A reader once wrote to me to ask:

"I have a quick question, and I apologize if it’s awfully trite, but I haven’t been able to find a satisfactory answer after (admittedly,
not-so-exhaustive) searching.  Here it is:
 
From the standpoint of the Catholic Church: does everything happen for a reason?
 
If it does, it smacks a bit of predestination; if it doesn’t, does that mean that God is out of control or doesn’t care? Say a flower grows on a mountaintop and it dies, and no human ever saw a trace of it or knew it existed; how much of that is an effect of an ecosystem going through its natural cycles, and how much is God putting a flower on a mountaintop?"

St. Thomas Aquinas answers the claim that God does not govern all things this way:

"On the contrary, Augustine says (De Civ. Dei v, 11): 'Not only heaven and earth, not only man and angel, even the bowels of the lowest animal, even the wing of the bird, the flower of the plant, the leaf of the tree, hath God endowed with every fitting detail of their nature.' Therefore all things are subject to His government.
 
I answer that, For the same reason is God the ruler of things as He is their cause, because the same gives existence as gives perfection; and this belongs to government. Now God is the cause not indeed only of some particular kind of being, but of the whole universal being, as proved above (44, 1,2). Wherefore, as there can be nothing which is not created by God, so there can be nothing which is not subject to His government. This can also be proved from the nature of the end of government. For a man’s government extends over all those things which come under the end of his government. Now the end of the Divine government is the Divine goodness; as we have shown (2). Wherefore, as there can be nothing that is not ordered to the Divine goodness as its end, as is clear from what we have said above (44, 4; 65, 2), so it is impossible for anything to escape from the Divine government.
 
Foolish therefore was the opinion of those who said that the corruptible lower world, or individual things, or that even human affairs, were not subject to the Divine government. These are represented as saying, 'God hath abandoned the earth' (Ezekiel 9:9)."

However, I’m not really sure that my reader is asking the question that St. Thomas is answering. I suppose part of my hesitancy depends on what my reader means by “for a reason”.  If he means, “Does everything that happens occur because God permits it and incorporates it into his ongoing act of creation and redemption?” then yes: everything happens for a reason.  God is not surprised by events as though he is not omniscient.  Nor is God at a loss at what to do about a created order that got away from his control when he was distracted.  The created order has never gotten away from God’s governance and he has always been in control.

At the same time, however, God has always allowed a certain sort of autonomy to his creatures (and not merely creatures with free will).  Critters do what they were created to do by God, but they do it in a way that is proper to their nature.  Moreover, Creation is not a one-off event that happened with the Big Bang and then was left to bounce around like billiard balls ever since.  God is the very present author of Creation right here and now.  If God wanted to get rid of Creation he would not have to do anything: he would have to stop doing something.  Indeed, even what we call “chance” is something which falls within God’s governance that leaves room for the freedom of his creatures.  So, for instance, a prophet speaking under inspiration tells Ahab that if he goes into battle, he is going to die—and the prophecy is fulfilled by an archer who draws his bow and fires “at random”, killing Ahab as prophesied (1 Kings 22:34).

This has big implications for things like the tussle between creationists and materialists who both imagine the evolution somehow disproves that God could be behind the creation of various species.  Similarly, it impinges on Einstein’s old discomfort with ideas like quantum indeterminacy and his famous remark that “God does not play dice.”  It would appear that, given the biblical data, what we call “chance” (which is a word for what we, not God, are unsure about) is one of the tools God uses in the unfolding drama of Creation and Redemption.

However, if my reader is asking “Does God positively will sin and evil and make people damn themselves so that some larger purpose of His can be accomplished?", then the answer is no.  God does not will sin—ever, though he permits it and turns it to our good (if we let Him.) When we sin we truly do something nonsensical and without reason.  We assert our nothingness and push ourselves away from God who is the Logos who holds all things in being and in good order.  Sin is the attempt to act without reason (though, to be sure, we always provide ourselves with excuses that appear reasonable).  If God the Logos did not incorporate our nonsensical acts into His creative and redemptive plan, they would spin out of control and carry us into nothingness.  But, thanks be to God, he is Lord of all and nothing escapes his Providence, so even our unreasoning acts of sin are turned by Him to the glory of His Name (though, if we remain impenitent, it will do us no good and we could send ourselves to Hell thereby).
 
 
Originally posted at National Catholic Register. Used with permission.
(Image credit: Unsplash)

The appearance of yet another film version of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby provides the occasion for reflecting on what many consider the great American novel.

