of the known thing. This means that, for example, “in the line of the good, God is the first and transcendent cause of our liberty and 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 . . . in the line of good: all that which God knows in created existence, He knows because He causes it.”
29. ST I, 2, 1, resp.
30. Cf. ST I, 2, resp; DN I, 3, 77; In Sent. VIII, 1,1.
31. See McDermott’s prefatory comments in Summa Theologiae: A Concise Edition, xxxi–xxxii: “Negations are, so to speak, the shadows cast in our language by the affirmations we would like to make: God’s simpleness, for example, his lack of parts, is a shadow thrown onto our expectation of what perfection is—richness of complexity—by God’s all-embracing concentration of perfection in one entity, a perfection that sums every variety of created perfection that imitates it. In similar ways, Thomas will show that God is-and-isn’t in space: not existing in space as himself located, but present as the active doing of all spatial location and locatedness; and even more mysteriously, that God is-and-isn’t in time: not himself measured by time but present in all temporal measuring and measuredness. The principle appealed to throughout is the same principle that led to God’s existence in the first place: God exists as the doing of all being, the existence that acts in all existence, an existence in the world’s existing but not of it, no thing, but not therefore nothing.”
32. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 166.
33. Santayana, Egotism, 135.
34. Cf. ST I, 2, 1.
35. Cf. Pegis, “Aquinas and the Natural Law,” 5: “The Christian man, who knows by faith that God has made that hope of human nature into a promise and a reality, can understand the mystery of human destiny with greater depth, but as the end for philosophy as for reason the vision of the perfect good remains a hope—not indeed a hope without substance, since it is discovered and expressed within a world of divine providence. What could—and even would—come to man, if he but opened himself to it, for a God who was pure love? Let us say, then, that a philosophical ethics ends in human hope sustained by a mystery, whereas religious ethics begins with a covenant and is sustained by a promise.” This lecture was referred to by Leo Strauss in his University of Chicago, 1965 winter quarter class “Introduction to Political Philosophy: Aristotle,” sessions 10–16. He purportedly noted that he had never understood Thomism in such a manner, and found the talk profound.
36. Hesse, “Dostoevsky’s The Idiot,” 203–4.
37. Cf. ST I-II, 91, 2, resp.
38. Cf. Moritz Schlick, “On the Meaning of Life,” in Hanfling, Life and Meaning: A Philosophical Reader, 60–73, esp. 64: “There is, however, no irreconcilable opposition between play in the philosophical sense and work in the economic meaning of the term. Play, as we see it, is any activity which takes place entirely for its own sake, independently of its effects and consequences. There is nothing to stop these effects from being of a useful or valuable kind. If they are, so much the better; the action still remains play, since it already bears its own value within itself . . . Play too, in other words, can be creative; its outcome can coincide with that of work . . . And that is also true in the end of those actions which engender neither science or art, but the day’s necessities, and which are seemingly altogether devoid of spirit. The tilling of the fields, the weaving of fabrics, the cobbling of shoes, can all become play, and may take on the character of artistic acts. Nor is it even so uncommon for a man to take so much pleasure in such activities, that he forgets the purpose of them. Every true craftsman can experience in his own case this transformation of the means into an end-in-itself, which can take place with almost any activity, and which makes the product into a work of art . . . The individual would lead an existence, as in the profound and beautiful saying of the Bible, like the life of the lilies of the field.”
39. See Saint Thomas on whether there was faith in angels and in man in their original states. ST II-II, 5, 1, ad. 1: “Their contemplation was higher than ours, and by means of it, they drew nearer to God than we do and so could in a clear way know more things about divine actions and mysteries than we can. For this reason, there was not in them a faith by which God is sought as being absent, in the way that He is sought by us. For He was more present to them by the light of wisdom than He is to us, even though He was not present to them as He is to the blessed through the light of glory.”
40. Cf. Unamuno, Our Lord Don Quixote.
41. Schlick, “On the Meaning of Life,” 68.
42. Matt 19:14 (VOICE).
43. Cf. Hesse, “Dostoevsky’s The Idiot,” 199: “Only one trait in Myshkin’s character, but that an important one, appears to me as Christlike. I allude to his timid, morbid purity. The secret fear of sex and of procreation is a trait which must be reckoned with in the message of Christ for it plays a distinct part in his world mission. Even the superficial portrait of Jesus by Renan does not entirely overlook this feature.”
44. We seek here the distinct non-mediated temporal presence, particular to the will, the region in beings where grace transforms desire into self-giving, evoking a co-naissance intimacy with Being, one which paradoxically prepares the intellect to guide the will. Cf. Nichols, Word Has Been Abroad, xv.
45. ST II-II, 17, 3, resp.
46. Cf. Critias, 109b–c: “In the days of old the gods had the whole earth distributed among them by allotment. There was no quarrelling; for you cannot rightly suppose that the gods did not know what was proper for each of them to have, or, knowing this, that they would seek to procure for themselves by contention that which more properly belonged to others. They all of them by just apportionment obtained what they wanted, and peopled their own districts; and when they had peopled them they tended us, their nurselings and possessions, as shepherds tend their flocks, excepting only that they did not use blows or bodily force, as shepherds do, but governed us like pilots from the stern of the vessel, which is an easy way of guiding animals, holding our souls by the rudder of persuasion according to their own pleasure;—thus did they guide all mortal creatures.”
47. Cf. Eckhart, “Sermon 34,” in Breakthrough, 478: “Three things caused Mary to sit at
