a determining form with regard to the
divine knowledge. So that all the change is on the
side of the term, caused existing and caused known,
in nowise on the side of the divine act itself. In other
words, through the free divine decree, things — con¬
tingent, and which might not have been — enter, so to
speak, as a pure and gratuitous surplus (of which the
relation to God is most real whereas the relation of
God to them is a relation of pure reason), into the
immutable immanent act through which God knows
Himself. They are divinely illumined and penetrated,
and rendered term materially attained, by the eternal
uncreated intellection itself of God by God. They are
— contingent — known by God (and freely loved by
Him) by and in the necessary act of knowledge itself
of God by God (and the act of love itself of God
by God): but without adding to this act the shadow
of a determination, because it is they, on the contrary,
which are determined by it.
It is thus that the ‘science of vision,’ which knows
all that it knows in the uncreated essence and the un¬
created light, descends even to the created existent
taken in its created existentiality and its created activity
themselves and as such, knows it according to the very
existence which it has extra Deum: just as, to employ
Saint Thomas’ comparison, “through the species of the
stone that the eye has within it, the eye knows the
stone secundum esse quod habet extra oculum, accord¬
ing to the existence that it has outside the eye.”2 This

2 Sum. theol., I, 14, 6, ad 1. It is well known that for Saint

Thomas the species which serves as means for the intuition of the

72
is how — to tell you as best I can what the weak means
at my disposal permit me to stammer on such a ques¬
tion — God knows in its presentness the human clay
which His hands shape, knows it even to the most
hidden core of itself and of its contingent and free
activity, right down to the last depths and to the
slightest tremblings of its subjectivity.

2. And now, what is the case with the line of non-

being when non-being comes — mere negation as the
free non-consideration of the rule or privation as evil
— when non-being comes to fissure this clay through
the deficient or nihilating first initiative of created
liberty?
Let us first consider the case of the free non-con¬
sideration of the rule. And let us understand well that
this free non-consideration is neither a being nor an
act but a non-act and a non-being, a mere absence,
a vacuum — and a vacuum produced not in a specify¬
ing object, but in a simple term materially attained
which is known by the divine science without de¬
termining it in the least. It suffices that the divine
science know perfectly and existentially this term ma¬
terially attained, for it at the same stroke to know in
it, in it which it invests on all sides, the lack which at
such or such moment of time comes to it from its
created liberty. Not the slightest determination of the
divine knowledge by anything created is implied here.
--—-->-—-
external sense is not an image or a species expressa as in the case
of the imagination — it is rather the mere species impressa whereby
the thing, by its action on the organ of the sense, renders itself
intentionally present to the sense, and which causes the tiling to
be known in its own extra-sensorial existence itself.

73
And how could non-being determine or specify the
divine knowledge, when even the created being known
by it is incapable of specifying it? The metaphysical
abomination of which I spoke at the beginning, a
determination of the act of divine knowledge by the
creature, is completely averted.
Similar considerations apply to the case of the priva¬
tion which is the evil of the sinful act. Created liberty
has need only of itself to omit (at this stage, at the
stage of operation, it is a sin of omission) to consider
the rule, and to introduce into its action the nothing¬
ness, the absence of due good, by reason of which it
turns away from God and turns toward a false good.
This culpable nihilation which hollows itself out in
the creature once the latter has already nihilated, but
without yet acting, in the instant of non-consideration
of the rule which precedes the evil option — this culp¬
able nihilation is known in the created existent itself,
in the terminus materialiter attactus, from the very fact
that the ‘science of vision’ which invests the latter in
its entirety, even to the deepest strata of what its
concrete singularity is and is not at each moment of
time, knows it perfectly and existentially.
What is this to say? I recalled a moment ago that
created things, which are for the divine knowledge but
a “term materially attained,” are for it effects rather
than objects, in other words are constituted or caused
existing and constituted or caused known by the ‘sci¬
ence of vision’ — and enter thus as a pure gratuitous
surplus into the immutable and eternal knowledge
which God has of Himself. Well, it is the ‘terminus
materialiter attactus’ in its existential integrity, with

74
all its being and all its non-being, which is thus con¬
stituted or caused known. It is only according to its
being that it is constituted or caused existing, but it is
according to its being and its non-being (according to
all the positive that it does through its second initiative,
but also according to the nothingness — mera negatio
and privation — that it “does” through its first initia¬
tive) that it is constituted or caused known by the
‘science of vision.’ And this is not surprising since non-
being obviously cannot exist but can be known (in
the being in which it is a lack and through the being
whose negation or privation it is).
This is, I think, a more decisive view on the prob¬
lem which concerns us. Let us not forget that we are
speaking here of things which are entirely above our
comprehension; and that all that we can hope for is to
succeed in discovering in them the slenderest thread
of intelligibility for our human thought.
Whether it is a question of the evil itself which
wounds the free act, or of the non-consideration of
the rule which is its cause, let us conclude therefore,
as I wrote in Existence and the Existent, that God
knows moral evil through the created existents whom
He knows through His essence and through His crea¬
tive ideas,3 without His knowledge of evil, any more
than His knowledge of the created existents them¬
selves, receiving from the created the shadow of a
3 This is what Saint Thomas himself teaches: “Unde, per hoc
quod Deus cognoscit essentiam suam cognoscit ea quae ab ipso sunt,
et PER EA cognoscit defectus eorum.” I Sent., dist. 36, q. 1, a. 2.
God knows evil through the things that He causes to exist and
which themselves He knows in knowing His essence — this is what
Saint Thomas says; and not that God knows evil through alleged
antecedent permissive decrees!

75
determination; in short, the 'science of vision’ being
absolutely and sovereignly independent of the created
existent, and, with all the more reason, of the nihilations
of which it is the deficient first cause.

76
 II

The Eternal Purposes

3. The sixth point of my program concerns the

eternal divine plan or the eternal purposes. I shall
employ the two expressions, but I prefer the second,
because the word “plan” runs the risk of suggesting
something prepared in advance, in a temporal anterior¬
ity which we have precisely to eliminate altogether
from our thinking.
I should like to place our reflections under the aegis
of a principle of capital importance, that of the real
presence of all the moments of time to divine eternity.
Each moment of time is present to divine eternity not
only as being known to it, but physically — this is
the word used by the theologians — or in its being
itself.4 On this point see John of Saint-Thomas, Cursus
Theologicus, t. II, q. X, disp. 9, a. 3.
All the moments of time are present to divine eternity
— in which there is no succession, and which is an
instant that endures without beginning or end-be¬
cause the creative ideas embrace according to their
4 Cf. 1 Sent., dist. 38, q. 1, a. 5: “Cum ergo Deus uno aetemo

intuitu, non successivo, omnia tempora videat, omnia contingentia

in tem’poribus diversis ab aetemo praesentiditer videt, non tantum
ut habentia esse in cognitione sua,”

77
own measure, which is eternity and which infinitely
transcends time, the material things which they cause
to be, the proper measure of which is the succession
of time.
According to a splendid text of Saint Peter Damien
— this contemner of philosophy was a rattling good
metaphysician — “the divine today is the incommut¬
able, indefeasible, inaccessible eternity to which noth¬
ing can be added, from which nothing can be taken
away. And all things which here below supervene
upon and succeed one another by flowing progressively
into non-being . . . are present before this today and
continue to exist motionless before it. In that today, the
day when the world began is still immutable. And
nevertheless, the day is already present also when it
will be judged by the eternal judge.”5
The whole passage of time, all its successive mo¬
ments, the whole flock of days is held and possessed
in a single glance by the supreme Instant of infinite
Being. This is completely unimaginable. It is the proper
mystery of the infinite transcendence of God. “There is
no future thing for God,” Saint Thomas Aquinas will
say.6
We must therefore have a holy dread of letting our¬
selves be misled by all those devilish words formed
with the prefix fore which our human, too human,
language naturally causes us to employ. Properly speak¬
ing, God does not foresee the things of time, He sees
them, and He sees in particular the free options and
decisions of the created existent which, inasmuch as

5 Ep. IV De Omnipotentia, cap. 8, P.L. 145, col. 607 B.

6 I Sent., dist. 38, q. 1, a. 5.
78
they are free, are unforeseeable in themselves. Because
they are all indivisibly possessed and measured by His
own eternal Instant, He sees them in the pure existen¬
tial freshness of their emergence into being at this or
that instant of time, in the humility of their own instant
of coming forth.
All of this means — and let us mark this well in our
minds — that God has the entire course of time physi¬
cally present to His eternal Instant, and that He has it
before His eyes in its entirety when He establishes all
things from all eternity.

