ARKCODEX
The Consolation of Philosophy
She had spoken. Now she turned the course of her argument toward other matters she meant to address and resolve. Then I said: "Your encouragement was sound. It was entirely worthy of your authority. But what you said earlier — that the question of providence is tangled up with several others — I am finding that out firsthand. I want to ask whether you think chance exists at all. And if it does, what you think it actually is." Then she said: "I am eager to fulfill the promise I owe you. I want to open the road that will carry you home. But these questions, though well worth knowing, lead us a little away from the path we set out on. I worry that if I tire you with detours, you will have nothing left for the straight road ahead." "Have no fear of that," I said. "To learn the things that delight me most will be rest, not effort. And once every side of your argument stands firm beyond all doubt, nothing that follows will be in question." Then she said: "I will do as you ask." And she began like this: "If someone defines chance as an event produced by random motion and by no chain of causes whatsoever, I say that chance is nothing at all. I judge that word to be empty — a sound with no substance behind it. When God holds everything in order, what room can possibly be left for randomness? The ancient thinkers were unanimous on this: nothing comes from nothing. They laid that down as the foundation of all reasoning about nature. They were speaking of matter, not of God as the creative source — but the principle stands. If something arises from no causes at all, it must appear to have come from nothing. And since that cannot happen, chance of the kind we just defined cannot exist either." "Then what?" I asked. "Is there nothing that can rightly be called chance or accident? Or is there something — hidden from ordinary people, perhaps — to which those words genuinely apply?" "My Aristotle," she said, "defined it in the Physics — briefly, and close to the truth." "How?" I asked. "Whenever something is done for a particular purpose," she said, "and something other than what was intended comes about through a separate chain of causes, that is called chance. For example: a man digs up a field to cultivate it. He finds a buried weight of gold. This is rightly believed to have happened by chance. But it did not come from nothing. It has its own proper causes. Their unforeseen and unexpected collision is what we call chance. For if the farmer had not been digging. If the man who hid the money had not buried it in that spot. The gold would never have been found. Those are the causes of this lucky windfall. It came not from the intention of the one acting, but from causes that met and flowed together. Neither the man who buried the gold nor the man who worked the field intended that the money would be found. But as I said — where one man buried it, the other happened to dig. There they met." "So we may define chance as this: an unexpected outcome arising from the collision of causes, in actions that were undertaken for some purpose. That collision and confluence of causes is made possible by the order that moves forward in its inevitable chain. It descends from the source of providence. It arranges all things in their proper places and times."
Where the Achaemenian cliffs rise sharp and the fleeing warrior turns to drive arrows into the chests of those who chase him. The Tigris and Euphrates break from a single source. Then they pull apart and go their separate ways. If they were to meet again and their currents drew back into one. Everything each rolling wave had carried would pour together. Ships would converge. Trunks torn loose by the river would collide. The blended water would tangle things into accidental patterns. Yet even those drifting accidents are steered by the slope of the land. The flowing order of the current as it falls holds them in place. So what looks like chance running loose with the reins dropped. Still submits to a bridle. It moves by its own law.
'I see it,' I said. 'And I agree that what you describe is so. But within this chain of causes locked together — is there any freedom of choice left to us? Or does a chain of fate bind the movements of human souls as well?' 'There is freedom,' she said. 'There could be no rational nature without it. Whatever can use reason by its nature has judgment. It uses that judgment to distinguish one thing from another. On its own it tells apart what is to be avoided from what is to be sought. It pursues what it judges worth having. It flees what it judges worth avoiding. Therefore wherever reason exists, the freedom to will and to refuse exists with it. But I do not hold this freedom to be equal in all things. In the highest divine beings, judgment is clear. Will is uncorrupted. Power over what is desired is fully effective. Human souls, however, are most free when they hold themselves in the contemplation of the divine mind. They are less free when they slip down toward bodies. They are less free still when they are bound within their earthly limbs. At the furthest extreme is slavery — when souls have surrendered to vice and fallen from possession of their own reason. When they have turned their eyes away from the light of the highest truth toward what is lower and dark, they grow blind in a cloud of ignorance. They are thrown into disorder by destructive passions. By drawing near to these passions and consenting to them, they strengthen the very slavery they have brought upon themselves. They become, in a certain way, prisoners of their own freedom. Yet all of this — seen from eternity — the gaze of Providence beholds. It assigns to each thing its place, determined by its own merits.'
