Fourth Meditation: What Is Freedom?beings, who exists in the manner of a finite thing. But God is
not an "entity." Neither, for that reason, is he some sort of par-
ticular object that one could choose or reject in the same way
that one might elect either to drink a glass of wine or to pour it
out in the dust. He is, rather, the fullness of Being and the tran-
scendental horizon of reality that animates every single stir-
ring of reason and desire, the always more remote end present
within every more immediate end. Insofar as we are able freely
to will anything at all, therefore, it is precisely because he is
making us to do so: as at once the source of all action and in -
tentionality in rational natures and also the transcendental ob-
ject of rational desire that elicits every act of mind and will
toward any purposes whatsoever.
The suggestion, then, that God-properly understood-
could not assure that a person freely will one thing rather than
another is simply false. Inasmuch as he acts upon the mind
and will both as their final cause and also as the deepest source
of their movements, he is already intrinsic to the very structure
of reason and desire within the soul. He is not merely some
external agency who would have to exercise coercion or exter-
nal compulsion of a creature's intentions to bring them to the
end he decrees. If he were, then the entire Christian doctrine
of providence- the vital teaching that God can so order all
conditions, circumstances, and contingencies among created
things as to bring about everything he wills for his creatures
while still not in any way violating the autonomy of secondary
causality-would be a logical contradiction. God, in his om-
nipotence and omniscience, is wholly capable of determining
the result of all secondary causes, including free will, while not
acting as yet another discrete cause among them. In one sense,
naturally, this is merely a function of the coincidence in his
nature of omniscience and omnipotence. Knowing not only