4. It follows from this that there is no scenario pre¬

pared in advance, in which created agents would play
parts and act as performers. We must purge our
thought of this spurious idea of a play written in ad¬
vance, in a time anterior to time — a play in which
time unfolds, and the characters of time read, the parts.
Father Jean-Herve Nicolas seems to be in full agree¬
ment on this point, but I fear that this is under cover
of a misunderstanding. For if in reality there is no
scenario prepared in advance, in other words if every¬
thing is adventure and improvisation under the direc¬
tion of an almighty Stage Manager whose plan is fixed
from all eternity but assuming7 that He has freely willed
this or that plan rather than some other — and this
simultaneously with the entire unfolding of time —
then it is indeed necessary that in the essential con¬
tingency of the spectacle thus immutably ordained and
directed by God, the characters of the drama have also
their share of initiative, and even their share of first
r Cf. Sum. theol., I, 19, 3 and Summa contra Gent., I, cap. 81-83.

79
initiative in the case where it is a question of the
initiative of evil, of the initiative of that failure or of
that nihilation of which the creature is the (deficient)
first cause.
And neo-Banezianism does not want this. For if the
creature could thus intervene by its first initiatives of
sin in the very establishment of the divine plan, God,
it is thought, would no longer be really the author of
the drama. The ends willed by Him could be frus¬
trated, as if for example the nurse of Saint Augustine
had taken a sudden fancy to strangle the baby — then
no more Saint Augustine!8 This objection is not a
serious one, and we can fully reassure our friends on
that score. If the nurse of the little Augustine had re¬
solved to strangle him, this interior act of election
would in the ordinary course of things have followed,
yes, her free initiative of non-consideration of the rule.
But from there to the execution, we saw in the pre¬
ceding seminar, there lies a world. For God has a
thousand means of preventing, if He wishes, this exe¬
cution; the wicked nurse can renounce her plan for
fear of the risks that it involves, or Saint Monica can
enter the room at the right moment, or an earthquake
can supervene, etc.
No, the argument of Father Jean-Herve is much
more profound, but it is the very same error I am
fighting against. When he asserts that God cannot be
really the author of the drama if, as I think, the eter¬
nal plan is established by Him while taking account
not only of the fallibility of created liberty, but in¬
deed of the actual failure which occurs or does not
8 Revue Thomiste, LX, 2, p. 195.

ao
occur in it —this signifies that in the eyes of Father
Jean-Herve9 God is really the author of the drama only
if He has the first intellectual initiative, the first idee-
matrix of all that which occurs in it, I mean of the evil
as well as of the good, of the evil which He contrives
so as not to “cause” but which His antecedent per¬
missive decrees manage inevitably to have happen.
Do not all the characters of a novel or of a drama sub¬
mit docilely10 to the plan of the author, if the latter is
an author worthy of the name? Here we are again back
to the scenario written in advance, if not in a time
anterior to time, at least in eternity superior to time —
a scenario in which there is pre-established for each
character all that which he has to say or to do in the
theater of the world.

5. Well, let us first consider — however secondary

such a consideration may be — the term of comparison,
deficient in all respects, furnished by human things,
9 If he is so attached to the antecedent permissive decrees, it is
because he holds as required by good doctrine “that God, at this
stage where He conceives the work which He is going to accom¬
plish by His almighty will and in complete independence. Himself
introduces into His plan the notion of the sins which will be com¬
mitted. . . .” Revue Thomiste, LX, 2, p. 185. Cf. ibid., pp. 193-199.
(Italics mine.) It is thus that evil and “the sins really committed”
“enter into the divine plan in such a way that, finally, whatever the
sinner may say, God does that which He wishes” (Revue Thomiste,
LX, 4, p. 509). Whatever the sinner may say. In the eyes of Father
Nicolas, to say that God causes to enter into the very composition
of His plan the first initiative of nothingness taken by man, is to
say that this initiative diverts the divine will from its objective. It
is not the sinner, it is God, who, by His almighty will itself, causes
evil to enter into the divine plan — here we have, in the question
of evil, the cornerstone of Bahezianism and neo-Banezianism. Let
us be grateful to Father Jean-Herve Nicolas for having squarely
brought this to light.
10 Cf. Revue Thomiste, LX, 2, p. 193, where there is mention of
characters “docile” to the intentions of the dramatist.

81
I mean by the works of imagination of which man is
the author. Why should we take as our example the
most poorly imagined case that comes to mind — and
in order to make use of it in a quasi-uni vocal manner
in transferring it to divine things? Paul Bourget, Henry
Bordeaux, or Mme. Zenai’de Fleuriot, the authors of
bad novels are perhaps authors in the sense that one
invokes against us. In the case of true novelists, in
actual fact, it is their characters at the same time as
themselves who make the novel; their characters resist
the author, they do just what they please, even though
the author follows the thread of his creative intuition
with a sovereign force. A blueprint, an architect’s plan
to which the characters would submit docilely would
have ruined everything. See on this point the repeated
testimonies of Julian Green in his Journal; and yet who
will say that Julian Green or Bernanos or Dostoyevsky
are not really the authors of their novels?
But let us leave this, and let us return to that which
matters, to the divine transcendence, in regard to which
all notions drawn from below are but very poor
analogates.
I have said that the divine purposes are infrustrably
fixed from all eternity from the fact that God, at the
eternal Instant to which all the moments of time are
present all together, has freely formed such or such
purposes for the world rather than an infinity of other
possible purposes (or even no purposes at all, for He
was free not to create the world). And I have said that
in the establishment, the sovereignly free establishment
of these eternal purposes or of this eternal plan - which
are the sole purposes and the sole plan to be con-

82
sidered since the others were not willed — the intelli¬
gent and free creature has its share by reason of its
initiatives, second initiatives in the line of good, first
initiatives in the line of evil.
And in the line of good it is God who has the first
initiative and who causes absolutely everything as first
cause. And in this line of good the initiative of crea¬
tures — although essentially dependent and second —
has a value and an efficacy certainly much greater than
in the fine of evil, since the good is being. “When the
disciples,” writes Monsignor Journet, “asked Christ to
teach them to pray, he gave them the Lord’s Prayer,
and the first three paradoxical petitions that they had
to address to God” for “divine things,” which “therefore
will come about partially in dependence on our human
initiatives. It must be concluded that the fervor with
which God’s friends pray will decide, to a very great
extent, the outpourings of God’s helping graces, be
they regular or miraculous, the advances made by the
City of God, and any progress in the conversion of the
world.”11 And all this good — it is God who causes it to
be in His work, through the motions of His goodness.
As to the line of evil, if it is the creature (let us
not forget that its very fallibility implies an undiffer¬
entiated permission of evil) which in this line of evil
has the first initiative (of nothingness), and if God
(Who from all eternity knows that at such or such
instant of time this or that creature, through its sole
liberty as nihilating first cause, posits the cause of
moral evil by ceasing to consider the rule), if God

11 Charles Journet, The Meaning of Evil. Translated by Michael

Barry. New York: P. J. Kenedy & Sons, 1963, pp. 172—173.

83
 normally allows, by His consequent permissive decree,
the evil option or election to take place in the depths
of the heart, this same consequent permissive decree
nevertheless allows the acts of execution to be effected
in the world only in the measure and according to the
manner that suit the divine purposes of good; and the
course of things, as I remarked in the last seminar,
thus ever remains plastic under the divine hand.
Now when one asserts that in such a view God is
not really the author of the drama into which creation
is plunged, I confess that such a reproach seems to me
a little outrageous. Do we not know, against the Occa-
sionalists, that the transcendent First Cause is more
really and more perfectly cause because it itself con¬
fers on created things, which are nothing over against
it, the power themselves also to cause? Is not — in the
same order of ideas — God more really and more per¬
fectly the author of the drama because in order to
render it more worthy of His glory He permits to
collaborate in it existents whom He has Himself en¬
dowed with intelligence and with liberty, and has this
created and fallible liberty, incapable of any good
without Him, but capable of evil by itself alone, enter
into the free establishment itself of His immutable
eternal purposes? In order that in a philosophical or
theological theory God not be really the author of the
drama into which creation is plunged, it would be
necessary that this theory forfeit the axiom that all
that which happens here on earth is willed or per¬
mitted by God, and this is certainly not, even for one
iota, the case with the views that I have proposed.

