Doubting the Answers 41
encumbrances of past mistakes-the more inevitable is one's
surrender to God. Liberated from all ignorance, emancipated
from all the adverse conditions of this life, the rational soul
could freely will only its own union with God, and thereby its
own supreme beatitude. We are, as it were, doomed to happi-
ness, so long as our natures follow their healthiest impulses
unhindered; we cannot not will the satisfaction of our beings
in our true final end, a transcendent Good lying behind and
beyond all the proximate ends we might be moved to pursue.
This is no constraint upon the freedom of the will, coherently
conceived; it is simply the consequence of possessing a nature
produced by and for the transcendent Good: a nature whose
proper end has been fashioned in harmony with a supernatu -
ral purpose. God has made us for himself, as Augustine would
say, and our hearts are restless till they rest in him. A rational
nature seeks a rational end: Truth, which is God himself. The
irresistibility of God for any soul that has truly been set free is
no more a constraint placed upon its liberty than is the irre-
sistible attraction of a flowing spring of fresh water in a desert
place to a man who is dying of thirst; to choose not to drink
in that circumstance would be not an act of freedom on his
part, but only a manifestation of the delusions that enslave him
and force him to inflict violence upon himself, contrary to his
nature. A woman who chooses to run into a burning building
not to save another's life, but only because she can imagine no
greater joy than burning to death, may be exercising a kind
of "liberty," but in the end she is captive to a far profounder
poverty of rational freedom.
So, yes, we can act irrationally, but that is no more than
a trivial deliberative power; it is not yet true liberty. Only be-
cause there is such a thing as a real rational terminus for in -
tentional action, which is objectively distinguishable from ir-