The Music of Creation

Preface

This is the second of two essays that do not attempt to explain evil away or reduce providence to a formula that removes mystery. They are an invitation to consider how a good God can create a world with a genuine wound in it, and govern that world without either overriding its freedom or abandoning it to itself.

The Question of Providence

Having asked why a good God permits a world with a wound in it, a second question follows close behind, and it is no easier: how does He govern such a world at all, without becoming either the wound's author or a stranger to it?

Ask someone what it means to say God governs the world, and you will usually get one of two pictures.

In the first, God is a hand pulling every movement from above. Nothing happens that He does not directly bring into being: the storm, the accident, the choice you made this morning. Free will becomes a kind of illusion, convincing from where we stand, invisible from His side of the curtain.

In the second, God is a hand withdrawn. He set the world going like a clock and stepped back to watch. Whatever happens, happens on its own. He observes; He does not govern.

Neither picture is the Christian one, and neither, on inspection, is even coherent. A world pulled by a single hand is not really a world with a history of its own; it is a puppet show. A world left to itself fares no better: everything in it runs on its own, observed but rudderless. Christianity has always claimed something harder to picture than either: a world that is fully God's doing and fully its own doing, without contradiction.

We need a better image than a hand, gripping or withdrawn, before we can state the problem correctly, let alone solve it.

Picture, instead, a composer and a score.

A composer does not stand over the orchestra pulling each player's arm through the correct motion. Nor does he write the piece and leave the hall. He gives each player something real to play, wills the whole performance toward the piece He has written, and remains present to it, note by note, from the first bar to the last. That is closer to what Christianity means by providence than either the puppeteer or the absentee landlord.

The Shape of the Music

Before asking how God governs what He made, it is worth asking why He made this world at all, as a wrong answer here will distort everything that follows.

One tempting picture envisages God surveying every possible world He might create, weighing each against every other, and selecting the best one. It is a tempting idea, yet a mistaken one. It turns creation into a contest with a winner, and every evil that survives into the winning world becomes something that had to be there, since the best possible option was chosen precisely because it was best, flaws included.

An older and better insight runs differently. God did not create by comparing rival options and crowning a winner. He created by will and wisdom together: freely, for a real purpose, in a world fully equal to meeting it. Aquinas's word for this is "fitting". It owes nothing to optimisation. It names a world suited to what God willed to bring about: creatures capable of receiving His goodness, knowing Him, and in time, loving Him freely in return.

A composer does not write the one symphony mathematically superior to every symphony that could ever be written. He writes the piece that expresses what he means to express, and writes it fully. Another piece might have expressed something worthy too. That does not make his choice arbitrary, and it does not require him to have auditioned every possible symphony first. The reason is real. The choice is free. Both things are true at once, and nothing more mysterious than ordinary creative purpose is needed to hold them together.

Hold onto that word: "fitting".

With it, two of the remaining questions become manageable. How does God govern the piece once written, first in the things that have no will of their own, and then in the creatures who do?

Real Instruments, Real Sound

Start with the world that cannot choose: weather, rocks, cells, and creatures who act according to their nature rather than their will.

Here Christian thought, following Aquinas, insists on something that sounds almost too obvious to need saying: a stone falls because it is a stone, not because God is, at every instant, pushing it downward as though it had no nature of its own. God does not replace secondary causes with His own hand disguised as weather. He is the reason there are real causes at all: the reason fire truly burns, water truly flows, and a living thing truly grows, decays, and dies according to what it is.

An orchestra's instruments are not mute props moved through the motions of music by a hidden puppeteer's hand. A violin makes its own sound because it is a violin, built to do exactly that; and yet that sound would not exist at all without a composer who conceived it and a hall that carries it.

The instrument is fully an instrument. The music is fully his. Both are true at once, because the composer is not merely the reason the piece exists. The whole performance depends upon him even though he is not himself one of its players.