84
 6. All right! It is indeed true that in this view the
Creator of the world does not provide Himself with
the absolutely safe spectacle of a game of marionettes
which would but put into execution a program that He
Himself has conceived for evil as well as for good. It is
indeed true that in this view, if God wills that we
engage ourselves headlong in the battle, it is because
He Himself has first engaged in it the glory of His
name, nay more, because He has engaged Himself in
it completely, by sending us His Son, one with Him
in nature.
In this view, the creature, each time that it does
evil, introduces to this extent nothingness into being,
and undoes for a part the work that God makes. The
work of God runs risks, risks that are real because the
drama is not merely portrayed, it is actually lived.
There are abysses which open out, collapses, disasters.
The gods from below that free agents are when they
take the initiative of nothingness, cause evil and per¬
version to multiply, and invent forms of horror and
of abomination which astonish the angels (and, if I
may say so, be it only to tease a little my neo-Banezian
friends, astonish the Author himself of the drama, in
this sense that if He knows in His ‘science of simple
intelligence’ all possible evil, it is not He, it is the
creature who invents existing evil, and in such an in¬
vention goes beyond all expectation).
But it is in all this, exactly, that the invincible wis¬
dom and the dazzling power of the eternal purposes
manifest themselves. He whose Name is above every
name, the eternally Victorious is certain to win the
game finally; He wins it at each instant, even when He

85
seems to be losing it. Each time that a free creature
undoes for its part the work that God makes, God
remakes to that extent — for the better — this work and
leads it to higher ends. Because of the presence of evil
on earth, everything on earth, from the beginning to
the end of time, is in perpetual recasting. However
real the risks may be, much more real still is the
strength of the arm which causes them to be sur¬
mounted by creation and repairs the damages incurred
by the latter. However deep the abysses may be, how¬
ever great the collapses and the disasters, sublimer
are the heights and the goods to which created being
will be transferred. And doubtless there will also be,
finally, real losses — all too real — but themselves com¬
pensated by the manifestation of eternal justice in the
creature when, in order to remain to itself its ultimate
End, it prefers over love all the pains of Hell. And the
more the gods from below cause horror and evil to
multiply, the more the saints in their love, accomplish¬
ing in their flesh what is lacking to the sufferings of
Christ, cause the magnificence of good to superabound
(to the point that they themselves — more teasing of
my good friends, but after all the Bible is full of meta¬
phorical figures of speech-will provoke the admira¬
tion of their Lord; for as a general rule the good
themselves, by all their shortcomings, leave unused
many of the treasures that God gives them; so that if
someone is so faithful that all the talents, or almost all,
that he has received bear fruit, he is worthy of the
admiration of Heaven). And finally it is by having
made good use of his liberty moved and activated from
end to end by God, and by having from all eternity

86
contributed for his part as free second cause to the
very establishment of the eternal plan, that the crea¬
ture saved — the one who in the end will not have
said No — will enter into the glory that God has pre¬
pared for those who love Him, and which was His
intention in creating the world, this world where evil
is permitted.
It seems to me that it is only in such a perspective
that one can glimpse just a little the real dimensions
of the mystery of the Cross, and of the folly of the
Cross, and of that other mystery before which Saint
Paul knelt in adoration: “Oh, the depth of the riches
of the wisdom and of the knowledge of God! How
incomprehensible are his judgments, and how un¬
searchable his ways!”12 “God hath concluded all in
unbelief, that he may have mercy on all.”13 “Where
the offence has abounded, grace has abounded yet
more.”14 When Jesus said to Angela of Foligno: “It is
not in order to laugh that I have loved you,” He was
not suggesting to her that the sinners responsible for
His death were only docile performers of antecedent
permissive decrees.

7. All that I have just said was a kind of gloss, not

only of the texts of Saint Paul which I have just cited,
but also of the text of Saint Augustine which I cited
in our preceding seminar: “God would never permit
evil if He was not strong enough and good enough
to draw good even from evil.”
The greater good of which Saint Augustine speaks
— it is in the order of the goods of grace that we have
12 Rom 11:33. 13 Rom 11:22. 14 Rom 5:20.

87
considered it, and rightly so. For it is there that is
found the greater good par excellence — the only one
which can give the final answer to our anxieties, — to
which are ordained absolutely speaking, simpliciter,
all the evils that God permits, evil of fault and evil
of suffering.
It is clear that this greater good simpliciter cannot
be merely the good of the universe or of the world of
nature; for if it is a question of the sin of a person
(and even of his suffering), it is not in the perfection
of the machine of the world, it is only in the goods of
grace and of glory, and the person-to-person love
which unites created agents with God and among
themselves there where we are fellow-citizens of the
saints, that these evils can be compensated and super-
compensated by a good incomparably greater in the
line of good than they are in the fine of evil.
It is the good which has been prepared for the
Jerusalem of heaven and the communion of saints, and
creation completely transfigured — and for each friend
of God in particular, because “to them that love God,
all things work together unto good,” says Saint Paul15 —
and in particular for the poor and the persecuted, and
for the victims of crimes and abominations of which
created liberty has been the nihilating first cause and
the execution of which God has permitted (and even
also, in a sense, for their authors, to whom the grace
of repentance will be offered at any moment whatever,
be it the last moment of their life).
After this, however, it seems to me that we must
also say that in a relative and secondary, or secundum
15 Rom 8:28.

88
quid, maimer the law of the permission of evil for a
greater good applies also in the domain of temporal
history. It is verified in the law of the two-fold simul¬
taneous progress of good and evil, of the wheat and
the cockle — but progress greater in the case of good or
of the wheat; for, everything considered, the good is
certainly stronger than evil.
It is true that grace and nature not being two
closed worlds, but two worlds open one to the other
and in mutual communication, it might happen that
the greater progress (of the wheat over that of the
cockle) of which I have just spoken would occur more
in the order of grace than in that of nature, where in
that case it would be masked by the progress of the
cockle. This is why we have the duty to hope for the
temporal history of men, but without any certitude
that the progress of evil will not there accompany,
with too much power and too much ghtter, the progress
of good.
Let us hope (and let us do all that is humanly
possible —in honesty of conscience — to attain this)
that from social evils which revolt us, from slavery,
from misery, from the power of great monsters which
devour the individual person, from the barbarous con¬
ditions in which so many of God’s creatures five,
human history will emerge not only with the cessation
of these evils, but with an increase of goods for hu¬
manity — so that the spirit may gain ascendancy, that
the unification of the human race may come about
under the sign of liberty, not of a herd conformism,
and that all men may have access free of charge to the
elementary goods of human life! But let us not forget

89
that moreover all these advances themselves — we are
in the history of this world —will be more or less
spoiled (not too spoiled, may it please God!) by evil
which progresses at the same time. And this kind of
overlapping of good on evil, and of evil on good, and
more still (with all the reservations I have just indi¬
cated ) of good on evil — well, such is the history of
the human race.

