THE PRECARIOUSNESS OF HUMAN JUDGEMENT AS TO WHAT IS

POSSIBLE OR IMPOSSIBLE FOR GOD

By David Braine

For St. Thomas Aquinas, of course, as it says in scripture, “Nothing is impossible with
God”—and he takes it that in God's work in creation, nothing is impossible except what
involves a logical contradiction. However, the notion of logical contradiction here cannot be
the simple notion of what, in virtue of logical laws alone, that is those formal laws of
prepositional and predicate logic and set theory as applied to finite collections, formal in such
a way as to apply in the same way to every subject matter whether abstract or concrete,
implies a statement of the form "P and Not-P." For, to take an example of the simplest kind,
for a bodily thing to be unbroken, pure cardinal red all over and unbroken, pure royal blue all
over is impossible but to say that it does not involve a contradiction in the sense of a formal
logical contradiction. Rather, this impossibility is of a kind arising within the area of a
particular type of concrete subject matter, that of human beings and the way their visual
perceptual capacities are organised.
It was characteristic of the rationalists from René Descartes onwards to be overconfident
of the capacities of the human intellect to make judgements of what was “conceivable” in the
sense of being free from any implication of a contradiction. Thus, he was confident that it
was “conceivable” that the human body organised as it is so as to be able to function in the
way that it does could exist without the human soul, and confident that it was “conceivable”
that the human soul could exist without the human body. In his view, the human ideas
involved here are sufficiently “clear” and “distinct” for us to be able to make these
judgments.
But this arrogant conceit in the powers of the human intellect appears misplaced. The
nature of the human soul is to be the principle of activities of human bodily persons, activities
including those of thought of the kind we express in speech dovetailing with exercises of
sensory perception and imagination, feeling, emotion, and intentional action, all along with
whatever learning capacities these things require. When Descartes envisaged the soul as a
thinking entity, the cogitationes or pensees he attributed to it included not only propositional
thoughts but also perceptions, imaginations, feelings, emotions, and volitions. And he
thought that our idea of an entity capable of such thinking all the most obviously mental
things was clear and distinct enough for us to judge that it could exist independently of a
human body. A more modest view would be that it is impossible for man to judge of the
conceptual possibility of the existence of such an independently existing human soul, or even
of the conceptual possibility of the existence of an independently existing human body of a
kind which is organised as it is so as to be able to function in the way that it does.
We know that as a matter of fact human beings exist, and this implies that their existence
is possible and a fortiori possible for God to conceive without seeing any conceptual
impossibility or “contradiction,” and therefore possible for God to create.
Now, this is quite generally the way human beings know which kinds of things are
possible, namely from their likeness to things that are actual.
We can see this in physics. Aristotle held that natural (that is, bodily) things cannot act at
a distance, and Isaac Newton suspected this, regarding his laws of gravitation as descriptive
rather than explanatory. In the century after Newton, because of the phenomena of gravity,
thinkers began to assume that there was no conceptual difficulty in action at a distance.
However, when Michael Faraday considered the electrostatic and magnetic phenomena he
argued that it was mad to suppose that a thing could act in a place from which it was absent,
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and therefore developed the conceptions of electric and magnetic fields. Again, although the
conception of a line's being straight considered as the conception of a perceived quality of
lines is strongly linked to the assumption that there can be parallel straight lines, there is no
formal logical contradiction in supposing that parallel straight lines do not exist, nor any in
supposing that a straight line cannot be extrapolated an equal length an unending number of
times. However, it was only with Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity that physicists
came to suppose that in the physical universe as it actually exists there are no parallel lines
and no such infinitely extensible lines. It is the facts which persuade us of the conceptual
coherence of the notions required to state them, not some adequacy in our capacity
beforehand to judge questions of conceptual coherence. And this is even more obvious when
it is affirmed that in some sense the same things behave both analogously to waves and
analogously to particles.
Therefore, it is with good reason that William Kneale questioned our capacities to make
judgements of conceptual possibility in physics (he was of course already aware that we
cannot at present judge whether it is conceptually possible for there to be an even number
which is not the sum of two prime numbers, to take just one of several examples from
arithmetic).1
When it comes to theology, we have reason to be yet more wary of our capacity to judge
what is possible a priori, that is in virtue of our understanding of the concepts involved.