A world of real instruments is a world where things really happen, where causes act on other causes, and where some of them, being real rather than staged, will collide, fail, and consume one another. A world with real weather has storms. A world with real causality has causes that fail. None of this is confusion or divine absence. It is what a world of secondary causes must be.

The deeper question of why suffering of this severity should follow from that structure belongs to a different essay. Here it is enough to see that God's governance of the physical world means His music sounding through instruments that are fully their own.

The composer, so far, stands outside the orchestra: willing it, sustaining it, never seated among its players. Christian faith will eventually claim something stranger still.

A Part That Can Be Refused

Human beings, too, take their place in this orchestra, but not as passively played instruments. They are invited to play a part, and offered what they need to perform it, but can choose whether to play.

This is where providence touches freedom most directly, and where the two false pictures from the opening do the most damage if left uncorrected. If God is the hand gripping every string, then a person's right and wrong notes are really God's doing wearing a human mask. If God is the hand withdrawn, then His help is a rumour rather than a gift actually placed before us.

The true picture is closer to this: God writes a true part for every performer and never stops inviting and encouraging them, through grace, to play it well. Grace is both invitation and gift: the summons to play, and the strength by which the player may answer it. What a person does with that grace is genuinely their decision. They can answer it. They can hold back. They can, across a whole performance, refuse the summons altogether.

That refusal has to mean something serious to count as refusal: not a single missed entrance, not one distracted bar, but a settled, persistent turning away from the part offered.

Christian thought has generally been content to say little more than this, recognising how quickly certainty here becomes presumption. Yet some theologians have argued that a little more can still be said without crossing that line.

One modern theologian, Fr William Most, offered one way of describing this order without sacrificing either God's universal saving will or the reality of human freedom. Writing against both the picture of a God who writes someone out of the piece before a note is played and the picture of a salvation earned note by note as though grace were a wage, he proposed an order that begins where Paul himself begins: God our Saviour desires all to be saved. That desire comes first, sincere and prior to anything any performer will do.

Being written out of the piece, where it happens, comes only after and because of a resistance grave and persistent enough to count as genuine refusal. Exactly where that line falls is not something anyone still playing can see from inside the performance, and that not-knowing guards against despair as surely as it guards against presumption. Everyone else is carried through to the end because love reached them and met no refusal; simply not walking away from the part was never itself an achievement requiring reward.

Nothing about being given a part makes its failure inevitable. The failure, where it comes, is not secretly written in from the start. That is what makes it a fall rather than a foregone conclusion.

Grace is God's own life at work within the performer, not replacing freedom but awakening and strengthening it. The Composer does not hand over the score and step back. Grace does not compete with human freedom, as though God and the creature were rivals for the same part; He remains present to every performer, and that presence is what lets them make the part truly their own. Grace perfects freedom.

Holding the Whole Score

One question remains, and it is usually the one that frightens people most: if God already knows what I will freely do, how can I still be free to do otherwise?

This fear imagines God rather like an audience member who has somehow read ahead in the programme, learned how tonight's performance turns out, and is now sitting in the hall waiting for the notes to catch up with what He already knows. On that picture, foreknowledge does feel like a kind of trap: if He already knows, how could the performer really have done otherwise?

But this is not the traditional picture at all. God is not sitting in the audience the way we are. We hear a piece of music one note after another, always waiting for what comes next. God does not wait. He holds the whole score, first bar to last, in a single, undivided act of knowing. This is what eternity means here: not an infinitely long stretch of waiting, but a standing above the whole performance at once, seeing beginning and end together, the way a composer holds an entire symphony in mind even while the orchestra is still only partway through the second movement.

Seeing the whole performance is not the same as forcing it. A composer who somehow held his finished symphony entirely in mind before a single note sounded would not be causing each performer's fingers to move. His knowing and their playing are different kinds of thing. So too here: God's knowledge of what a person will freely do is not the cause of their doing it, any more than seeing the whole score causes the orchestra to play it. He knows it because, from where He stands, outside the running of time altogether, it is there to be seen: genuinely free, genuinely theirs, and genuinely known, all at once.