8. Two further remarks to conclude this section. I

would like, in the first place, to come back for a
moment to the axiom which rules our whole present
discussion: the physical presence of all the moments of
time to divine eternity.
If we have understood the great doctrine which I
have tried to expound, we know that —because the
entire course of time is present at one glance to the
eternal Instant of God — God in His eternity sees to¬
gether and in a single glance the instant of time in
which under His efficacious grace Abraham prepared
to sacrifice Isaac, and the one in which, through the
nihilating initiative of created liberty, Judas prepared
to betray his Master - and the instant of time in which
I indulge in my chatter and in which you listen to me
charitably — and the instant of time in which, through
a nihilating first initiative of the created existent whose
effect the divine “fair play” does not will to prevent,
a great number will yield to the seductions of Anti¬
christ, and the one in which under an efficacious grace
Israel will recognize Jesus and will find her plenitude
in the Church. All these moments are there, present
before God, and it is in taking account both of all our

90
initiatives of good of which He is the transcendent First
Cause and of all our initiatives of evil of which we are
the nihilating first cause, that He freely establishes,
according as He wills to cause or to prevent or to per¬
mit, His immutable eternal plan.
So, you see that in this eternal plan or these eternal
purposes everything is likewise and infallibly estab¬
lished. In the radical fluidity and mutability of the
course of the world and of time there is absolutely no
event — whether it be necessary, contingent, or free,
and whether it be a means or an end with respect to
another event — which according as it is willed or per¬
mitted by the eternal purposes has the slightest in¬
determination and the slightest mutability.
And you see also what we must think of the
moments of reason which we introduce into the
establishment of the eternal plan when we try to pic¬
ture it to ourselves in our fashion. All these moments
of reason are absolutely nothing in God and in the
establishment of the divine plan. They are mere beings
of reasoning reason, which have foundation only in
our manner of conceiving when we wish to picture to
ourselves in terms of time that which, dependent on
the divine eternity, is of itself exclusive of time.
Consequently, when we undertake to picture things
to ourselves in this way, in order to aid our reason in
the hypotheses which it fabricates with a view to ex¬
plaining that of which it is ignorant, we are perfectly
free to imagine the supposed moments in the eternal
purposes according to the model of the successive mo¬
ments in the designs of a dramatist or of a novelist,
or of a general or of a statesman. We are perfectly

91
free to think antbropomorphically, if this facilitates our
reflection, that at a certain moment of reason God
decides to cure a sick swindler in order that he may
restore to a poor man that which he has stolen from
him, and that the aforesaid swindler profits from
this only to do in other victims. Again we are free
to think that at a certain moment of reason God has
decided, but in leaving the obtaining of this end in¬
determinate as to its mode, that the world throw off
a regime of civilization in which social injustice cries
to Heaven — so that the world will throw off this re¬
gime, but (this will be for the divine purposes the
affair of other moments of reason) either by means of
a Christian revolution if generations of Christians have
not betrayed the spirit of which they are, or, in their
default, by means of a revolution rotted by atheism.
In such a case it would be absurd to reproach our¬
selves for making the ends willed by God (that is to
say, the ends to which He wills that this or that be
ordained, for non vult hoc propter hoc, sed cult hoc
esse propter hoc) either variable or indeterminate. Be¬
cause in reality we have posited nothing at all in God.
From the moment that we imagined moments (“of
reason”) succeeding one another in the divine eternity,
we were (and we had therefore to remain) in full
anthropomorphism.16 All our moments of reasoning
16 If someone makes a similar reasoning but in turning it the other
way, for example in saying: “God wills and establishes first (at a
certain moment of reason) that this or that man have the merits
of martyrdom; now the divine ends cannot be frustrated; it is there¬
fore inevitable that then (at another moment of reason) God wills
and establishes also by His first initiative the means for this end, in
other words, the sin of the one who will have this man put to
death” — such a reasoning would simply be inconsistent and devoid
of sense (it would jump from an anthropomorphic premise to an

92
reason and the beings of reason which depend on them
belong only to our representation, to a maya produced
by us in our minds according to our human mode of
conceiving, in order that we may imagine in time that
which is absolutely outside of time. All this has no
reality in God and in the eternal Instant of God; it is
a world of clouds which is swept away as soon as we
pass to the reality of the eternal Sun and of the divine
purposes, to which all things and all events and the
whole succession of time are present at one stroke in
their actuality and their existentiality, and in which
there is absolutely nothing variable and absolutely
nothing indeterminate. Things are ordained there to
ends, yes; but it is not there, on the side of the eternal
purposes, it is only on the side of the created term
that are found the hazards and the mutability which
the material world implies, and the indetermination of
contingent futurahilia, especially of free futurabilia.
All that we can say really, is that the course of the
world and of history is that which it is, and that by it
are manifested to us, in the causation and permission
which intertwine there, the eternal purposes with re¬
gard to it.

9. Rather than introduce moments of reason into

the establishment of the eternal plan, it seems to me —

authentically theological premise and thus end in a bastard and

illusory conclusion), as if one said: God has on His head a crown
of solid gold,—but all that which is divine is uncreated, — there¬
fore it must needs be that this crown is made of uncreated gold.”
It is as a result of such reasonings, wherein the human being of
reason comes to determine the divine reality, that it is so difficult
for many among us to rid themselves of the idea of a scenario
prepared in advance when they think of the eternal purposes.

93
this is my second remark —that one could try, by a
sort of back-and-forth movement, to consider created
things now according to their own nature, now accord¬
ing as they are established by the eternal purposes.
On the side of the eternal purposes we know that
everything is established in a single and indivisible
flash of the divine will whether causative or permissive,
to which is present — naked — the entire course of time
in the infinity of its detail, as well as the heart of each
free agent with its fidelities and its nihilatings.
Whether they be in themselves necessary events, or
contingent, or purely fortuitous, or whether they be
free events, all the events which happen here on earth,
the falling of this leaf, the flight of this bird, the hero¬
ism of this martyr, the petty fault of this child, or the
denial of Saint Peter, or the betrayal and the despair
of Judas, absolutely all the events of this world are,
with respect to the eternal purposes or according as
they are part of the divine plan, necessary by sup¬
position, as immutably established as this plan of
which they are part, and which is necessary hypo¬
thetically — once assumed as willed by God (account
being taken of all the nihilatings of the free creature)
this or that plan instead of an infinity of others which
could have been willed in its place. This follows
clearly, as I have already noted in passing,17 from the
teaching of Saint Thomas, especially in Summa Theo-
logica, I, 19, 3: That God will other things besides
Himself, is not necessary absolutely. And yet it is
necessary ‘ex suppositione’: for assuming that He wills,
He cannot not will, because His will cannot be
17 Cf. above, p. 79.

94
changed.” The things that God wills in a necessary
ex suppositione manner, they are clearly also — I cer¬
tainly do not say in themselves or in their own
nature, I say under a certain aspect, extrinsic to their
own nature if it is a question of contingent or free
beings — they are also with respect to the eternal plan
or according as they are part of it, necessary ex
suppositione.18
^JLet us turn our attention now to created things
considered in their own nature, and let us think of the
acts of created liberty. There are free acts of which,
if they are taken collectively and indeterminately, the
occurrence is certain. According to the example em¬
ployed by Saint Thomas, if all the inhabitants of a
town are bilious it is certain that a fight will break
out — although one cannot say with certainty that at
such or such a given moment this individual and that
individual will come to blows.
If on the contrary it is a question of a free act
individually taken, it cannot be foreseen with cer¬
tainty; its occurrence (however probable it may be in
certain cases) cannot in any particular case be certain.
Of itself, or by the proper nature of the event, it is
in no wise necessary. That in a town of bilious per¬
sons a fight break out at some moment or other be¬
tween some two individuals — this is inevitable, neces¬
sary, certain. That such a fight break out at this or
that moment between these two particular individuals
is neither inevitable nor necessary nor certain.
This being understood, we can remark that the oc¬
currence of certain good things presupposes some sin,
18 “O necessary sin of Adam...” (Blessing of the Paschal Candle).

95
taken collectively and indeterminately. No martyr with¬
out some executioner. The Word was made flesh
in order to redeem the world by His sacrifice and
His immolation, and this presupposes murderers.
On the side of the eternal purposes this supreme act
of love and obedience that is the immolation of Christ
according as it is accepted and willed by Him, and
the infinite merits with which it is resplendent, and
the redemptions that it effects — all the good, at once
human and divine, of this immolation is willed by
God. But He wills all this good without willing in
any way, either directly or indirectly, the sin com¬
mitted by the authors of the death of Jesus. This sin
remains absolutely outside the field of divine causa¬
tion — God is absolutely not the cause of it, even the
cause per accidens.19
Let us return now to created things considered in
their own nature. Suppose that a friend of the Holy
Family, devoid of any prophetic instinct but pro¬
foundly versed in all the divine and human sciences,
knew on the one hand many things concerning the
birth and the childhood of Jesus, and the beginnings
of His public mission, and on the other hand all the
historical context of the Judeo-Roman world of the
period. This man could have been certain that being
given the historical conjuncture and the idea that the
princes of the priests had of the Messiah, as also the
politics pursued by them with regard to the Romans,
19 There where there is no moral evil or evil of liberty, but only
physical evil or evil of nature, the divine action which ’ conserves
the world in being is the cause per accidens of the death of this
lamb causing this lion to live. But of sin God is in nowise the
cause, even per accidens.