Homer sings with honeyed voice of Phoebus Apollo. He calls him the one who sees all things and hears all things. Yet Apollo cannot pierce the deep interior of the earth. His light is too weak to break through to the bottom of the sea. The maker of the great universe is nothing like this. He looks down from on high upon everything. No mass of earth blocks his sight. No night of black clouds stands in his way. He sees in a single flash of mind what is. what was. and what is yet to come. Because he alone sees all things. you could rightly call him the true sun.
"Look," I said, "I am thrown into confusion again by another ambiguity." "What is it?" she asked. "I can already guess what is troubling you." "It seems to me," I said, "that God's foreknowledge of all things and the existence of any human freedom are deeply and irreconcilably at odds. If God foresees everything and cannot be mistaken in any way, then whatever his providence has foreseen must necessarily come to pass. If from eternity he foreknows not only human actions but also intentions and desires, then there can be no freedom of choice. No action and no act of will can occur other than what God's infallible providence has already foreseen. If events could turn out differently from what he foresaw, his foreknowledge of the future would no longer be certain. It would be mere guesswork. And to believe that of God I consider impious. I reject the argument by which some people think they can untie this knot. They say that a thing is not going to happen because providence foresaw it. They say rather the opposite: because something is going to happen, it cannot be hidden from divine providence. As if it truly mattered which is the cause of which — whether foreknowledge causes future necessity or future necessity causes foreknowledge. What we need to establish is this: whatever the order of causes may be, the outcome of foreknown events is necessary. This remains true even if divine foreknowledge does not appear to impose necessity on future events. Consider this: if someone is sitting down, any belief that he is sitting must be true. And conversely, if it is true that someone is sitting, then he must be sitting. There is necessity on both sides. On the one side, the necessity of sitting. On the other, the necessity of truth. But a man does not sit because the belief is true. The belief is true because the sitting came first. The cause of the truth lies on one side. Yet the necessity is shared by both. The same reasoning clearly applies to providence and future events. Even if things are foreseen because they are going to happen, and not because they are foreseen do they happen, it is still equally necessary either that God foresees what will come or that what is foreseen must occur. This alone is enough to destroy freedom of choice. How absurd it is to claim that the outcome of temporal events is the cause of eternal foreknowledge. What else does it mean to say that God foresees future events because they are going to happen, except to say that things which once occurred are the cause of that supreme providence? Further: just as when I know something exists, it must necessarily exist, so when I know something will happen, it must necessarily happen. The outcome of a foreknown event therefore cannot be avoided. Finally, if someone believes a thing to be other than it actually is, that is not knowledge. It is false opinion. It is something far removed from the truth that knowledge holds. If the outcome of a future event is not certain and necessary, how can it be foreknown? Just as knowledge itself is untainted by falsehood, so what knowledge grasps cannot be other than as it is grasped. Knowledge is free from error for precisely this reason: each thing must be exactly as knowledge comprehends it to be. What then? How can God foreknow these uncertain future events? If he judges as inevitable what could in fact not occur, he is deceived. Not only is it impious to think this — it is impious even to say it. But if he judges future events as they truly are, knowing equally that they may or may not occur, what kind of foreknowledge is this that grasps nothing certain and nothing fixed? What would make this any better than the famous joke of Tiresias — 'Whatever I say, it either will be or it won't'? How would divine providence surpass ordinary human guesswork, if it judges uncertain outcomes the way men do? Yet if nothing uncertain can exist at the source from which all certainty flows, then the outcome of what he has firmly foreknown is certain. Therefore there is no freedom in human deliberation and action. The divine mind surveys all things without error and binds every action to a single fixed outcome. Once this is granted, the consequences for human life are clear. Rewards and punishments for the good and the wicked become meaningless. No free and voluntary movement of the soul has earned them. What is now considered the most just of things — the punishment of the wicked and the reward of the good — will appear the most unjust of all. For neither the wicked nor the good were driven by their own will. They were compelled by the fixed necessity of what was to come. Vice and virtue would count for nothing. In their place would stand only a disordered confusion of all merit. And something more wicked still follows: since the entire order of things flows from providence and no human plan has room to act, our very vices must be traced back to the author of all good. There is therefore no point in hope. There is no point in prayer. What can anyone hope for or pray against when an unbending chain of causes links all that is to come? That unique commerce between mankind and God — the commerce of hope and prayer — would be taken away. It is through righteous humility that we earn the immeasurable gift of divine grace. This seems to be the only way in which human beings can truly speak with God and be joined to that inaccessible light — even before a prayer is granted — through the very act of praying. If all this is believed to be emptied of power by the necessity of future events, then there will be nothing by which we can hold fast to the supreme source of all things. And it will be necessary, as you yourself were singing a little while ago, that the human race be cut off and severed from its source — and left to fall apart."