Thus, we know as a matter of fact that God has created a natural universe of bodily
things, light, heat, etc., in which there is continuous movement over time through at least
three spatial dimensions. But, as can be seen from my earlier remarks, we have no concepts
for describing the constitution of this universe which are such as to enable us to judge a
priori, in virtue of the obvious coherence of these concepts, that such a universe is possible.
Our certainty that it is possible derives from our certainty that it is actual, not from any
obviousness in the coherence of the concepts we use to describe it. The absence of formal
logical contradictions in our more modest statements about the features of the universe that
we observe cannot be the warrant for supposing that our system of describing the universe is
conceptually coherent, but rather the best warrant we can have for this is whatever warrant
we have for supposing that some of these statements are true. A fortiori, that it was possible
for God to create such a universe is not something we can judge a priori, just from insight
into the coherence of our concepts of God and of the universe, because, besides having no
adequate concept of God to enable us to judge even that there is such a being, we have no
adequate insight into the coherence of our concepts of the universe. Again, there is no doubt
that God exists since otherwise there would be no universe (this I have argued elsewhere) and
no doubt that he did create the universe. But, here again, our knowledge that it was possible
for God to create the universe derives from our knowledge that he did.
Again, if God creates beings with natural causal powers, then what they do in exercise of
these powers are done by them and not by him (he does not push, pull, carry, burn, or wet
things). But we hold that it is a fact that amongst these creatures of God with natural causal
powers are beings with intellect and free will, and it follows from this that there can be things
they do which are permitted by God but not caused by him, and in some cases against what
he would desire. His desire that they be free has taken priority over the desire that they do his
will. Now, it is true that Augustine tells us that, “Since God is the highest good, he would not
allow any evil to exist in his works, unless his omnipotence and goodness were such as to
bring good even out of evil” (Enchiridion 11). But it remains that evil as a privation of good
where good is appropriate and part of a thing's proper fulfilment is actual and in the cases I
have just instanced consists in the wrongful choices of free intelligent creatures. Accordingly,

1 Because of this, he even suggested that physical laws might obtain in virtue of logical necessities which
we cannot see or judge a priori, but learn of only empirically.
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while God is author of history, he has permitted free intelligent creatures, human beings
being the ones most obvious to us, to play a role as co-authors. Inasmuch as it is held in
Christian doctrine that by grace he can influence the human exercise of freedom, and yet to
make it that human beings never resolutely and knowingly choose contrary to his will would
be to make nonsense of the gift of freedom, there is a mystery here as to how God can create
free intelligent creatures. Again, we know that God has done it, but it is only because he has
done it that we know that it was possible for him to do it.
Further, if in addition to have an intellectual nature implies, as Aquinas argues, having
the natural desire for the vision of God and the possibility of such vision, and then we can
further say that there is such disproportion between any created nature and God, that there is
a fortiori no way in which our concepts are so adequate as to provide the ground for a
judgement that a being of this kind could possibly exist, and therefore be something God
could create.
Finally, amongst these matters that still come within the remit of natural reason to be
able to know, there is the question as to whether it is possible for God to create intellectual
animals, i.e. beings like man which are genuinely animals and at the same time genuinely
intellectual. The impossibilities of Descartes' and other similarly dualistic accounts such as
those of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Nicolas Malebranche have been argued by countless
people beginning with Aristotle and Aquinas, and by many philosophers of different
traditions, Gabriel Marcel, Gilbert Ryle, and by other more recent Anglo-Saxon
philosophers2 drawing upon arguments from Ludwig Wittgenstein, J.L. Austin, and Maurice
Merleau-Ponty as well as adding their own. Fashionable materialist accounts of the human
constitution have the effect of excluding significant freedom. Accordingly, our only reasons
for supposing that God could create unitary intellectual animals with significant freedom
(freedom consisting in the exercise of choice, not just a by-product of the operations of
chance) or that such a being could exist, are that they do exist and he has created them.
Let us now move into the area of things which can only be known by Revelation.
We know from Revelation that Jesus was divine and that he prayed to his Father, and
therefore that the Son of God the Father and God the Father himself are distinct “persons.”
We also know from Revelation that the Holy Spirit, proceeding from the Father, is distinct
both from the Father and from Jesus, so that as Jesus is our advocate or comforter, so the
Holy Spirit is “another advocate” whom Jesus would give to his disciples. And we know that
there is one God, and not three. But we have no reason, apart from knowledge from
Revelation that it is a fact, for supposing that it is possible for God to be three persons in one
being. Likewise, we have no reason, apart from knowledge from Revelation, that it is a fact
that Jesus was truly divine and truly human—for supposing that it is possible for a divine
person to take on human nature.