Those who are looking for a thorough review of the movie itself will have to look elsewhere, I’m afraid. I will say only this about the movie: I think that Baz Luhrmann’s version is better than the sleepy 1974 incarnation, and I would say that Leonardo DiCaprio makes a more convincing Gatsby than Robert Redford. But I want to focus, not so much on the techniques of the filmmaker, as on the genius of the writer who gave us the story.

F. Scott Fitzgerald belonged to that famously “lost” generation of artists and writers, which included Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, Ford Madox Ford, and others. Having come of age during the First World War, these figures saw, in some cases at close quarters, the worst that human beings can do to one another, and they witnessed as well the complete ineffectuality of the political and religious institutions of the time to deal with the horrific crisis into which the world had stumbled. Consequently, they felt themselves adrift, without a clear moral compass; lost. Hemingway’s novels—and his own personal choices—showed one way to deal with this problem, namely, to place oneself purposely in dangerous situations so as to stir up a sense of being alive. This explains Hemingway’s interests in deep-sea fishing, big game hunting, battling Nazis, and above all, bull-fighting. Scott Fitzgerald explored another way that people coped with the spiritual emptiness of his time, and his deftest act of reportage was The Great Gatsby.

As the novel commences, we meet Tom and Daisy Buchanan, two denizens of East Egg, a town on Long Island where “old money” resides. Ensconced in a glorious mansion, wearing the most fashionable clothes, surrounded by servants, and in the company of the most “beautiful” people, Tom and Daisy are, nevertheless, utterly bored, both with themselves and their relationship. While Daisy languishes and frets, Tom is carrying on a number of illicit love affairs with women from both the upper and lower echelons of the social order. One of the more affecting scenes in the Baz Luhrmann film depicts Tom and a gaggle of his hangers-on whiling away an afternoon and evening in a rented Manhattan apartment. In the aftermath, they are all drunk, sexually sated, and obviously miserable.

Meanwhile, across the bay from the Buchanans in West Egg, is the hero of the story, ensconced in his even more glorious mansion. Gatsby wears pink suits, drives a yellow roadster, and associates with the leading politicians, culture mavens, and gangsters of the time. But the most intriguing thing about him is that, week after week, every Saturday night, he opens his spacious home for a wild party, attended by all of the glitterati of New York. Scott Fitzgerald’s description of these parties—all wild dancing, jazz music, cloche hats, sexual innuendo, and flapper dresses—is certainly one of the highlights of the book. We discover that the sole purpose of these astronomically expensive parties is to lure Daisy, with whom Gatsby had had a romantic relationship some years before. Though Daisy is a married woman, Gatsby wants to steal her from her husband. When Nick Carraway, the narrator, chides Gatsby that no one can repeat the past, the hero of the novel responds curtly, “What do you mean you can’t repeat the past? Of course you can.” Without going into any more plot details, I will simply say that this set of circumstances led to disappointment, hatred, betrayal, and finally, Gatsby’s death at the hand of a gunman.

Fitzgerald saw that, given the breakdown of traditional morality and the marginalization of God, many people in the postwar West simply surrendered themselves to wealth and pleasure. Commitment, marriage, sexual responsibility, and the cultivation of a spiritual life were seen as, at best, holdovers from the Victorian age, and at worst, the enemies of progress and pleasure. Gatsby’s parties were, we might say, the liturgies of the new religion of sensuality and materiality, frenzied dances around the golden calf. And despite his reputation as a hard-drinking sensualist, Fitzgerald, in The Great Gatsby, was as uncompromising and morally clear-eyed as an evangelical preacher. He tells us that the displacement of God by wealth and pleasure leads, by a short route, to the corroding of the soul.

There is a burnt-out and economically depressed city that lies on Long Island in between West Egg and Manhattan, and the main characters of The Great Gatsby pass through it frequently. In fact, one of Tom Buchanan’s mistresses lives there. Fitzgerald is undoubtedly using it to symbolize the dark under-belly of the Roaring Twenties, the economic detritus of all of that conspicuous consumption. But he also uses it to make a religious point. For just off the main road, there are the remains of a billboard advertising a local ophthalmologist. All we can see are two bespectacled eyes, but they hover over the comings and goings of all the lost souls in the story. Like all symbols in great literary works, this one is multivalent, but I think it’s fairly clear that Scott Fitzgerald wanted it, at least in part, to stand for the providential gaze of God.  Though he has been pushed to the side and treated with disrespect, God still watches, and his moral judgment is still operative.

It’s a sermon still worth hearing.
 
 
Originally appeared at Word on Fire. Used with author's permission.
(Image credit: Patsonic)