Sometimes these pages sound so certain, but the writer – me – is not always as confident as his words. For instance, in the last essay, published under “Essays,” I wrote that Spirit is always working with us to pull us towards God whether we know it or not – and we usually don’t know it. As I look back on my life, this seems to be absolutely true. But is it? For there is a fundamental problem in all this, which gets to the heart of the human condition and the relationship of humans to the uniting cosmic force. The problem is the eternal paradox of free will. I would like to get into the nitty-gritty of it, but this has been done before so many times by so many people that the reader might simply turn the page. Rather, let’s just get down to the one essential element of free will that defines the very nature of our reality, which is: does it really exist? For if it does, then everything else we think we know falls away from us like a ghost in a dream.
Let’s start with what we think we know.
In the empirical model of science, after the unanswerable beginning of everything, everything else flows from natural law. Atoms and molecules do not have free will, but rather act according to how they are acted upon. It was upon this model that now out-of-favor behaviorist B.F. Skinner made his hypothesis of the human condition – that is, that like Pavlov’s dogs, all our actions are conditioned by previous actions. But Skinner ran into a major problem: there was no way he could verify his theory because there was no way he could bring two human beings together who had identical genetic makeups and identical pasts. Since the variables could not be controlled – and oh how he tried – the theory became useless.
Which is not to say that it is no longer believed, even by those who would refute it. Most clinical psychiatrists see our behavior as a result of the interaction of nature and nurture, our nature depending on our genetic make-up. Boiled down to the essentials, they are by- and - large still Skinnerians, for where is the other element outside the physical model? And if there is none, what then separates us from the atoms and molecules from which we are made? What, then, would give us free will?
If we have free will, then, we have a major influence in our lives that transcends the physical. Call it the “third element,” the point where we are drawn into the spiritual realm whether we want to be or not. Once we concede this, everything changes.
Of course it does. Once we examine free will, we find that we are living with an element outside of natural processes that can actually control and manipulate these processes. Universal objective reality then becomes something only useful for short-term or limited usage, like Newtonian physics in the vastness of infinity. Simply put, the material model does not describe for us the big picture. Since it does not do this, it cannot inform us of our purpose in being. For those looking for purpose, this creates a pretty big vacuum in reality.
Free will itself may not inform us of our purpose in precise terms, but it does tell us that we have a purpose. Thus it moves us closer to filling that vacuum. But free will creates other problems that the doctors of the spiritual realm have wrestled with for millennia. For Judaeo-Christians, since God has created all, he knows exactly how all works – including how free will works with his creatures. But if this is true, how could we have free will? Would this not only place us in a much bigger Skinner box? The great thinkers of the past understood this, and so, after great and ponderous thinking, they dealt with this primarily by proclaiming that the big picture was unknowable to the human mind.
This is undoubtedly true, but it still leaves us with this uncomfortable question: would God have created so many of us to fail? Since Christians believe that their decisions can condemn them to eternal damnation and suffering, would there then be any justice in this, since God is already well aware of who will be condemned even before they are born?
This is how, then, I came to the conclusion reached in the last essay that free will leads us all ultimately back to God. Such it seems would be the grand purpose of free will with a god as Judea-Christians have defined him – as the ultimate being of infinite love and mercy. This would also fill a large part of our vacuum of meaning. But I also must agree with the ancients: we do not and cannot know the mind of God. Since it is he who has made the rules of rationality and logic, he can also change them with a flick of his divine will. What to do?
This is where I now stand, without confidence, and even stumped. If we take the Gospels as, well, gospel, our question concerning the nature of God becomes no clearer. Rather, we are told again and again both that God loves us far greater than we can possibly know, but also is fully disposed to fling us into hell after a single lifetime of trial and error.
We might want to look at the lives of the saints for greater insight, then, since those people are so perfect that their wills often defy the natural laws in time and space.
Right now I am reading about Catherine of Sienna in 14th century Italy, at the cusp of the Renaissance. During that time, the papal office had moved to Avignon in France, leaving a vacated Rome in spiritual ruin. Wars were continuous, as were assassinations and debauchery, the latter practiced on an outrageous scale even among the clergy, and even by a few of the popes. In this climate of violence and excess, Catherine was the perfect foil. Although she was from a wealthy household, she denied herself any sensual pleasures, including food, as it was reliably reported that she lived for months at a time on communion wafers alone. Her self-denial was matched by the miracles that accompanied her. She could bi-locate, watching over many people simultaneously while still in her meditation cell. She could heal, and was healed herself of leprosy after caring for one who would be touched by no one else. The list goes on and on, and this combination of saintly denial and miracles impressed even the most avaricious dealers in power and wealth and vice. Although only a woman with no material levers of power, she was able to right the sinking ship of Catholicism and even Europe as a whole in the nick of time, we now know, before the Ottoman Empire became a dire threat in the next century.
With all that, we might think we can trust her on what she had to say about Christ and God, and what she had to say was not all peaches and cream. She was not only told but allowed to see Hell, and, much worse, was allowed to see her and others’ sins as God sees them. In this view, even she had to admit to being a horrendous sinner who would be saved from Hell only through severe devotion. So we might understand that the God of infinite mercy can only pardon the average sinner if this sinner – all of us - subjects himself to nearly continuous acts of contrition and penance.
However…To pull Christendom together from its near ruin, Catherine also pushed for a massive crusade against the Muslims in Asia Minor and the Holy Land. In other words, we find that one of the meekest and most self-denying person of her time advocated holy warfare, which always included unholy murder, rape and pillage. How could this be?
For me, it points once again towards a god working with us with what we have. The people of the era were warmongers who were going to fight regardless, and just as the God of the Bible worked with the practices of slavery and multiple wives of the Jews, so he worked with the Europeans of the time with their warfare. In other words, he was turning their unholy actions towards the holy, even as they were being steered away from their sins of excess, which they well recognized, by the only kind of threat that could deter them: eternal suffering in the afterlife.
In other words, it seems the Judea- Christian God works with us both collectively in history and personally on our own level in the eternal work of bringing the human race back to him. In his boundless wisdom and love, it seems he might then someday find a way back to him for us all.
So it seems to me even in my own personal micro-revelations, but I am no saint. I cannot say that I could ever know more than an inkling of the mind of God. But we can see the evolution of how God works with humans in the Old and New Testaments just as we see an evolution among ourselves with our own notions of morality and mercy. For better and for worse, we are no longer the people of the ancient Mideast or those of feudal Europe. Although God in his wholeness might never change, we do, and so must our partial understanding of him and how we understand his relationship with us. Whether that does away with eternal damnation or whether that is only a New Age pipe dream I do not really know. To hedge my (our) bet, it is fairly obvious that I should run my life with a more conservative moral bent. But I wouldn’t be surprised, as a dying St Thomas Aquinas said, that all our thinking and writings about God are mere straw compared to the real thing.
With that and all the above in mind, I believe there remains real hope even for those of us who do not freely choose to live off of communion wafers alone.
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