96
and being given the unbearable scandal that Jesus
was for the world of the doctors and the public offi¬
cials, there would be some among them to send Christ
to His death, just as in a town where everyone is
bilious there will certainly be a fight. That in one man¬
ner or in another Jesus would in the end be immo¬
lated — this was certain, inevitable.
But if on the contrary it is a question of the sin of
a particular individual such as Judas, for example, then
no man in the world, even supposing that he knew
perfectly the character of Judas, and the circumstances,
could be certain that he would betray Jesus. It is on
an initiative of nothingness (non-consideration of the
rule) of which created liberty, which escapes all neces-
sitation of whatever sort, takes or does not take the
first initiative, that this sin depends.
And on the side of the divine purposes it is because
such an actual failure has been, in the eternal Instant,
known by the ‘science of vision’ as taking place at a
certain moment of time, that the betrayal of Judas has
been permitted. This betrayal would not have taken
place, the condition for its being permitted would not
have been posited, if the actual failure in question, the
nihilating first initiative of a certain creature had not
taken place. (In this case it is another eternal plan
which would have been immutably established by the
divine will.) It was therefore possible, absolutely
speaking, that Judas not betray his Master.
If this event appears to us as something necessary,
inevitable, immutably established in the unfolding of
the Passion, it is because it in actual fact occurred,
and in a history so sacred that it seems to us, by a sort

97
of mirage, to require as to its terrestrial occurrence
itself the same necessity (ex suppositione) and the
same immutability that it has as part of the eternal
purposes (and has there only). But in reality it could
not have occurred; it is then in some other manner that
Christ would have fallen into the hands of His ene¬
mies, and this manner would likewise seem necessary
for the reasons which I have mentioned.
Let us add one further remark. That out of twelve
disciples there be one who betrays, or that in the cir¬
cumstances in which Pilate existed a Roman governor
(or any governor) should condemn an innocent man
for political reasons, there is nothing which is more
in accordance with human nature. All of which con¬
fers on the arrival of such events as much probability
as you please, but not any certitude.
That thus, consequently — and not by reason of an
antecedent permissive decree, but by reason of an
actual failure of created liberty not considering the
rule —the sin of Judas and that of Pilate should in
actual fact have taken place here on earth, it follows
that in this very thing the drama of the Passion, show¬
ing us to an eminent degree “that which is in man,”
attains to a particular summit of beauty. The fact re¬
mains that such is the case because things happened
in this manner, but that this was not necessary (ex¬
cept on the side of the eternal plan and hypothetically,
once supposed the eternal purposes which, account
being taken of the nihilatings of created liberty, have
immutably established that things would happen in
this manner — and which themselves, absolutely speak¬
ing, could have been different).

98
 Ill

Predestination and Reprobation

10. We finally come now to the seventh and last

point of our program: Predestination and Reprobation.
First a few remarks on a distinction that you know
well, a distinction of reason but founded in reality or
a virtual distinction which is altogether indispensable
— a pity only that it is formulated in those so coarsely
hewn words of which theologians seem to have the
secret. I am speaking of the distinction, in God, be¬
tween the will called antecedent and the will called
consequent; better to say, doubtless: primordial or
‘uncircumstanced’ will, on the one hand; and, on the
other, definitive or circumstanced will.
It is the consequent or circumstanced will which is
always accomplished, whether it be will to do or will
to permit. It is the absolute will of God.
But the primordial or uncircumstanced will, the
antecedent will, by which God wills that “all men be
saved and come to the knowledge of the truth”20 —
Saint Paul says expressly, that all men be saved, that
all men come to the knowledge of the truth — this will
is nevertheless very real, although conditional. It is not

20 Saint Paul, I Tim 2:4.

99
a simple velleity, a barely outlined movement by which
one does not will something but only would will it
(although Saint Thomas did on one occasion21 employ
rather untowardly the word velleitas, but not in this
sense). Saint Thomas does not say that God would
like or would prefer, or that He has a vague and hesi¬
tant desire; he says that God wills that all men be
saved. The uncircumstanced will is a formal and prop¬
erly so-called will (see, on this point, John of Saint-
Thomas, Cursus Theologicus, t. Ill, disp. 5, art. 7 and
8). It is the first root of the whole divine economy.
But this primordial will of the infinite Goodness, by
which, taking account only of itself and leaving aside
every other consideration, it wills that all our acts be
good and that we be saved, is a conditional will, and
it can be frustrated.22 Frustrated how? by what sorts
of “circumstances”? — By the initiatives of nothingness
of that created liberty which God Himself has made
and which He has Himself decided to leave a clear
field in governing the world.
When on the contrary it is not frustrated by a free
initiative of nothingness of the creature, then, as I put
it in Existence and the Existent, the antecedent will
is confirmed by the consequent will. I have never said
nor thought that it would realize; it is clear that as
soon as there is realization there is consequent or abso-
21 Sum. theol., I, 19, 16.
22 Not, to be sure, in the sense in which a desire is “frustrated”
in us (by some exterior agent which deprives us, in spite of our¬
selves, of that which we will, and which thus imposes constraint
on us). The antecedent will is “frustrated” but by a liberty that
God Himself has created, and has authorized, according to a funda¬
mental law that He Himself has established, to evade Him if it
wishes, and which in fact produces an evil act in the world only
with His permission,

100
lute will. But when this realization is something good
and in the very measure in which it is something good,
a good and meritorious act especially, it is obviously
willed both by the antecedent will and the consequent
will (which have in this case a same object).
Each time that by God’s consequent or circum¬
stanced absolute will a shatterable motion to good is
given to a creature, the antecedent or uncircumstanced
will is therein confirmed by the consequent will; and
each time that this shatterable motion, not having been
shattered, fructifies into an unshatterable motion to
which it gives way, the antecedent will is therein con¬
firmed by the consequent will. Each time that man
does the good, it is not only the consequent will, it is
also the antecedent will of God that is done on earth —
as confirmed then by the consequent will. Each time
that a soul is saved, the antecedent will, which wills
that all souls be saved, is obviously accomplished — as
confirmed by the consequent will.

11. But it is about predestination and reprobation

that I must speak to you. And in thus entering, in spite
of myself, onto the terrain of the theologians, my first
word concerning them, concerning my friends the hard
Thomists, will be the expression of a regret. What a
pity that in order to try to gain, by means of analogies
which should be elaborated and refined with the
greatest care, some understanding of that which in¬
finitely surpasses our intellect and is hidden in the
transcendence of God, one has recourse from the be¬
ginning to the shallowest meanings of the words that
we are indeed forced to draw from our human experi-

101
ence! We saw this a while ago with the word author.
We are going to see it now with the word choice.
The elect are, by definition, those chosen. Conse¬
quently, must we not say with the Banezians and neo-
Banezians: “Reprobation is the counterpart of election;
in its very concept choice implies the forsaking of a
certain number; there would be no choice, if none were
abandoned”?23 There it is, it’s as plain as daylight.
“There would be no choice if none were abandoned.”
It’s evident, isn’t it? Consider a housewife who is
doing preserves. She is seated in her kitchen, with
a large basket of apples in front of her. And by
hypothesis these apples are all alike (no more praevisa
demerita than praevisa merita, no more apples already
blemished than apples juicier). From among these
apples that are all alike, our housewife chooses a cer¬
tain number of them to place in her preserving-pan,
and at the same stroke, it is very clear, the others
are left aside. Oh! one does not wish them any harm,
one simply leaves them aside, one does not choose
them. Naturally, not having been chosen they will be
thrown into the garbage-can, but this will be decided
later, when having remained some days in the basket
these apples which have not been chosen will begin
to spoil. Then they will be thrown into the garbage-
can by reason of their blemishes, by reason of their
sins. But first of all it was clearly necessary — since
it is the other apples which have been chosen — that
these should not have been chosen, in other words, that
they be negatively, negatively rejected. Negative repro¬
bation ‘ante praevisa demerita.’
23 Revue Thomiste, LX, 4, p. 535. (Italics mine.)