What discordant cause tears apart the bonds that hold things together? What god set such fierce war between two true things? Things that each hold together on their own refuse to be joined when mixed. Or is there no real discord between true things? Do they always cohere, certain of themselves? But the mind is buried under the blindness of the body. The fire of its crushed inner light cannot make out the delicate connections between things. But then why does it burn with such fierce longing to uncover the hidden marks of truth? Does it know what it anxiously strains to know? But who struggles to know what they already know? And if it does not know, what is this blind reaching for? Who would ever desire something they have no knowledge of? Who could pursue what is entirely unfamiliar? And once found, how could anyone recognize a form they had never known? But when the mind once looked upon the heights, it knew the whole and the parts together. Now it is buried under the cloud of the body. It has not forgotten itself entirely. It holds the whole while losing the particulars. Whoever seeks the truth therefore stands in neither condition. They do not fully know. But neither are they in complete ignorance. They hold the whole in memory. They turn back to what was once seen from the heights. So that what was kept might receive what was lost.
This is an old complaint about providence. Marcus Tullius wrestled with it hard when he wrote about divination. You yourself have turned it over for a long time. Yet no one has ever settled it with enough care or confidence. The darkness around this problem has one cause. The movement of human reasoning cannot reach the simplicity of divine foreknowledge. If it could, nothing would remain uncertain. I will try to open this up and clear it away. But first I need to weigh what is troubling you. Tell me why you find the standard solution so weak. It holds that foreknowledge is not the cause of necessity in future events. From this it concludes that foreknowledge does not hinder the freedom of the will. Where else do you get your argument for the necessity of future events? Only from this: that what is foreknown cannot fail to happen. But if foreknowledge adds no necessity to future things — as you yourself admitted a moment ago — then what forces the free outcomes of events into a fixed result? Consider this for the sake of argument. Suppose there is no foreknowledge at all. Would the things that arise from free choice be compelled by necessity? They would not. Now suppose foreknowledge exists but imposes no necessity on things. The will remains entirely free. Intact. Absolute. But you will say: even if future events carry no necessity of occurring, foreknowledge is still a sign that they will necessarily come to pass. Then it would follow that even without foreknowledge, the outcomes of future things would be necessary. But a sign only shows what is. It does not bring about what it points to. You must first prove that everything happens by necessity. Only then can foreknowledge appear as a sign of that necessity. Without necessity, foreknowledge cannot be a sign of something that does not exist. Sound proof must rest on fitting and necessary causes. It cannot be built from signs or borrowed arguments. But how can things fail to occur when providence has foreseen them as future? We do not believe that what providence foreknows will fail to happen. We believe instead that even though these things do happen, nothing in their nature made it necessary that they happen. You can see this easily by looking around you. We watch many things happen before our eyes. We see charioteers guiding and turning their horses in the race. We see countless things like this. Does any necessity compel them to act as they do? None at all. The skill would be worthless if everything moved by compulsion. What lacks necessity while it is happening also lacks necessity before it happens. There are therefore events whose outcomes are entirely free of necessity. No one, I think, will claim that things happening now were not going to happen before they happened. Even foreknown things have free outcomes. Just as knowledge of present things imposes no necessity on what is happening, foreknowledge of future things imposes no necessity on what is to come. But here, you say, is the real difficulty. Can there be foreknowledge of things whose outcomes are not necessary? The two seem to clash. You think that if things are foreseen, necessity follows. And if necessity is absent, they cannot be foreknown. You think nothing can be grasped by knowledge unless it is certain. To foresee uncertain outcomes as though they were certain is the fog of opinion. It is not the truth of knowledge. You believe that to judge a thing otherwise than it is falls short of genuine knowledge. The source of this error is the assumption that everything known is known purely through the power and nature of the thing known. The opposite is true. Everything that is known is grasped not according to its own power but according to the capacity of the one who knows it. Take a simple example. The eye and the hand each recognize the roundness of a ball in a different way. The eye stands back and takes in the whole at once with its outward rays. The hand presses against the surface and moves around it. It grasps the roundness piece by piece. The same man is seen differently by sense, imagination, reason, and intelligence. Sense perceives the shape fixed in physical matter. Imagination perceives the shape alone without matter. Reason rises above this and examines the universal form present in individual things. The eye of intelligence stands higher still. It passes beyond the whole realm of the universal and beholds that simple form itself with the pure gaze of the mind. Here is the most important point. A higher power of knowing takes in what is below it. A lower power cannot rise to what is above it. Sense has no reach beyond matter. Imagination does not see universal forms. Reason does not grasp the simple form. But intelligence, looking down from above, holds