Dialogue IX

Summary

God always acts according to His nature. He has done everything for His glory in Jesus Christ, and He has not formed His plans without regard for the ways of executing them.

I. THEODORE. What do you think today, Aristes, of what we were talking about yesterday? Have you properly contemplated the notion of the infinite, of Being without restriction, of the infinitely perfect Being? And can you now envisage it in a completely pure way, without endowing it with the ideas of creatures, without as it were embodying it, without limiting it, without corrupting it to accommodate it to the weakness of the human mind?

ARISTES. Ah, Theodore, how difficult it is to separate the ideas of particular beings from the notion of Being! How difficult it is not to attribute to God what we sense in ourselves! We continually humanize the divinity, we naturally limit the infinite. This is because the mind wishes to comprehend what is incomprehensible, it wishes to see the invisible God. It seeks Him in the ideas of creatures, it fixes on its own sensations which touch and penetrate it. But how far all this is from representing the divinity! And what strange judgments are made about the attributes of God and His adorable providence by those people who judge the divine perfections by the inner feeling of what happens in themselves! I glimpse what I am telling you, but I still do not see it well enough to explain it.