A harder version of the worry survives the point about causation. Even granting that God's knowing does not force the playing, doesn't His infallibly knowing now that a note will be played make the note's being played unavoidable? This is not really a question about causes. It is a question about necessity: whether what God knows is thereby fixed beyond the performer's power to have done otherwise.

An old answer, developed and sharpened by Boethius and carried forward by Aquinas, rests on a careful distinction. Think of the composer once more, already holding his finished symphony in mind in a single eternal present. It is necessarily true that if he knows a note will be played, the note will be played: that is a conditional necessity, tying the knowing to the happening. It is not a necessity belonging to the note itself. The note remains, in itself, one the performer was free to play or withhold. What is fixed is only that the composer's seeing and the performer's playing agree, not that the playing could never have been otherwise. Because the composer's knowing stands outside the sequence of bars altogether, rather than one bar ahead of the orchestra, it settles nothing about what happens in bar forty. It only sees what does get played.

This is not a full solution to the problem theologians have debated for centuries. It shows two narrower things: that God's knowing does not force the note, and that the note is not, in itself, necessary. It does not show that the performer had the deeper kind of freedom to have done otherwise, the kind some philosophers insist on. That question stays open here, and nothing here depends on closing it. What it does settle is enough: foreknowledge and freedom are not, after all, in contradiction, once we stop imagining God as a spectator peeking ahead in someone else's programme, and start imagining Him as the one who holds the whole score, beginning and end together, in a single act of knowing that time itself does not contain, never displacing the players' own hands from their own instruments.

So too with the prayers offered from within the performance: God eternally knows every prayer before it is prayed, every answer before it is given, and every refusal before it is made.

Hearing from Within

One difficulty remains: if God holds the whole performance in a single act of knowing, why does His governance so often feel absent?

A parent buries a child. A tower falls on people going about their day. One of those is, so far as anyone can say, a cause failing the way causes sometimes do, the very thing accounted for earlier. The other may be a wrong note: a will refused, and a refusal whose weight falls on someone who did not choose it. These aren't secretly the same event, but from inside the bar in which they are heard, they sound alike. The parent standing at the grave doesn't first sort the death into its correct category before grieving it. The real difficulty is that no resolution may arrive: not next bar, not next year, sometimes not within a lifetime.

Christ was asked about exactly this, and refused to answer it in the way it was asked. When told of Galileans killed by Pilate, and of eighteen killed when a tower at Siloam fell on them, He did not explain why. He did not say what their deaths meant, or trace them to some fitting cause. He said only that they were no more guilty than anyone else, and that the real danger lay elsewhere: mistaking a question about the victims' guilt for a question about the hearers' own need to turn their lives toward God. The tower was not a message. It was not a verdict rendered on the eighteen beneath it. He declined, pointedly, to let it be read that way.

A performer inside bar forty-seven cannot hear the symphony's shape the way the composer does; that is what it means to be a performer rather than the composer. It does not mean the piece has no shape, or that no one is holding it. But it does mean that a wrong note, heard from inside the bar in which it sounds, will often sound wrong, with nothing yet available to make it sound otherwise. Nor does the performer have any licence, from where they stand, to decode it as a message written specifically for them.

Job asked for an explanation and was given a whirlwind instead: not silence, but not an answer shaped like the question either. Christ, faced with Siloam, does something harder still: He refuses to let tragedy be read at all, and turns the question back toward the one asking it. Neither response resolves the hiddenness. Both refuse to let it be filled with a false answer, which is not nothing.

Nothing here forbids lament; Scripture is full of it, from Job's own protest to the Psalms' unanswered cries. What is forbidden is only the presumption that our explanations are equal to God's. Sometimes the alternative to explaining the wrong note is the discipline of not inventing one.