102
 This negative reprobation, “which precedes any de¬
merit”24 — this is the thesis of the school that Father
Jean-Herve Nicolas follows. In defending this thesis
he makes use of two expressions which I would like
to note. He tells us, first, that the soul which God “has
not decided to save,” God “does not love it with that
love of predilection’ which He has for the elect. And
he tells us also: “Whereas predestination comports a
jealous choice by God of the creature whom He has
selected, negative reprobation comports a sort of in¬
difference with regard to the actual salvation of the
one who has not been chosen.”25 You see that this God
who is Subsisting Love itself, and who has first loved
us all, this God who wills that all men be saved, this
God who has sent His Son to suffer for all men (“there
is not a man, nor has there been nor will there be
one, for whom Christ has not suffered,” declared the
Council of Quierzy in 85326) — well, in order that cer¬
tain ones be chosen and predestined it is necessary
that this God of love have for them a love of predilec¬
tion; and as to the others He experiences for them a
sort of indifference (I should think so! As a result of
this sort of indifference they will burn eternally, and
through their own fault: a consequence that the God
of love knows perfectly, much better indeed than any
theologian, at the moment of reason when He does
not choose them). The least one can say about this
theory is that it does not seem very consistent, if not
with the antecedent permissive decrees, at least with
the spirit of the Gospel.
24 Revue Thomiste, LX, 4, p. 536.
25 Revue Thomiste, LX, p. 537. (Italics mine.)
26 Denz., 319.

103
 12. And yet, as long as one will not decide to follow
through to the very end with the principle of the dis¬
symmetry between the line of good and the line of
evil, it is Father Jean-Herve Nicolas and his school
who will be right in saying: if the elect are chosen
gratuitously ante praevisa merita, anteriorly to any
foreseen merit, is there the slightest conceivable pos¬
sibility that the others are not at the same stroke not
chosen, that is to say, condemned negatively, ante
praevisa demerita, anteriorly to any foreseen demerit?
What, then, is the solution? Well, we know that by
His primordial or antecedent will God wills that all
men be saved — He wills that all be saved if only they
do not refuse, for all this is an affair of love, and love
necessarily implies liberty and free gift. He wills that
all be saved if only certain ones do not frustrate this
antecedent will of universal salvation by a free nihilat-
ing of their will which will make them, at the very
instant when it settles down for eternity, prefer to the
beatific vision and to the love of God over and above
all, the love over and above all of their own grandeur,
be it at the price of all the flames and gnashings
of teeth.
What does this mean? “I choose all,” said the little
Theresa of Lisieux. Cannot God do the same? And
this is where the analogical concept of choice is prop¬
erly elaborated.
By His antecedent will God chooses them all (con¬
ditionally); by His antecedent will they are, with a
total gratuitousness, all chosen (conditionally, since
to be conditional or uncircumstanced is the proper
characteristic of the antecedent will).

104
 We do not forget, for all that, the absolute liberty
of the divine predilections, and that God has prefer¬
ential choices and loves which are their own reason.
Just as He can give to whomever He wills, as if by a
miracle, an unshatterable-from-the-very-first motion to
moral good, so also He can, as if by a miracle, desig¬
nate for eternal salvation and predestine uncondition¬
ally from the very first whomever He wills. To these
He will give, at the very instant that their souls leave
their bodies, an unshsLttershle-from-the-very-frst mo¬
tion to love Him over and above all; and to whatever
deviations they may have abandoned themselves dur¬
ing their lives, they will be saved as if by miracle.
There we have, if I may so put it, a privileged group
of the predestined, and it is in regard to them that one
can speak with good reason, and in the strongest sense,
of love of predilection. The Gospel has proclaimed the
equal dignity of all men; but as concerns the affairs of
the Master of the vineyard with men, which are, I
repeat, affairs of the heart, the Gospel is far from being
egalitarian.
If it is a question now of the other elect, of the
great mass or of the general run of the elect, then it
is before the ordinary regime and the ordinary ways
called for by the nature of things that we find our¬
selves — God deals with them according to the normal
course which befits fallible liberties. Each has been
conditionally chosen, by the antecedent will; each is
loved specially-for itself, with that love which wills
that all be saved if the creature itself does not obtrude
any obstacle by its own initiative of nothingness. And
if the obstacle in question is not posited, if the initia-

105
tive of non-being is not taken (which God knows from
all eternity), from all eternity the consequent or cir¬
cumstanced will, the absolute will of God confirms
purely and simply, in a manner unconditional this time,
and unfailingly efficacious, His antecedent will with
regard to them. By this absolute will they are elected
in the proper and decisive sense of the word, uncondi¬
tionally elected, and from before the world was, since
from all eternity.
And if you have well understood all this, you have
understood also that it is ante praevisa merita, an¬
teriorly to any merit on their part, by reason only of
the pure initiative of the divine goodness, by reason
only of the creative and saving love which is directed
on them, that all the elect are chosen and predestined,
those who are chosen unconditionally from the very
first, and those who are chosen unconditionally from
the fact that a voluntary nihilating of created liberty
has not frustrated the antecedent divine will. No one
‘discerns himself’ for, or makes himself worthy of, eter¬
nal life; it is an absolutely free gift of the grace and
generosity of God. The merits of the elect, far from
being the reason of their election, are there, on the
contrary, because from all eternity (“before the world
was”) - in that eternity to which all the instants of
the life of a man, the last as well as the first, are
present together - the elect have been unconditionally
chosen by the absolute will of God, either at one stroke,
or, if it is a question of the “general run of the elect,”
according as it confirms the antecedent will, this latter
not having been frustrated.

106
 13. I must insist now on a point that is especially
important, namely, that in not taking the initiative
(nihilating) of not considering the rule (and therefore
of shattering the shatterable motion), I do not posit
of myself any act, and do not take of myself any
initiative by which I would merit in any way, or would
add in any way whatsoever, the shadow even of a
determination to the shatterable motion. Let us not
forget that as cause of sin or mera negatio the non¬
consideration of the rule is not an evil (either physi¬
cally or morally). To consider the rule, at this stage
(that is to say, before the effectuation of the act of
choice), is no longer a good that is due, a thing having
the slightest moral or meritorious value (nor even a
thing physically required for the normal functioning
of anything27). Not to nihilate, not to take the initia¬
tive of not considering the rule, is a mere material
condition by which the creature, without adding any¬
thing of itself, obtrudes no obstacle to the love of God.
In other words, not to ‘discern myself or discriminate
myself for evil and in the line of evil (in not taking
the initiative of a nothingness), this is in absolutely
no manner to ‘discern myself or discriminate myself
for good, and in the line of good or of being; it is only
not to budge under grace.
As I wrote in Existence and the Existent, not to
nihilate under the divine activation “does not mean
27 The consideration of the rule becomes a due good only at the
instant of the effectuation of the choice. In others words, it is when
the shatterable motion, not having been shattered, fructifies into
unshatterable motion and gives way to it, that the consideration of
the rule is an act morally good. Then, in the instant of the effectua¬
tion of the choice, it is under the motion of efficacious grace that
the rule is considered, and the good election effectuated.

107
acting on one’s own to complete, in any way whatever,
the divine activation. It means not stirring under its
touch, but allowing it free passage, allowing it to bear
its fruit (the unshatterable activation) by virtue of
which the will (which did not nihilate in the first
instance) will act (will look at the rule efficaciously)
in the very exercise of its domination over its motives,
and will burst forth freely in a good option and a good
act. It will then be all the more aided by God, for
there is no aid stronger than that which possesses a
decidedly existential value, which decidedly and effica¬
ciously causes an act freely posited to come into exis¬
tence — an act surrounded on all sides with being and
with goodness. One man may have received shatterable
motions or activations of a higher sort than those re¬
ceived by another. If one renders them sterile by freely
nihilating, while the other does not render sterile those
which he received, and which fructify of themselves
in shatterable activation, that other will have been
more greatly loved. He will have been loved to the
degree which counts above all else, the degree of the
communication or effusion of goodness in the exercise
of the existence and effectuation of the act.”28 He will
have been more greatly loved, and not indeed by rea¬
son of his merits, for no creature is more lovable ex¬
cept because it is more greatly loved by God; it will
have been more greatly loved by reason only of the
love with which God has loved it first, and by which,
as we explained a moment ago, He has chosen and
predestined it.

