The Divine Lamp

The consideration of the plan whichGod follows ininstructing mankind has ofte excited in me a thrill of sublime emotion.  That plan consists in permitting that doubts, or rather difficulties, should rise arise in mens minds, in order that men may be roused to action, and moved to reflection and the investigation of the truth.

We may imagine all this universe, both physical and moral, as a grand and sacred book opened by God before men’s eyes, and full of queries and problems for the mind of man to solve, and so to increase the store of his knowledge and contentment.  The pages of the great volume are unfolded gradually in the course of centuries;- the multiplication of the human race, its division into diverse peoples, the dispersion of these people over the face of the earth, then in succession their mutual relations, their wars, their rivalries, their alliances; and in particular the history of the Jewish people, which God directed with a peculiar Providence, intending to make it a fugure, on a small scale, of what the entire human race was destined to be at a later period.  The problems found in the earlier pages of this book are more easy to solve than those which come after; nor is a new page ever opened until man has succeeded in deciphering those that precede.

It seems as if Infinite Wisdom delighted in adopting with human beings the process known as the Socratic Method, by which the most difficult truths are easily illicited from the lips of illiterate persons and of children; the secret simply consisting of a few interrogatives skillfully arraigned in a certain order.  In this way, I believe, does God act towards His creatures.  He ordains that things which are marvelous, and wholly at various with their modes of thinking, should happen before the eyes of man, that being struck with wonder at the novelty, they may feel prompted to direct their attention to investigating the hidden causes of things.  He does not wish to say everything Himself, because, being good, He does not wish his beloved creature, man, to remain and inert, or to be deprived of the noble gratification and merit which he can gain by instructing himself in many things.  To this end, He has endowed man with the faculty of knowing, that he may enjoy the honest pleasure of developing knowledge for himself, of being in part his own teacher.  God would not assist him save in that for which his natural knowledge could not suffice.  And what was this?

First, man’s faculty of knowing required to be stimulated and roused so as to be drawn forth into its own peculiar act; second, to progress in the wisdom necessary to man, this faculty required to have suitable queries or interogations put to it by its Supreme Instructor; third, and it likewise required to be furnished with some general principles, to enable it, by their application, to arrive at the right answers to those questions.

Furnished with these aids, man would be in a position to form for himself a science of a truly ennobling character.  God provided him with them, and, having done so, left him, as I have said, freely to enjoy the honest and noble of delight of being the author of his own wisdom. (THEODICY: ESSAYS ON DIVINE PROVIDENCE by Antonio Rosmini)