Now Aquinas makes numerous statements of possibility in respect to God. He says that it
would be possible for God to annihilate a human being, but later on he argues that this would
be against God's goodness and wisdom because he would not have created the human being,
of its nature everlasting, if he had not loved it. In an attempt to make the distinction plain, it
has been traditional to distinguish between a potestas absoluta and a potestas ordinata, which
suggests that whereas only what is outside God's potestas absoluta is actually impossible,
what is outside God's potestas ordinata is not actually impossible. Because this way of
speaking suggests such a false conclusion, it would be better to speak of a distinction between
what is possible for God to do under the aspect of God's action by which he gives being to
things each in their particular nature and what is possible for him to do under the aspect
according to which his action accords with the practical wisdom and goodness which belong
to him as governor of the world. In general, in considering statements about what is possible
2 One may instance P.F. Strawson, Elizabeth Anscombe, Stuart Hampshire, and Charles Taylor.
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for God, we should distinguish between what is possible for God under one aspect of how we
consider God and what is possible for God under another aspect of how we consider God.
We are now in a position to consider three problems.
Firstly, Aquinas holds that human beings have a natural desire for God. And he argues
more generally that it is the ultimate end of any creature to be united with God as closely as is
possible, and that therefore the end of any intellectual creature is to know God by an act of
understanding (SCG III, Chap. 25). From this, he goes on to argue that the ultimate happiness
(felicitas) of man consists in the contemplation of God (SCG III, Chap. 37). He further argues
that man cannot attain felicity in any kind of knowledge of God obtainable in this life,
because knowledge attainable apart from Revelation leads man to desire more and the
knowledge attainable by faith inflames man to desire to see what he believes (Chaps. 38-40),
and this is not possible in this life except by being completely cut off from the bodily senses,
either by death or by ecstasy, and in this life there is no certain stability but in the
continuance of natural appetite, a fear of death (Chaps. 47-48).
Yet, he argues, it is impossible for natural desire to be incapable of fulfilment, else since
“nature does nothing in vain” (Chap. 48, quoting Aristotle De caelo, 291b 13). He then
proposes an explanation of how the vision of God is possible and the ultimate happiness
which it gives fulfils man's every desire (Chaps. 51-63). Yet, in the course of his argument
and elsewhere, he makes it plain that such vision depends upon a gift of light from God
which can be received only by a person who is by grace imbued with supernatural love for
God, that is who by grace is within God's supernatural friendship.
Thus, his argument appears to suggest that, since we have natural knowledge of our
natural desire to know God by intellect, and that this natural desire can only be brought to rest
or satisfied in seeing God, therefore we have natural knowledge that we have a supernatural
end.
From this would seem that man and any other intellectual creature must have a right to
the vision of God, and therefore a right to the grace of this friendship, a right only forfeited
by its being rejected.
Yet, in writing to Henri de Lubac in 1948, Fr. Joseph Huby rightly implies that “this
question of the rights of man over God” is “meaningless for anyone who has understood in
what dependency creation places the creature with regard to God.” He goes on to say that,
“If, in the system of ‘pure nature,’ one has to admit that man has rights over God and that his
end is owed to him, this is for me sufficient reason to reject that system.”3 It is entirely wrong
to conceive the matter in a juridical way as if man had rights over God.
Since, in advance of God having endowed a creature with grace so that the creature
exists in a state of friendship or communion with God, there is not only no equality with God
but no sense in which God and a creature are persons in sufficiently the same way as to have
person to person relations, and so no basis from which the creature could claim to have rights
to things from God.
When I speak of “being persons in sufficiently the same way as to have person to person
relations,” I have in mind the relation Christians hold to exist between Jesus the divine Son of
God, truly God and truly man, and human persons as children of God able like Jesus to pray
“Abba, Father,” the address “Abba” having the same implication of intimacy as “Papa” or
“Daddy.” This is the kind of intimate supernatural friendship of which I spoke in my earlier
essay on “The Incarnation and Man's Salvation.”
Since the gift of this friendship and vision depends on grace, upon the free gratuitous act
of God, an act which cannot be required of God as something to which man or any other
intellectual creature has a right, in 1951 Pius XII condemned those who “destroy the gratuity

3 De Lubac, “At the Service of the Church,” p. 63.

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of the supernatural order, since God, they say, cannot create intellectual beings without
ordering and calling them to the beatific vision” (Humani Generis, para. 26).