28 Existence and the Existent, pp. 100-102 (Image Books edition

pp. 107-109).

108
 14. As to the others, the condemned, it is through
their fault and by reason of their demerits that they
will have been less loved. I have already noted that
Saint Thomas takes great care to call them the fore¬
known (and not the “negatively condemned”!). God
knows from all eternity that they will be, that they
are condemned — but not because He would have con¬
demned them in advance, even negatively; on the con¬
trary it is they who have refused God. It is post prae-
visa demerita, “after” their “fore”-seen demerits, that
they are condemned, because they have withdrawn
from divine grace by their free initiative of nihilating
first cause. In short, it is they themselves who have
“discerned” or discriminated themselves for evil and
for Hell, when at the end of their life they have ir¬
revocably shattered the last grace offered. At that time
they have for ever preferred their own grandeur — to
be to themselves their last end — to the supernatural
beatitude which presupposes the love of God over and
above all. They prefer Hell even while cursing it. They
have that which they willed, that which they have
themselves chosen as the supreme good; they have put
their beatitude in themselves and they will hold fast
to it, they are fixed in aversion of God.
At the same stroke, in what concerns the divine
government of beings, they have passed from the
watershed of mercy to that of justice29: so that it is by
manifesting in them His attribute of justice — justice
which, to speak-the truth, is above all patience (what
is more awesome than that patience of God which
makes Him endure being eternally rejected by a crea-
29 Cf. Sum. theol., I, 103, 7.
109
ture whom He has made?) — it is by manifesting in
them his eternal justice that God will draw from their
fault a greater good, not for them, most certainly, but
this time for the whole order of created nature and of
the machine of the world, since, having refused love
and rejected God, they have themselves put below
this order all that which by the privileges of person¬
ality emerged in them above it.
And let us make here one further remark. In their
regard God wills the good of His justice and of their
just chastisement, but because it is they who have ex¬
cluded themselves from the goods to which in the first
place and of Himself He had ordained them. It is not
in view of their just chastisement, and of the manifes¬
tation of His justice, that He has permitted their sins!
It is by reason of their obstinacy in evil that their
faults serve finally the epiphany of God’s justice ap¬
pearing in its terrifying beauty.30
All the faults that they have committed during their
life, God has permitted them by referring them to a
greater good, to a greater work of love — the good of
the superabundances of grace, and of the reparations
effected by the charity of the saints; and, as concerns
the fore-known themselves, this greater good included
as one of its elements — conditionally, if they did not
evade the profferred grace — their repentance. And
30 This epiphany of the divine justice is thus the final reason of
the reprobation of the praesciti, but the obstinacy of the free crea¬
ture in evil being presupposed; it is thus that we must understand
Sum. theol., I, 23, 5, ad 3. Likewise, if in the last analysis every¬
thing depends on the divine will alone, it is because, as we noted
above (pp. 105-106), God could have — but contrary to the ways
called for by the nature of things — given to all an unshatterable
motion to love Him over and above everything.

110
from all eternity God sees that they have so evaded.
And at the end of their life the last motion which He
has sent them was directed toward their final repen¬
tance, and it is they themselves who by their initiative
of nothingness have shattered this motion. And all this
is from all eternity naked before God, so that all this
is determinately established, even to the least ripple
on the water, as well as all the rest, in His eternal
purposes.

15. There you know now, my dear friends, the views

proposed by your old Jacques on things which far ex¬
ceed his understanding (and not only his).
My idea is that in insisting to the very end on the
dissymmetry between the line of good and the line of
evil and on the essential importance of the perspective
of non-being, these views permit us to break the iron-
collar of antinomies in which we are apparently en¬
closed by this truth that all that we do which is good
comes from God and all that we do which is evil comes
from ourselves. I think also that they are fully con¬
sonant — more fully indeed than the theory of the
antecedent permissive decrees and of negative repro¬
bation — with these venerable declarations of the Coun¬
cil of Quierzy:
“Deus omnipotens omnes homines sine exceptione
vult salvos fieri (1 Tim 2:4), licet non omnes salventur.
Quod autem quidam salvantur, salvantis est donum;
quod autem quidam pereunt, pereuntium est meri-
tum.”31 “Almighty God wills that all men without ex¬
ception be saved, although all are not saved. Now,
31 Denz., 318.

Ill
that certain ones be saved, this is the gift of Him
who saves; and that certain ones perish, this is the
fault (meritum) of those who perish.”
May I say that it is not only with the letter, but
also with the tone, the accent, the cadence, the thin
edge of such assertions that in the little concert which
I have given you my music and my instruments were
in accord?

16. I would also like to note that at the end of all

our considerations we understand better the import
we must give to this thesis of Saint Thomas that God
has not the idea of evil;32 in God there is not the idea
of evil, because the ideas of God are creative or fac-
tive, and because evil is non-being. This means that
God knows, indeed, evil, and knows it to perfection,
but not as something of which He would have had the
idea. Of Himself He knows evil only as possible, by
His ‘science of simple intelligence/ Evil as real, the
evil which disfigures or deprives of a due good the free
act of the created existent, God knows it by His ‘sci¬
ence of vision in the created existent itself, and as
caused by the first initiative, the initiative of nothing¬
ness of the created existent. God is in no degree the
inventor of the evil that the creature does. He has in
no degree and in no respect the initiative of sin — or,
like the author who forms in his mind the plot of a
drama or the tangled destinies of the characters of a
novel, the pensee-mere, the initial “notion”33 or the
initial design of the sins, crimes and abominations
which supervene. These things are required by the
32 Sum. theol., I, 15, 3, ad 1.
33 Cf. above, p. 81, footnote 9.

112
development of the drama or of the novel that a man
imagines, but in God’s work they come from the im¬
provisations of nothingness of created existents masters
of their acts to whom He gives a clear field because
He is an “author” of an infinite power and wisdom,
capable in His eternal Instant of shaping, forming, and
ordaining everything in a single glance by taking ac¬
count of all that which happens at each moment of
time in created wills, and by drawing from the evils
which He permits without having willed them, goods
incomparably greater.
There you have the absolute innocence of God, of
which I spoke in our first seminar.

17. To conclude, and while thanking you for your

fraternal attention, I should like to stress that I do not
at all claim to have furnished a perfect theory, pol¬
ished, screwed down and padlocked on all sides. What
I have told you locks things up more tightly than what
I wrote in Existence and the Existent. There are never¬
theless many problems still which I have not had the
time or the capacity to treat, and it is probable that
there are some screws missing here and there.
You know that in my youth I spent some years
breaking windows, and afterwards I tried as best I
could to open doors, and to open paths. That is my
calling. Well, I have confidence that on the question
of God and the permission of evil, the paths that I have
proposed to you-are good ones; and that come what
may, while doing better work than I, my masters and
friends the theologians will one day embark upon
them.
113
 ADDITIONAL NOTE TO
THE THIRD FRENCH EDITION

It would be fitting, it seems to me, — if one had time

for it, — to discuss more closely certain views to which
I alluded only very distantly on page 86, and which
relate no longer to the case of evil acts, where created
liberty has the first initiative of nihilating purely
and simply, and of introducing evil into its activity
— but to the case of good acts, where created liberty
can also (this is at least the idea I would like to
examine) have a first initiative of nothingness, this
time under a certain relation only, in rendering its
activity less good than it could have been.
My book has for its subject the Permission of Evil:
this is why I have not wished to complicate things
by discussing in it also the case of good acts. Besides,
unlike the themes expounded in the book, which I
hold to be firmly established, the views in question are
still, in my eyes, hypothetical and conjectural, and
can be considered only as suggestions for research. A
few words concerning them, placed at the back in an
Additional Note, are perhaps not, however, out of
place.
The idea which in my opinion it would first be neces¬
sary to bring forward is that in the moral order and

