Salesian Literature

Chapter 3:  God’s providence in general

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God, therefore, has no need of complex activity; a single act of his all-powerful will suffices to create his manifold works, for he is infinitely perfect.  We, his creatures, however, needs must describe his activity after the fashion of the limited understanding of our puny minds.

 

We can say that from all eternity God had a perfect idea of how to make the world for his glory.  First of all, he made a mental picture of the chief created beings who would be able to pay him honour – angels and men.  For angelic nature he planned the manifold hierarchies and orders about which we learn from holy Scripture and the Doctors of the Church.  In human nature too he arranged for the great variety that meets our gaze. Then, still from all eternity, he foresaw and decided upon all the means which men and angels would need to reach the destiny he had planned for them … and so made his providence active.

 

But that was not all: in order to execute his plans he created both angels and men; then, to put his providence into practice, he provide – and continues to supply by his government – everything that rational creatures need to attain to glory.

 

So that (to put it in a nutshell) supreme providence is simply the act by which God intends to supply men and angels with the means, both necessary and useful, for achieving their destiny.  Since these means are of different kinds, however, we also give God’s providence various names.  We divide it into natural or supernatural; and the supernatural we call general, special or particular.

 

Because I shall urge you later to bring your will into line with God’s providence, I should like to say a word here about natural providence, while we are on the subject.  Since God intended to provide men with their natural means they would need to give glory to goodness, he created for their sake all the other animals and plants.  So as to provide for these animals and plants, he created all the different soils, seasons, springs, winds, rains.  For man’s sake, and for the sake of those things concerned with him, God also created the elements, the sky and the heavenly bodies.

 

In the same way, by a wonderful sequence, he laid down the mutual functions which most creatures have towards each other.  Horses carry us on our way, but we attend to their grooming; sheep supply us with food and clothing, but we find them pasture-ground; the earth gives off vapours to the air, while the air rains down moisture upon the earth; even hand and foot supply each other’s needs.

 

The sight of this interdependence of all created things, how it should move a man to love the supreme wisdom that planned it all!  This should be his cry: “Thy fatherly providence, great eternal Father, takes care of all things.” (cf. Wis. 14:3).

 

God’s providence, therefore, reaches out to everything, rules over all things, makes all redound to his glory.  Still, chance happenings, unexpected incidents do occur.  Only to us, however, are they fortuitous, unexpected; to God’s providence, we may be sure, they are the awaited outcome of events foreseen and designed for the common good of the universe.  Chance events, you see, are due to the combination of several causes, causes which have no natural connection, which each produce their own individual effect. T heir meeting, however, results in the production of a new effect, and effect of a different kind which had scarcely been foreseen.

 

Take the poet Aeschylus, for instance: it was only fitting that his curiosity should have been punished … A fortune-teller he consulted warned him that he would die through being crushed by a falling house; as a result he spent all day in the open country to escape his fate.  While he was standing quite still, bareheaded, a falcon gripping a tortoise in its talons mistook this poet’s bald pate for the top of a rock, dropped the tortoise right on the centre of it – and there lay Aeschylus, a corpse in the middle of a field, crushed by the shell which housed a tortoise!  An unlucky accident, to be sure: for the poet only went into the field to escape death, not to meet it; while the falcon meant to break the shell of a tortoise, not a man’s head – a meal of tortoise-flesh was all it wanted.  Yet it turned out the other way: the tortoise survived, while poor Aeschylus died.  As we look at it, this was a totally unexpected incident; but in the sight of providence, whose vision is greater and extends to the concurrence of causes, it was an act of justice, a punishment for the poet’s superstition.

 

The adventures of Joseph of old were wonderful in their variety, in the extremes to which they led.  Sold by his brethren, to be rid of him, he surprised them by becoming viceroy of Egypt, so that they were dreadfully afraid of his revenge.  Not at all: It was not your design, then, he told them, it was God’s will that sent me here … You thought to do me harm, but God turned it all to good account (Gen. 45:8; 50:20).  You see, what the world would have called luck or chance, Joseph called God’s will, God’s providence, which disposes everything for its own ends.

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