76. Does God move my will or do I?
76. DOES GOD MOVE MY WILL OR DO I?
If we are not pantheists, we distinguish ourselves from God (Duh!), so we naturally ask the question: when God gives me grace, does He move my will or do I? How can it be both? How can grace preserve my freedom of will?
It is written (Sir 15:14): God made man from the beginning, and left him in the hand of his own counsel. Therefore He does not of necessity move man’s will. . . . As Dionysius says, it belongs to Divine providence not to destroy but to preserve the nature of things. Wherefore it moves all things in accordance with their conditions, so that from necessary causes, through Divine motion, effects follow of necessity; but from contingent (not-necessary) causes effects follow contingently (I-II,10,4).
This is a fundamental mystery of religion. “Religion” means, literally, “binding relationship”. Religion is essentially the relationship between man and God. Both man and God are free. So religion is the mystery of the relationship between these two freedoms, these two free wills. God freely offers us grace, offers us His very self, and we freely choose to accept it or to reject it.
But how do these two wills meet? How can God move me without making me less free rather than more?
He does not move us without our free choice. And when both He and we move freely into a relationship (both move freely into a relationship—that’s almost the very definition of love), it’s not 50-50, or 100% and 0 or 0 and 100% but 100% and 100%. Every happily married couple knows that that’s possible; for that’s what happens when the two become “one flesh” without ceasing to be two. “One flesh” means one person, one embodied person, one body—as Christ has one body, not two, He being the Head. That’s the image St. Paul used for marriage: Christ’s relation to the Church: see Ephesians 5:32.
It’s God’s transcendence, as our Creator, that preserves our freedom. We are free because God is not Brahman, the pantheistic One and Only; we are not mere parts of Him. Parts are not free to choose their relationship with the Whole. And we are free because God is not a pagan god like Zeus either, not one of the many beings that exist in the universe. If He were, then when He moved us, He would move us from without, as Zeus supposedly moved the Greeks to cower in fear by throwing down his thunder and lightning. Rather, God is the transcendent Creator and Designer of everything in the universe, including us and our free choices, as an author is the transcendent creator and designer of everything in his novel, including the characters and their free choices. One character can compel another (e.g., Laertes compels Hamlet to die, Laertes kills Hamlet), but Shakespeare does not compel any of his characters. He does not take away their freedom (that is what compulsion does), he gives them their freedom. He decrees that some things (the choices of his characters) take place freely, by the characters’ free choice rather than by necessity; and he decrees that other things (the setting, like falling leaves or rain) take place unfreely and by natural necessity (leaves and rain have no free will). God is our Author, and also the Author of the natural setting that is the universe. He is the Author of both freedom, in us, and unfreedom, in nature.
The great mystery of Christianity is that the Author has a relationship with His characters; that He steps into His book and says “Hello” to His characters. All divine revelation is a little bit like the Incarnation. Christ is the fulfillment of what God did throughout the Old Testament: the Author, without ceasing to be the transcendent, divine Author, steps into His own story and eventually even becomes one of His characters. He first speaks many words (plural) to His characters, and then becomes the Word (singular), the main Character of the whole story.