the form itself in view. From that height it judges everything beneath it. It knows the universal of reason, the figure of imagination, the tangible object of sense — and it does this without using reason, imagination, or sense. It surveys everything in a single stroke of the mind. Formally, if I may say so, all at once. Reason too, when it surveys something universal, grasps things that are imaginable or sensible — without using imagination or sense. It defines its universal concept in this way: man is a two-footed rational animal. That is a universal idea. Yet everyone knows the thing it describes is imaginable and sensible. Reason considers it not through imagination or sense but in rational conception alone. Imagination, though it first took its start from the senses in forming visible shapes, surveys all sensible things even without the senses present. It judges them not by the rule of sense but by the rule of the image. Do you see it now? In every act of knowing, each faculty uses its own power. It does not use the power of the thing it knows. This is entirely right. Every act of judgment belongs to the one who judges. Each must carry out its work not by another's power but by its own.
Once there was a school of thought — the Stoics — that produced philosophers too deep in shadow. They believed that sense impressions and mental images are stamped into the mind from the outer surfaces of things. They imagined it the way a sharp stylus once used to press its marks into a blank page. The page has no writing of its own. It simply receives the letters pressed into it. But consider the mind on those terms. If the mind, vast as it is, works out nothing through its own movements. If it only lies there passively. If it is subject to the imprints left by physical things. If it gives back empty reflections of those things like a mirror. Then where does this power come from that lives in the mind and perceives everything so clearly? What force sees each thing individually? What separates what has been known? What gathers back what has been separated? What travels the path between high and low. Now lifting its head among the highest things. Now descending into the lowest. Then returning to itself. Then refuting what is false with what is true? That force is the cause that does the real work. It is far more powerful than the one that merely endures the impressions stamped into matter. Yet something does come first. Something that stirs the mind and sets its powers in motion. That something is sensation — happening within a living body. When light strikes the eyes. When a voice breaks upon the ears. Then the mind's awakened energy calls up the inner forms it already holds. It draws them toward movements that match what came from outside. It takes those outward impressions. It mingles them with the images hidden deep within.
When it comes to perceiving physical things, the qualities of external objects strike our sense organs from outside. The body's experience comes first. It then provokes and stirs the mind into action, awakening the forms that had been resting quietly within. Even so, when the mind perceives through the body, it is not merely marked by that physical experience. It judges the body's experience from its own inner power. How much more, then, do things entirely free from bodily influence work in their knowing. They do not follow what is placed before them from outside. They release the act of their own mind. For this reason, different kinds of knowing belong to different kinds of being. Bare sensation alone, without any higher faculty, belongs to creatures that cannot move — the shellfish and everything else that clings to rock and feeds there. Imagination belongs to creatures that move, in whom there is already some impulse to flee or to seek. Reason belongs to human beings alone. Understanding belongs to God alone. It follows that the knowing which is highest by its very nature knows not only its own proper objects but the objects of every lower kind of knowing as well. What then if the senses and imagination push back against reason? What if they say that this universal, which reason believes itself to see, does not exist at all? Their argument is this: whatever can be sensed or imagined cannot be universal. Either reason's judgment is true and nothing is truly sensible, or, since it is plain that many things fall under sense and imagination, reason's conception is empty — it takes something sensible and particular and treats it as though it were universal. To this, reason answers back. It says that it sees both the sensible and the imaginable within the framework of the universal. But sense and imagination cannot rise to that universal knowledge, because their awareness cannot get beyond bodily shapes. In a dispute like this, we who possess reason as well as imagination and sensation — would we not take reason's side? The answer is clear. It is the same with human reason and divine understanding. Human reason assumes that divine understanding cannot see future things in any way different from the way reason itself sees them. The argument runs like this: if certain events do not appear to have fixed and necessary outcomes, they cannot be foreknown as certainly going to happen. Therefore there is no foreknowledge of such things. And if we believe there is, then nothing will happen except by necessity. But if we could possess the judgment of the divine mind, just as we possess the faculty of reason, we would recognize what we already judged to be true of imagination and sensation. We judged that imagination and sensation should yield to reason. We would then judge, with the same justice, that human reason should submit itself to the divine mind. Let us therefore lift ourselves, if we can, to the height of that supreme understanding. There, reason will see what it cannot see within itself. It will see how a foreknowledge that is certain and defined can behold even those things whose outcomes are not fixed. This is not opinion. It is the simplicity of a supreme knowledge enclosed within no limits at all.
