must therefore consider the ways in which God does not exist rather than the ways in which he does.”
72. ST I, 2, 1, resp.
73. ST I, 58, 4, resp.
74. ST I, 2, 2, resp.
75. Tolstoy dictated to N. N. Gusev, his personal secretary, that he wanted to be buried at Yasnaya Polyana and his reasoning is ever timely. See “Tolstoy’s Grave”: “‘There should be no ceremonies while burying my body; a wooden coffin and let anybody who will be willing to take it to the Old Zakaz forest, to the place of the little green stick, by the ravine.’ Tolstoy heard the legend about the little green stick from his most beloved eldest brother Nikolai when a child. When Nikolai was 12 years old, he once told his family about a great secret. If it could be revealed, nobody would die any more, there would be no wars or illnesses, and all the people would become ant brothers. To make it happen, one just needed to find a little green stick, buried on the edge of the ravine in Old Zakaz, as the secret was written on it. Playing the game of ‘ant brothers,’ the Tolstoy children settled under arm-chairs covered with shawls; sitting there and snuggling up together (like ants in their little home), they felt how good it was to be together ‘under the same roof,’ because they loved each other. And they dreamed of the ant brotherhood for all the people. As an old man, Tolstoy wrote: ‘It was so very good, and I am grateful to God that I could play like that. We called it a game, though anything in the world is a game except that.’”
76. Waugh, Brideshead Revisited, 25.
77. Cf. Pieper, Happiness and Contemplation, 20–32.
78. Péguy, Portal of the Mystery of Hope, 45–46; cf. Péguy, Basic Verities, 275–77:
Blessed are those who died for carnal earth.
Provided it was in a just war.
Blessed are those who died for a plot of ground.
Blessed are those who died a solemn death.
Blessed are those who died in great battles.
Stretched out on the ground in the face of God.
…
Blessed are those who died for their carnal cities.
For they are the body of the City of God.
Blessed are those who died for their hearth and their fire,
And the lowly honors of their father’s house.
For such is the image and such the beginning
…
Blessed are those who died in this crushing down,
In the accomplishment of this earthly vow.
…
Blessed are those who died, for they have returned
Into primeval clay and primeval earth.
Blessed are those who died in a just war.
Blessed is the wheat that is ripe and the wheat that is gathered in sheaves.
79. Cf. Chesterton, Catholic Church and Conversion, 113: “The Catholic Church is the only thing which saves a man from the degrading slavery of being a child of his age.”
80. Cf. Matt 7:24.
81. Cf. ST I, 2, 1, ad. 1. See also Burrell, Knowing the Unknowable God: Ibn Sina, Maimonides, Aquinas, 46–47: “The best way I know to put this is to remind ourselves that simpleness is not an attribute of God, properly speaking, so much as a ‘formal feature’ of divinity. That is, we do not include ‘simpleness’ in that list of terms we wish to attribute to God—classically, ‘living’, ‘wise’, ‘willing’. It is rather that simpleness defines the manner in which such properties might be attributed to God. When we say God is simple, we are speaking not about God directly but about God’s ontological constitution; just as when we say that Eloise is composite, we are not predicating anything about her in any of the nine recognizable ways of Aristotle. So it would be putting the cart well before the horse to think of simpleness as a constituent property of God whose very “existence is a necessary condition of [God’s] existence” [Alvin Plantinga]. ‘Formal properties’ are not so much said of a subject, as they are reflected in a subject’s very mode of existing, and govern the way in which anything whatsoever might be said of that subject.”
82. Saint Thomas’s remarks on obediental potency as the divine inflictive benefaction raising us beyond our own powers requires that within us there is a natural openness to be raised. This natural openness is housed not in the intellect but in the intellect’s trigger mechanism, desire, in its most profound sense, as potency. What is described in obediential potency can be understood as reflecting the meaning of the will in its non-reflexive originary praxis. Cf. DV, XXIX, 3, answers to three difficulties: “The capacity of a creature is predicated on the potency of reception which it has. Now the potency of a creature to receive is of two kinds. One is natural; and this can be entirely fulfilled, because it extends only to natural perfections. The other is obediential potency, inasmuch as it can receive something from God; and such a capacity cannot be filled, because whatever God does with a creature, it still remains in potency to receive from God. Now a measure which increases when goodness increases is determined by the amount of perfection received rather than by that of the capacity to receive.”
83. Cf. SCG III, 26–40. Saint Thomas unveils a litany of options as to what human felicity does not consist in.
84. Theaet. 176b1. NE, 1177b33; 1179a22–30; Met., 1072b14–26.
85. God is not self-evident in our condition; but self-evident in our nature. This is the difference between natural law as imposition when reflecting our condition and as a connaturality in our nature. The difficulty of clarifying the meaning of traditio as a set of enduring truths wholly irreducible to a Humean irrational sentiment yet, at the same time, not easily open to verification, is realized in the language of natural law’s simultaneous self-evidence and refusal to unveil its mystery. Russell Kirk’s famous Ten Principles, perhaps, when read within this light, give them a whole new vantage by which to approach the relationship between tradition, conservatism, and the natural law. For the original six principles see Kirk, Conservative Mind. For their communion expansion see Kirk, Politics of Prudence.
86. Dostoyevsky, Brothers Karamazov, 268.
87. Cf. Armand Maurer, “Gilson’s Use of History in Philosophy,” in Russman, Thomistic Papers V, 25–47. See also É. Gilson, Spirit of Thomism; Reason and Revelation; God and Philosophy.
88.
