Fourth Meditation: What Is Freedom?
never be for the will simply one plausible terminus of desire in
competition with another; he could never confront the intel-
lect simply as a relative and evaluative good, from which one
might reasonably turn to some other. He remains forever the
encompassing final object that motivates and makes actual
every choice, the Good that makes the will free in the first
place. Even an act of apostasy, then, traced back to its most
primordial impulse, is motivated by the desire for God. Even
the satanist can embrace evil only insofar as he thinks it will
satisfy a desire for what is most agreeable to his own nature.
He is in error in the choice he makes, and is culpable to the de-
gree that he abets the error willingly; but it is also then the case
that, to the degree he knows the Good in itself, he cannot but
desire it rationally. However the "gnomic" faculty may wander,
the "natural" will animating it seeks only one ultimate end. You
can reject a glass of wine absolutely; you can even reject evil
in its (insubstantial) totality without any remainder of inten-
tionality. Neither of these things possesses more than a finite
allure in itself. But you cannot reject God except defectively,
by having failed to recognize him as the primordial object of
all your deepest longings, the very source of their activity. We
cannot choose between him and some other end in an absolute
sense; we can choose only between better or worse approaches
to his transcendence. As I have said, to reject God is still, how-
ever obscurely and uncomprehendingly, to seek God.
This means also that God could never be, for the rational
will, merely some extrinsic causality intruding upon the will's
autonomy, or some irresistible heteronomous power over-
whelming the feebler powers of the creature. He is freedom as
such, the fiery energy that liberates the flame from the wood.
He is the very power of agency. He is the Good that makes
the rational will exist. He is the eternal infinite source of all