What a variety of shapes move across the earth! Some creatures stretch their bodies long and sweep the dust. Driven by the force of their chests, they carve one unbroken furrow through the ground. Some are given the gift of light wings to beat the air. They swim out across the wide and open sky in long and flowing flight. Others take pleasure in pressing their footprints into the soil. They stride through green fields or push deep into the woods. You can see that all these creatures differ in their many forms. Yet their downward-facing gaze weighs heavily on their dull senses. Humanity alone lifts its head higher. Standing upright and unburdened, it looks down upon the earth. This is what your form is telling you — unless you are a fool who has lost his way. You are the one who seeks the sky with face raised. You are the one who holds your brow up toward what is above. Lift your mind up to match that height. Do not let it sink down and settle beneath a body that has already been raised so high.
We have now established that everything known is understood according to the nature of the knower, not the nature of the thing known. Let us examine, as far as we are able, the nature of divine being itself. In doing so, we will come to understand what divine knowledge actually is. All rational creatures share one common judgment: God is eternal. Let us think carefully about what eternity means. It will reveal both the nature of God and the nature of God's knowledge. Eternity is the complete, simultaneous, and perfect possession of unlimited life. Time makes this clearer by contrast. Whatever lives in time moves from past through present into future. Nothing that exists in time can hold the whole span of its life at once. Tomorrow has not yet arrived. Yesterday is already gone. Even in today, you live no more than in that fleeting, vanishing instant. Whatever is subject to time, then, even if it had no beginning and will have no end, as Aristotle believed of the world, even if its life stretches out alongside infinite time, that thing still cannot rightly be called eternal. It never holds the full span of its unlimited life all at once. The future is not yet in hand. The past has already slipped away. What rightly deserves to be called eternal is that which grasps and possesses the entire fullness of unlimited life all at once. Nothing future is absent from it. Nothing past has flowed away from it. It must be fully present to itself at all times. It holds the infinity of moving time in a single, permanent present. This is why certain thinkers go wrong. They hear that Plato believed the world had no beginning in time and will have no end. From this they conclude that the created world is co-eternal with its Creator. But there is a difference. To be carried along through an unending life, which is what Plato attributed to the world, is one thing. To embrace the entire presence of an unlimited life all at once, which belongs to the divine mind alone, is something else entirely. God should not be thought of as older than creation in terms of measured time. God surpasses creation by the simplicity of an unchanging nature. The endless movement of time imitates the steady, present fullness of God's motionless life. But it cannot match or reproduce it. It falls from stillness into motion. It falls from the simplicity of presence into the endless extension of past and future. Unable to possess the fullness of life all at once, time does the only thing it can: it never stops existing. In this way it reaches, faintly, toward what it cannot fully grasp or express. It binds itself to whatever passing presence this brief and flying moment offers. That moment, because it carries a faint image of the abiding divine present, gives to whatever it touches the appearance of existence. But since time cannot remain, it seizes upon the infinite road of duration. It sustains life by moving forward, the life whose fullness it could not sustain by standing still. If we wish to give things their proper names, following Plato, let us call God eternal. Let us call the world perpetual. Since every act of knowing comprehends its object according to the knower's own nature, and since God's state is always eternal and always present, God's knowledge also rises above all movement of time. It remains in the simplicity of its own presence. It embraces the infinite stretches of past and future. It regards all things as though they were happening now, in a single, simple act of knowing. If you want to understand the quality of this divine knowing, do not call it foreknowledge of the future. Call it knowledge of a present that never passes. It is not foresight but providence, a word that fits because God, stationed high above all things, looks out over everything from the summit of the universe. Why should you demand that the things God illumines with divine light become necessary? Even human beings do not make things necessary simply by seeing them. Does your seeing something before you add any necessity to it? Not at all. Then consider this comparison between the divine present and the human present. You see certain things in your fleeting, temporal present. God sees all things in his eternal present. This divine foreknowledge does not change the