On the Will of God
A note to Thomas F. McCabe, a Catholic friend, on what Alyssa takes to be a tension in everyday Catholic moral reasoning — the worry about “going against God’s plan” — given the doctrines of divine omnipotence, omniscience, and omnipresence. The piece concludes with a long passage from J.R.R. Tolkien’s Silmarillion , retelling the creation of the world as a contest of music between God and the rebel angel Lucifer.
You are Catholic, if I’m remembering correctly. I, of course, am not Catholic. But let’s ignore that. Let’s assume Catholicism has it all figured out, God exists as described in the Christian Bible, and so on.
A lot of Catholics worry about ‘God’s plan’, or ‘going against the will of God’. But, if you believe in the fundamental tenets of Catholicism, this is nonsense. God is omnipotent, He is omniscient, and He is omnipresent. Hence, we know that anything that happens in real life must , in some sense, be God’s will.
Suppose a glass tips over and spills water on the floor. We now know that thirteen billion years ago, He created a universe which would, after the atoms danced their dance, eventually have a spilled glass in it. Since He is omniscient, He knew this would happen, with 100% certainty. And since He is omnipotent, if He didn’t want it to happen, He could have created a very slightly different universe in the first place. He didn’t, so that glass spilling must be part of God’s Plan.
Or, consider when Hitler’s mother first conceived Hitler. At that very moment, when the sperm were swimming towards the egg, God knew (being omniscient) that one particular sperm would, decades later, inevitably lead to the Holocaust and WWII and the other horrors of Nazism. If God, in some sense, didn’t want this, all He would have to do is move an inconceivably tiny speck an inconceivably tiny fraction of an inch. But He didn’t. So, yes, we must accept that WWII, from the heroism of the American private to the horror of the SS butchers, was all part of God’s Plan.
JRR Tolkien, a devout Catholic and the author of The Lord of the Rings , understood this well. There is a prequel to The Lord of the Rings , called the Silmarillion , describing the history of the angels and the creation of the universe. In it, God and His angels are singing the music that will become the World.
Then God arose, and the angels perceived that he smiled; and he lifted up his left hand, and a new theme began amid the storm, like and yet unlike to the former theme, and it gathered power and had new beauty. But the discord of Lucifer rose in uproar and contended with it, and again there was a war of sound more violent than before, until many of the angels were dismayed and sang no longer, and Lucifer had the mastery. Then again God arose, and the angels perceived that his countenance was stern; and he lifted up his right hand, and behold! a third theme grew amid the confusion, and it was unlike the others. For it seemed at first soft and sweet, a mere rippling of gentle sounds in delicate melodies; but it could not be quenched, and it took to itself power and profundity. And it seemed at last that there were two musics progressing at one time before the seat of God, and they were utterly at variance. The one was deep and wide and beautiful, but slow and blended with an immeasurable sorrow, from which its beauty chiefly came. The other had now achieved a unity of its own; but it was loud, and vain, and endlessly repeated; and it had little harmony, but rather a clamorous unison as of many trumpets braying upon a few notes. And it essayed to drown the other music by the violence of its voice, but it seemed that its most triumphant notes were taken by the other and woven into its own solemn pattern.
In the midst of this strife, whereat the halls of God shook and a tremor ran out into the silences yet unmoved, God arose a third time, and his face was terrible to behold. Then he raised up both his hands, and in one chord, deeper than the Abyss, higher than the Firmament, piercing as the light of the eye of God, the Music ceased.
Then God spoke, and he said: ‘Mighty are the angels, and mightiest among them is Lucifer; but that he may know, and all the angels, that I am God, those things that ye have sung, I will show them forth, that ye may see what ye have done. And thou, Lucifer, shalt see that no theme may be played that hath not its uttermost source in me, nor can any alter the music in my despite. For he that attempteth this shall prove but mine instrument in the devising of things more wonderful, which he himself hath not imagined.’