20th Nov 21 - Promises, Promises

Dr dear Dr: If human beings really do possess a free will faculty, how is that God can somehow keep his promises?

If we can keep before our minds the promise of Socrates to Phaedrus that if he were but patient, Socrates would elucidate a new method of doing philosophy and a new route for arriving at a certain minimal wisdom, then we can see that a promise is only a promise, it cannot assure the recipient of anything for real until like Phaedrus the recipient is ready to go through the process of story in order to arrive there at the sought after destination. Similarly the discussion about Abraham in the Letter to the Romans. But if we can remind ourselves of the episode that changed the life of a young composer when he took the train out of town, out of smokey old London, and found himself in a country churchyard much after the manner of the poet Thomas Gray, and there listened in silence for some wisdom for 3 and 4 hours one bright summer day, when the tensions at home with his mother and brother had become impossible to bear what with a new face on the block, then we can recall the words of the Lord to the young schoolboy in that church - "I cannot promise you happiness in this life, since this is a vale of tears, but I can promise you some success in your life if you but embrace the many little crosses of your future life in music." So this promise was a conditional promise, like most of the promises of the uberwelt toward the young as they start out their careers. The Lord promised the boy composer, Andrew, the following:

- A certain minimal happiness in the next life if not in this world;

- A keeping of promises of some success in this life at work;

- The cross would be a reality but generally it would only mean a few little crosses in life;

- Look around you in the church at Essex, all these people that joyously wear ankle chains do so as a sign of things to come in their lives, and they are joyous because they have pre-selected happiness but through a mature acceptance of the cross;

- You too can profit from this lesson and if you stay humble you can succeed.

NB - A promise is only a promise, it is not a legal guarantee. So thuswise we might reason through the foundations of this question from a girl down south. So free will complicates this dialogue between divine munificence and human will. Some things to note about free will though:

- Free will is a doctrine;

- It is defined as a doctrine that is De Fide, therefore to be held as true even if not an absolute;

- Ludwig Ott's Compendium mentions that it is required for living out the Faith - Ott, Free Will, in Fundamentals, 246-249;

- But though not an absolute in toto, it approaches one in God's dealings with men and women;

- God rarely intervenes on free planets, except where the freedom is abused by gross crimes;

- Daniel Westburgh in his Oxford Monograph on Prudence describes it as Right Practical Reason;

- James Watkins in his Oxford Thesis on Prudence describes it as a judgement on circumstances, which he then took as a Thesis to Rome to defend it at the pope's university, at the Angelicum;

- Thomas O'Loughlin in his book Les Celtiques - Celtic Theology, defends the role of free will in the spiritual direction sessions of the Celtic monks in the Dark Ages, hence the Penitentials;

- Like the Indianapolis 500, the British Catholics have laboured long and hard with this doctrine.

All in all then, the whole tenor of the debate from the Dialogues of the Prophets in the Old Testament Hebrew Bible shows forth the way that the Dialogue between free human agent and Divine emissary takes place without compromising the faculty of free will, so that there is some conditional "what if" factor in these dealings. Abraham is a case in point, and the role of the son Isaac. It all hangs together if the human side of the equation recalls that the free will faculty is not always a faculty of rejecting the goods and freedoms and future blessings promised. God likes to keep his promises to people like Abraham, people who take a risk to be a friend of God, but he does so by enlargening the expanse of time in which to see them vindicated, from one year to a thousand years. In this sense he respects human free will but he also keeps his promises without overriding it all as a faculty of choosing. Even the great defender of free will in modern times, Margaret Thatcher, would accept this notion of freedom as the power to maximise and extend one's available choices. Arthur would not disagree nowadays as they look down on it all far below in human homeworld.