nature or character of things. It looks upon them as present to itself, exactly as they will unfold in time as future events. God does not confuse the nature of things. In a single act of knowing, the divine mind distinguishes what will come about necessarily from what will come about freely. It is the same as when you see, at one and the same moment, a man walking on the ground and the sun rising in the sky. You observe both simultaneously, yet you judge one to be voluntary and the other to be necessary. In the same way, the divine gaze looks down on all things without disturbing their quality. To God they are present. In relation to time they are future. The result is not mere opinion but knowledge grounded in truth. God knows that something will exist, and knows equally that it carries no necessity of existing. If you say that what God sees as going to happen cannot fail to happen, and that what cannot fail to happen comes about by necessity, and you press me to accept the word necessity, I will agree that the matter is one of the most solid truth. But it is a truth that almost no one grasps who has not devoted himself to the contemplation of divine things. My answer is this: the same future event, when considered in relation to divine knowledge, appears necessary. When considered in its own nature, it appears entirely free and unconstrained. There are two kinds of necessity. The first is simple necessity: all human beings must die. The second is conditional necessity: if you know that someone is walking, then that person must be walking. What someone knows cannot be otherwise than it is known. But this conditional necessity does not drag simple necessity along with it. It is not the walker's own nature that makes walking necessary. It is the condition added by the knowing. Nothing compels a man to walk of his own free will. Yet while he is walking, it is necessary that he walk. In the same way, whatever providence sees as present must exist. Yet it carries no necessity by its own nature. God beholds as present the future events that arise from free choice. Considered in relation to the divine gaze, they become necessary through the condition of divine knowing. Considered purely in themselves, they do not cease to be absolutely free by their own nature. Everything God foreknows will certainly come to pass. Yet some of these things proceed from free choice. Even though they happen, they do not lose their own nature in the happening. Before they came to be, they could also have not come to be. What difference does it make, you ask, that they are not necessary in themselves, when they will happen in every way like necessary things because of the condition of divine knowledge? This difference: the two examples I gave a moment ago, the rising sun and the walking man. While they are happening, neither can be not happening. But the one was always going to exist by necessity. The other was not. In the same way, the things God holds as present will beyond all doubt come to exist. Yet some descend from the necessity of things, and others from the power of those who act. We were not wrong to say that these events, when referred to divine knowledge, are necessary, while considered in themselves they are free from the bonds of necessity. Just as everything open to the senses is universal when referred to reason, and singular when considered on its own terms. But suppose, you say, that it lies within my power to change my intention. Then I will make providence void whenever I change what it foreknew. My answer is this. You can indeed change your intention. But since providence in its present truth sees both that you can do so and whether you do so and where you turn, you cannot escape divine foreknowledge. You cannot escape the gaze of an eye that is present, even as you turn yourself freely in every direction. Then will divine knowledge change along with my choices, you ask? When I want one thing now and another thing later, will God's knowing alternate accordingly? Not at all. The divine gaze runs ahead of all that is future and calls it back into the presence of its own knowing. It does not alternate, as you imagine, between this foreknowledge and that. In a single, unwavering act it anticipates and encompasses all your changes. God possesses this present comprehension of all things, this seeing of everything at once, not from the unfolding of future events, but from the simplicity of God's own nature. This also resolves the objection raised earlier, that it is unworthy for our future actions to be called the cause of divine knowledge. This power of knowing, embracing all things in its present act, itself establishes the order of all things. It owes nothing to what comes after. Since all this is so, the freedom of will belonging to mortals remains unimpaired. The laws that set out rewards and punishments for wills free from all necessity are not unjust. God remains above all things, foreknowing all things, a present and eternal witness. His eternal and ever-present vision runs alongside the future quality of our acts, dispensing rewards to the good and punishment to the wicked. Hope placed in God is not placed in vain. Prayer directed rightly cannot fail to reach its end. Turn away from vice. Pursue virtue