greater than anything that can be thought. This is a paradox but not a contradiction. But how does he get here? By taking the idea from and within the faith, not by discovering it in the warehouse of his mind nor by demonstrating it step-by-step. We do not mean a mere natural faith, or a rational assent to a cloaked and hidden God. This is a faith of the dramatis personae—of God and man. It is faith thoroughly supernatural and dependent on God because his pure To Be is not ideational, but lives in the cosmic naturalness of the actions of the noble soul. Here we have natural law as religious promise, as divine covenant:62
Ah, blessed they, who pass through life’s journey unstained, who follow the law of the Lord! Ah, blessed they, who cherish his decrees, make him the whole quest of their hearts! Afar from wrong-doing, thy sure paths they tread. Above all else it binds us, the charge thou hast given us to keep. Ah, how shall my steps be surely guided to keep faith with thy covenant? Attentive to all thy commandments, I go my way undismayed. A true heart’s worship thou shalt have, thy just awards prompting me. All shall be done thy laws demand, so thou wilt not forsake me utterly.63
The bifurcated view of nature and grace wreaks its havoc on the language of the natural and supernatural, and this can be seen in how faith is witnessed and enacted in the soul’s relationship of will and intellect.64 If faith is not achieved by the intellect’s powers alone, if there is no amount of rational climbing that can help us arrive at the non-sequitur of the Incarnation, then the view of the intellectual ascent to God is only partially competent to reveal to us the vision of the faithful. If faith—even and especially in its absence and dryness—must carry a witness-like65 quality to it, it is because the originary praxis which works itself into the soul of the saint or the martyr transmits what is incommunicable.
Is God self-evident? The question is framed in terms of intellectual assent, and the answer, within that vein, must be a resounding No. But because God’s essence and existence are identical, Saint Thomas presents the genuine non-mediated connectivity between God’s creative To Be and man’s active responsiveness to that immediacy:
God is in all things; not, indeed, as part of their essence, nor as an accident, but as an agent is present to that upon which it works. For an agent must be joined to that wherein it acts immediately and touch it by its power; hence it is proved in Phys. vii that the thing moved and the mover must be joined together. Now since God is very being by His own essence, created being must be His proper effect; as to ignite is the proper effect of fire. Now God causes this effect in things not only when they first begin to be, but as long as they are preserved in being; as light is caused in the air by the sun as long as the air remains illuminated. Therefore as long as a thing has being, God must be present to it, according to its mode of being. But being is innermost in each thing and most fundamentally inherent in all things since it is formal in respect of everything found in a thing, as was shown above (Question 7, Article 1). Hence it must be that God is in all things, and innermostly.66
For the intellect, God is not self-evident, for to be so would undermine the freedom and integrity of the creature and of God. But in order to ground that freedom and the longer way of the intellect’s assent, God must be present according to our mode of being—to our desire to know. God must be present—immediately and connaturally self-evident—in the bodily immediacy of the soul as exteriorized existence. If man is already outside himself in order to know himself and the world, he is already, by that dual intentionality, in the self-evidence of God by presence of the will. This is a non-demonstrable—because pre- and non-intellectual—starting point for the intellect to guide the will towards what it desires. And how could the will desire God if it does not “know” God? Moreover, the will does not act by “knowing” but by acting, and thus it must have an acting immediacy or self-evidence of God for it to desire God. Again, how can the intellect guide the will to its desire, if neither the intellect nor the will is in possession of what it desires?67 God is in no way self-evident to the intellect, for this would be the sort of proto-occasionalism of select medieval thinkers,68 which diminishes the ontological dimension of God and of our personal freedom. It would render the will a vacuole having no role or reference point in its relationship with the intellect.
Saint Thomas’s rejection of the argument for self-evidence resides solely on the question of the intellect, but it leaves open the door for a different order of self-evidence, one absolutely necessary for the grounding of his metaphysics of To Be. If there is no form for connatural self-evidence, then the possibility of God as innermost in all things would be impossible. God would be idea but not Being. Let us change the question. If the question was “Is Being self-evident?” what would Saint Thomas’s answer be? It would certainly be “yes.” The existence of God is not self-evident to us though it is, in itself, self-evident. If we knew God’s essence as existence, as identical, then God’s existence would be self-evident:
[The] proposition, ‘God exists,’ of itself is self-evident, for the predicate is the same as the subject, because God is His own existence as will be hereafter shown (I:3:4). Now because we do not know the essence of God, the proposition is not self-evident to us; but needs to be demonstrated by things that are more known to us, though less known in their nature—namely, by effects.69
Once you have identified God’s essence with His To Be, then Anselm is right and God cannot not exist, the richest idea cannot be the poorest, the most meaningful cannot be the emptiest.70 If I already knew that God is Being, his existence would be self-evident. But God as Being is not self-evident to the intellect.71 While on the horizon between time and eternity, and sharing an immediacy of vision with the angel, we understand, for the most part, by composition and division, especially when the essence is not common to all72 and knowledge of first causes must proceed by effects:
As in the intellect, when reasoning, the conclusion is compared with the principle, so in the intellect composing and dividing, the predicate is compared with the subject. For if our intellect were to see at once the truth of the conclusion in the principle, it would never understand by discursion and reasoning. In like manner, if the intellect in apprehending the quiddity of the subject were at once to have knowledge of all that can be attributed to, or removed from, the subject, it would never understand by composing and dividing, but only by understanding the essence. Thus, it is evident that for the self-same reason our intellect understands by discursion, and by composing and dividing, namely, that in the first apprehension of anything newly apprehended it does not at once grasp all that is virtually contained in it. And this comes from the weakness of the intellectual light within us, as has been said (Article 3). Hence, since the intellectual light is perfect in the angel, for he is a pure and most clear mirror, as Dionysius says (Div. Nom. iv), it follows that as the angel does not understand by reasoning, so neither does he by composing and dividing.73
The intellect achieves this unifying and distinguishing because it works from and within the basis of Being, from an avenue of connatural self-evidence not immediately granted to the speculative intellect. By their nature as speculative, the intellectual powers work counter to that bodily immediacy, but never in contradiction to it; it is, again, the basis for those powers. How can one seek God if God is not in a way present; how can we know we are lost without knowing where we should be; how can composition and division be achieved without a ground already present from which unity and distinction proceed? This non-mediated, un-reflexive self-evidence resides identical to the proper good of the will while at the same time remaining at an essential distance from the intellect, reflective of our stance within
