beyond a reasonable doubt the existence of God because the God of the faith is the only universal cause of all that is in nature, and that in the natural order of things, effects necessarily point toward the existence of their cause.
The demonstrations for God are not logical or scientific proofs. Precisely because God’s essence is unknown to us,30 we cannot demonstrate Him by intellectual empirical description alone but must work within the relationship between the connatural immediacy of the will and the speculative distance of the intellect. The demonstrations are thus properly called ways or viae, meaning they are pointing towards what is needed, beyond any reasonable doubt, to be our primal and ultimate cause. What they are pointing toward is the mystery of God, a Being unlike any other Being in the world, a Being that was not caused but always existed, that is eternal, perfect, unchanging, infinite, all-good, all-knowing, all-powerful. Thus, what exactly can we demonstrate of this being when such attributes so surpass our limited powers as temporal, limited in knowledge and power? How can we get from the finite to the infinite?31
The predicament of Saint Thomas is as such: The faith urges reason that it must be able to demonstrate something of God beyond a reasonable doubt because effects necessarily demonstrate the existence of their cause. To say that this does not apply to God and man would imply that the truths of reason are not compatible with the truths of faith, and this is a dangerous precedent that Saint Thomas would never advocate. But at the same time, Saint Thomas knows that whatever he demonstrates of God cannot violate the effulgent mystery and plenitude of God. Saint Thomas’s demonstrations must demonstrate God beyond a reasonable doubt in order to respect the relationship between cause and effect, and at the same time demonstrate God in such a way not only that the demonstrations do not violate the mystery of God which is accessed only by the faith or, in the end, in the beatific vision of God, but actually opens the invitation to the mystery. The language of the reflexive intellect and the non-reflexive originary praxis of the will must both be at play in the demonstrations. Without the balance of the two, the Five Ways will fall either into reducing God to a cheap empirical certitude, or not going far enough to show that there is no other way to understand our complex existential situation but to affirm this efficacious supernatural origin.
God as Self-Evident? The Pedagogy of Suggestion
Verily, it is a blessing and not a blasphemy when I teach: Over all things stand the heaven Accident, the heaven Innocence, the heaven Chance, the heaven Prankishness. ‘By Chance’—that is the most ancient nobility of the world, and this I restored to all things: I delivered them from their bondage under Purpose. This freedom and heavenly cheer I have placed over all things like an azure bell when I taught that over them and through them no ‘eternal will’ wills. This prankish folly I have put in the place of that will when I taught: ‘In everything one thing is impossible: rationality.’ A little reason, to be sure, a seed of wisdom scattered from star to starthis heaven is mixed in with all things: for folly’s sake, wisdom is mixed in with all things. A little wisdom is possible indeed; this blessed certainty I found in all things: that they would rather dance on the feet of chance.32
The rules of the language game of the divine are neither self-evident nor a priori nor even synthetic a priori—but they are naturally indubitable. The problem is that reflection on the natural separates us from the natural, creating the distance that requires what it should not require—demonstration! And it is this that puts God into the dock, and reveals Myshkin to be the enigma of simplicity that he is or, what Santayana calls, in referring to Nietzsche, the geniality of imbecility.33
Saint Thomas opens his Five Ways with a proposed rejection of the self-evident existence of God. We must ask ourselves why this clarity of vision, this type of certitude, must be dismissed from the outset? This is Aquinas’s opening salvo, and it carries the tone and approach for the unfolding of his arguments, a tone and approach which are to lead us to the door of the divine and claim a groundwork unlike any other type of proof precisely because it is not “proof.” Rather is it a way, a signpost pointing, beyond any reasonable doubt, to that difference as such at the heart of Being. And yet, Thomas’s difference as such, this beyond reasonable doubt mystery which serves as foundation for all empirical truths, even as it resides beyond them, carries its own presential self-evidence, a communion with un-reflexive love. Saint Thomas does not merely reject the self-evident existence of God, but points to a different order of self-evidence with first principles34 which retains the crucial importance of that strange clarity, that self-evident communion with Being so clear and real that it is unquestionably present. This presence is there for Dostoyevsky’s Prince Myshkin, not as a thing to be aspired to or studied or even religiously sustained as a promise35 but simply a presence to which the bodily soul is united:
Myshkin is different from others because, as an Idiot and an epileptic who is at the same time an exceptionally clever man, he has much closer and less obscure relationships with the Unconscious. He has had rare instants of intuitive perception, occasional seconds of transcendent exaltation. For a lightning moment he has felt the all-being, the all-feeling, the all-suffering, the all-understanding. He has known all that is in the world. There lies the kernel of his magical being. He has not studied, and is not endowed with, mystical wisdom, he has not even aspired to it. He has simply experienced the thing itself. He has not merely had occasional significant thoughts and ideas. He has literally, once and more than once, stood on the magic borderland where everything is affirmed, where not only the remotest thought is true, but also the contrary of such thought.36
Now what occurs in ST I, 2, 1 is not so much a rejection of the principles of self-evidence as it is a relocation of their placement, not in that second order where natural law is identical with its necessarily prescriptive role in the polis, but in that first order which is clear to those who, like Myshkin, live one in being with a bodily soul. It is therefore not a question of dismissing that certitude as without foundation or basis, but showing that something does indeed change when man acts only by reflection and places the natural law, as necessary imposition, upon his being. When he interrogatively uncovers his naturally supernatural status, he affirms and yet by that very act loses that very status! By being eidetically circumscribed as a “state” or “status,” that supernatural appellation betokens more alienation than union, a not-of-the-world recognition which has the tendency to veer into the unnatural or to bypass the natural as a merely uninformative starting point, losing the forest for the trees, losing the actual to be of the what is in the mediated flux of what is. The divine multiplication of intermediaries invites the soul to reflection but also tempts the soul to put the emphasis on the wrong syllables of existence, forfeiting immediacy to distance. And yet this is the longer way and must be efficacious. The self-evidence of God is too easy an answer, and existence, while a gift, is not easy. It is unease in essence. It is ill at ease without being dis-eased. And while God is not self-evident, He is ineluctable.
That first order clarity is obscured because we have turned reflexive, claiming our naturally supernatural state in the second order of prescription and imposition, thereby becoming identical with our own imposition. This movement is not unnatural; it is the essential movement which reveals the natural law to be our rational participation in the eternal law.37 But all movements receive their meaning from their efficient and final causation, from their arche and telos. The telos is gathered by way of the intellect which creates distance-as-separation and places us as spectator; but the arche, which had originarily ignited our desire for the telos, is gained not by conceptio or theoria but by an originary praxis. It is one with the bodily and simple soul which lives before aspiration so that aspiration may occur, which precedes contemplation so that that dwelling can be inhabited. It is the play before work which allows the work to be creative in the realm of sanctification.38 It is the first order of our being before existence is reordered39 in terms of a judiciary futurity in which essences are determined, decisions made, and responsibilities assumed, “for the sake of” realm in which every end is incremental and temporally futural, for the sake of the objective to be attained. Now in some sense this seems an inversion of the distinction between practical and theoretical, where praxis is the realm of the for-the-sake-of while theoria is the realm of the in-itself. Only when a soul has lived before futurity can it access within itself the natural law in a way which recognizes the law’s