Accordingly, it might seem that in principle there could exist created intellectual beings
not ordered towards the life of grace and its fulfilment in the vision of God. And it would
seem that there must be some weakness or ambiguity in Aquinas’ argument. Now, a creature
is not to be blamed for not attaining ultimate happiness, and it might seem that the natural
knowledge of God by intellect might be realised, although not satisfied and brought to rest, in
ever increasing gifts of knowledge, engendering an ever increasing natural or preternatural
love of God, corresponding to ever richer metaphorical forms “sonship” of God, but none
involving grace, i.e., none belonging to the supernatural adopted sonship of which I spoke in
my earlier essay and none reaching the ecstatic love correlative with the vision of God.
Yet the statement that in principle there could exist created intellectual beings not
ordered towards the life of grace and its fulfilment in the vision of God is a rather academic
one, inasmuch as Revelation gives us no reason to suppose that there are any such beings.
Thus, we know from Revelation that God desires the salvation of all human beings, and that
the angels as well as man were created in a state of grace and friendship with God, so that it
was only by spurning this grace that the devils lost any possibility of the vision of God.
Therefore, the assertion of such a possibility concerns no creatures of whose existence we
have any knowledge.
Indeed, it is only recently that the statement has ceased to be entirely academic, since we
have long ceased to suspect that there exist fairies, banshees, or other such earthly intelligent
beings alongside man. Now, the question might be supposed to have become a real one today
because some people argue that, although the universe is finite in total mass-energy, it is
nonetheless so vast that there are bound to be huge numbers of planetary systems containing
planets or satellites of planets sufficiently like the earth to give rise to living things at the
level of bacteria, and with greater difficulty cellular biological life. Although the step from
one-celled to many-celled existence has taken place many times on earth and would so seem
to constitute less difficulty, the step of having a brain malleable enough in its functioning for
the human kind of intelligence to appear may be incredibly more improbable. Nonetheless,
there is no empirical reason for supposing that it is so improbable as to have happened only
once in this vast universe. Of course, the prospects of our learning of such beings is minimal
and, because of the vast distances, the prospects of interactive communication may
reasonably be assumed to be zero, so that such beings could in no way form a this-worldly
community with us, so that after hearing from them we could tell them what we know.
What then are we to make of the implication of Pius XII's statement, the implication
namely that God can create intellectual beings without ordering and calling them to the
beatific vision? Is it a matter of God's potestas absoluta, or is it a matter of his potestas
ordinata?
Nonetheless, Augustine envisages man as the first from within the natural (physikon)
creation to be able to give voice to what the rest of nature declares only implicitly by the
wonder of its character, saying “God made us.” That is, it is the special role of intellectual
creatures to be able to acknowledge and worship their Creator, and according to the way St.
Paul portrays matters in Ephesians and Colossians, whereby Christ is to bring all things in the
cosmos to unity, any kind of tribalism in regard to supernatural goods would seem alien to
the spirit of St. Paul's argument. Accordingly, within Revealed theology, it is difficult to
envisage there being actually any intellectual beings which are not ordered and called to the
beatific vision. We might conceive this as within God's potestas absoluta, but not within his
potestas ordinata.
Secondly, since the gift of grace is free and gratuitous, not to be reckoned upon as
something a human being has a right to, it must be possible that some human beings after the
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fall should not receive gifts of grace making supernatural love possible and thence also the
vision of God. Otherwise, again it is argued, the gratuitousness of grace has been
undermined. And from this, earlier theologians have deduced the existence of a Limbo for
unbaptised infants and also a Limbo for pagans who are just but lack grace. Again, I am of
the opinion that there is no need for these suppositions, and that grace will not be withheld
from either unbaptised infants or just pagans whether before or after the time of Christ's
Passion, and I explain how this is compatible with Christian tradition and understanding in
my essay on “The Catholic Conception of the Church.” In this matter, we have a stronger
argument than where intellectual creatures are unrelated to man are concerned, namely that
we are told that God desires the salvation of all human beings (anthropoi).
Thirdly, it is argued that unless some human beings ultimately refuse grace and so end in
Hell, the doctrine of the gratuitousness of grace has again been done away. Here the
conclusion is, I believe, correct, but the reason given the wrong one. It is rather that nonsense
is made of the doctrine of human free will, besides that to deny it would be to set aside the
plain meaning of many passages in Scripture.