None of this is quietism. The performers are not told to endure the music until the final cadence. Scripture is full of cries, protests, petitions, and songs of thanksgiving because providence is not deaf. The Composer hears every prayer offered from within the performance, and His answer belongs to the music no less than the prayer itself. Prayer is not an interruption of the symphony but one of the ways the symphony is played.

Discord and Resolution

Draw the threads together, and a single shape emerges across all three: the physical world, the human world, and God's knowledge of both.

God does not grip every string, and He has not walked away from the hall. He gave the world real instruments and let them genuinely sound, gave human beings a real part and never stopped willing that they play it well. He holds the whole performance, start to finish, in a single, timeless act, knowing every note without compelling it; willing the whole performance without ceasing to sustain it.

Maximus the Confessor saw the whole of creation as moving toward union with God. The final harmony is therefore the fulfilment of what every created note was written for from the beginning. Providence is not simply God's way of recovering from discord, but of bringing the entire symphony to the end for which it was composed.

A wrong note, when it comes, is a real wrong note. An instrument failing is a real failure. Nothing here pretends otherwise, nor does it write either into the score in advance as though it had to happen. God did not only permit wrong notes; He transforms their consequences by gathering the discord into the resolution, not because it belonged in the music, but because the Composer is greater than the discord. A symphony's ending can do something stranger than erase what came before it. It can carry the wrong note into a harmony large enough to hold it and still be harmony, without pretending it was never sounded.

Whether that is possible without denying that the wrong note was ever wrong, and whether the Composer, present to the discord, remains untouched by what He hears, are not questions answered by a deeper philosophy of providence.

The Composer was not new to the hall. He had already called a people and revealed to them the shape of the piece He intended, its ending as much as its opening. Calling players and revealing a score, though, is one thing; becoming Himself one who truly plays within the music as one who shares our condition is another. A composer can walk into the rehearsal hall and conduct from the podium while remaining safely outside the piece itself. To become something that could be out of tune, something that could be broken, was still to come.

That is the answer to whether the Composer remains outside what He hears. He does not. Not by ceasing to be Composer, but by becoming one who can be touched by it as we are. Everything said here about real instruments, real freedom, and the Composer's timeless knowing was already, without our knowing it, a description of the piece into which He Himself would enter. In the fullness of time, He entered the very discord He came to resolve.

Sources and Further Reading

Scripture: 1 Timothy 2:3–4; Luke 13:1–5; Job 38–42; Romans 8; Colossians 1; Philippians 2.
https://www.biblegateway.com/versions/New-Revised-Standard-Version-Catholic-Edition-NRSVCE-Bible/

Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Part I, questions 22, 25, 44, 103, and 105 (on providence, creation, divine governance, and secondary causes).
https://www.newadvent.org/summa/

Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, First Part of the Second Part, questions 109 and 113 (on grace, human freedom, and the relationship between divine action and human cooperation).
https://www.newadvent.org/summa/

Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, Book V, Prose 6 (on divine eternity and the distinction between God's knowledge and temporal events).
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/14328

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Essays on Theodicy (1710), especially Part I (on the claim that God creates the best possible world).
https://homepages.uc.edu/~martinj/Philosophy%20and%20Religion/Problem_of_Evil,_Free_Will_and_Determinism/Leibniz%20-%20Theodicy.pd

William G. Most, Grace, Predestination, and the Salvific Will of God (on God's universal salvific will, grace, and human resistance).
https://afkimel.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/william-most-predestination.pdf

Maximus the Confessor, Ambigua (especially on creation's movement toward its fulfilment in God through the Logos).
https://archive.org/details/ambigua0000maxi

Catechism of the Catholic Church, sections 302–314 (on divine providence, the mystery of suffering, and God's governance of creation).
https://www.vatican.va/archive/ENG0015/_INDEX.HTM