114
in the supernatural order one finds again, and brought
to a higher degree still than in the order of nature (in
particular in the biological order), that law of super¬
abundance and of excess, of luxury in generosity, which
seems characteristic of the divine gifts.
From that moment the notion of “physical pre¬
motion” to the good act would need to be re-thought
in a more truly analogical or super-analogical perspec¬
tive. The shatterable motion would have to be con¬
ceived as a divine activation toward an excellent good,
a good in which the divine excess overflows, and which
the created agent can attain to only if it withdraws
from this activation in absolutely no way and in abso¬
lutely no degree. If it withdraws from it the slightest
bit (without, for all that, shattering it), the act that
it will produce under the unshatterable motion into
which the not-shattered shatterable motion fructifies
(a good act, an act which comports no trace of sin,
not even venial) will be diminished, to this extent, as
to height or perfection, to which — of itself, and ab¬
straction made of the possible nihilating initiatives of
the created will — the shatterable motion caused to
tend, and one will be able to say that this shatterable
motion itself will have been lowered or diminished by
a certain lack whose first origin is created liberty.
But — let this be well understood — such a lack is not
the non-consideration of the rule, the defectus or the
failure which without yet being an evil is the cause of
the evil of the evil act! It is a “negatio” (mera nega-
tio) or a nihilation, yes, but of another type, and
altogether secondary: interference of non-being which
does not consist in not considering the rule, and which

115
the name of defectus or of failure does not fit. It would
be necessary to invent another word, and we find our¬
selves here before the misery of human vocabulary
when it is a question especially of expressing that
which relates to the perspective of non-being. Meta¬
phorically one could say that the current passes, but
that there is a leakage by reason of which the effect
produced is diminished. However it may be with the
words, it seems to me that the idea is sufficiently clear.
My suggestion would be to speak in such a case of a
merely remissive or diminutive nihilation, which in¬
stead of consisting in not considering the rule, would
consist in a non-attention of the intellect — or in a
non-application of the will — to some aspect or some
feature which would have completed in plenitude the
good which presents itself as to be done, and which —
this instant of purely remissive nihilation being pre¬
supposed — one in actual fact decides to do.
Supposing therefore that an intellectual creature
does not shatter by a first initiative of nothingness
pure and simple, the shatterable motion which it has
received, it could have in an altogether other sense a
first initiative of nothingness, this time under a certain
relation only, by reason of which it would render less
high and less perfect (although still good) the object
to which the (not-shattered) shatterable motion in¬
clined it. In other words, the shatterable motion would
be also a lowerable or diminishable motion, to the
extent that the created free agent can withdraw from
it in a manner merely partial and only as to the degree
of goodness of the good action to which it causes the
soul to tend.

116
 In short (all that which is drawn from nothingness
being inclined toward nothingness, as Saint Thomas
says, and this being, in particular, the case with
created will), the shatterable motion would (as a re¬
sult of the conditional and undifferentiated divine per¬
mission which it envelops in advance) be exposed to
two kinds of nihilation springing from a first initiative
of the created free agent: either a nihilation pure and
simple, by which it is shattered, or else a nihilation
secundum quid and merely remissive by which it it¬
self and the object (the good act) to which it causes
to tend are lowered. And when, instead of being shat¬
tered, it is only rendered less high, it is as such, or to
the given degree of lesser elevation at which in fact it
thus finds itself, that it would fructify into the uni-
shatterable motion and would be replaced by it.
Let us add, if the shatterable motion is not lowered
by the first initiative of created liberty ceding in a
certain measure to non-being, and if, consequently, the
produced act of election should, for example, be an
heroic act, all the merit of the creature determining
itself to this act will spring from God and from divine
grace as first cause, and not an atom of good or of
merit springing from created initiative as independent
and positively determining cause will have been intro¬
duced into being. Since (cf. our discussion, pp. 107-
108) the created agent will of itself have added abso¬
lutely nothing to the motion received, it will only
have let pass thg (shatterable) divine motion without
doing anything of itself and without interfering by
any initiative of nothingness even merely remissive.
One sees to what conclusions these remarks lead.

117
It is not only in the case of evil and of evil acts, it
is also in the case of good and of good acts that (al¬
ways by reason of the power of nihilating proper to
the intellectual creature, and not this time by reason
of the possibihty of a first initiative of nihilation pure
and simple shattering the shatterable motion — but by
reason of the possibility of a first initiative of merely
remissive or diminutive nihilation) a field of indeter¬
mination determinable only by created liberty is left
to the free created agent by Uncreated Liberty at the
eternal instant to which all the moments of time are
present, and which so respects and honors created
liberty that It has it enter into the very establishment
of Its eternal plan.
I add that there is an evident link between the
views proposed in this Additional Note and the the¬
ological doctrine — as correct as it is human — accord¬
ing to which, as Father Garrigou-Lagrange has shown
in some remarkable pages1, one must distinguish be¬
tween imperfection and moral fault, imperfection prop¬
erly so called not being a sin, not even a venial one.
I remember a very simple story told by the Cure of
Courneuve and which had greatly impressed me. (Let
one take it for folklore if he wishes, this is not the case
for me — but it makes no difference to me, it remains
just as significant.) In his childhood he used to gather
bouquets of flowers to put at the feet of a statue of
the Blessed Virgin. A long time later the Blessed Vir¬
gin (who used to visit him often) reminded him of
this, and added that he had always refused (however

1 “La tendance a la perfection et les actes de charite imparfaits”.

Revue Thomiste, 1928, pp. 388-411.

118
much he had wanted to do so) to sniff the odor of
these beautiful flowers before offering them to her.
This was a refinement which had greatly touched her,
a gratuitous little final feature which had made com¬
pletely acceptable to her this humble offering of a
created thing — of which he had retained nothing for
himself, not even a transient scent. Well, who will say
that if the child had put his nose into the bouquet
before offering it he would have committed a venial
sin? It would have been an imperfection, not a sin,
however so slight a one. In offering his bouquet he
would have done a good act, but less perfect.
Perhaps, finally, one would find some profit in re¬
reading in relation to the problem which has occu¬
pied us in this Note, what the theologians (with alto¬
gether other problems in view) have said concerning
actus remissi.

119
 INDEX

Augustine, St., 62, 63, 80, 87 Lautreamont, 4, 5, 6

Leibniz, G. W., 4
Banez, 14, 21, 22, 24, 25, 27, Leroy, M.-V., 55
29, 32, 42, 46, 48, 59, 80, 81,
85, 102 Maritain, Raissa, 64
Banezianism, 24, 81 Marxists, 5
Banezians, 102 Molina, 15, 16
Barry, Michael, 83 Molinism, 16
Bemanos, Georges, 82 Monica, St., 80
Bloy, Leon, 4
Bordeaux, Henry, 82 neo-Banezianism, 21, 22, 24, 27,
Bourget, Paul, 82 29, 32, 42, 46, 48, 59, 80, 81,
85
Carmelites of Salamanca, the, 14 Nicolai, Jean, 17, 27
Coumeuve, Cure of, 118 Nicolas, Jean-Herve, 2, 19, 20,
Cyprian, St., 62 23, 28, 30, 42, 44, 55, 56, 58,
60, 61, 62, 79, 80, 81, 103, 104
Descartes, 70
Des Lauriers, Guerard, 53 Pascal, 17
Dostoyevsky, 4, 82 Paul, St., 63, 87, 88
Peter Damien, St., 78
Fleuriot, Zenaide, 82
Francis de Sales, St., 15 Quierzy, Council of, 103, 111

Gardet, Louis, 41, 55

Richter, Jean-Paul, 4
Garrigou-Lagrange, R., 19, 118
Gredt, J., 24
Green, Julian, 82 Schelling, F. W. J., 8
Sorel, Georges, 4
Hegel, G., 7, 8, 11
Theresa of Lisieux, St., 104
John of Saint-Thomas, 14, 71, 77, Thomas Aquinas, St., 5, 6 f, 13,
100 15, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 24,
Joumet, Charles, 2, 83 34, 35, 37, 42, 46, 47, 48, 50,
58, 69, 72, 75, 78, 94, 95, 100,
Koran, the, 40 101, 109, 112, 117
Thomism, 19, 20, 32
Labourdette, M.-M., 55 Thomists, 14, 15, 16, 101

121
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