The Philosophy of Courage - Alcoholics Anonymous. AA, Meeting ...

ABSOLUTENESSGod’s power, patience, wisdom, love—these are qualities that also belong to aman. But all qualities that have been attributed to God have always been supposed tobelong to Him in a special way—in a more eminent degree. This greater eminenceis partly pressed by calling God omnipotent and saying that His qualities constituteHis omnipotence. But partly because omnipotence is a notion which involvesdifficulties when you start to define it, I propose here to denote the special eminenceof God’s qualities by saying that they are all absolute all the time. By absolutenessI mean the same as purity. A quality is present in an absolute or pure form when itis present without any admixture of its contrary. God’s power is absolute becausethere is never any fainting or failure in Him; His patience (in both senses of theword given) is absolute because there is in Him neither hurrying nor shrinking orrejection. His love is absolute because it is that kind of patience or forbearance andalso a generosity without reserve; His wisdom is absolute because He is all the timelight without any particle of darkness.In thus distinguishing God from men I do not mean that a man cannot beabsolutely loving or wise or efficient in a particular act with the absolute love orwisdom or efficiency which the particular moment allows or requires. He can beany of these things in the same way in which God can. In fact it is in the man’sbeing any of them that God manifests His absolute love or wisdom or power atthat moment and that the man participates in the omnipotence which is God. Butif a man is absolutely loving or wise or efficient at one moment, he is not so at thenext. There is no necessity for this to be so; its being so is merely what in Philosophyis called a brute fact and what in ordinary speech we may call an unpleasant butfortunately, with God’s help, an alterable fact, which, so long as it lasts, makes of theworld the sorry thing it is.GOD’S ONENESSGod is not just a collection of qualities—power, patience, wisdom, love, health,creativity. In language which I have already used, having carefully chosen it, He ispower, which is patience, which is wisdom, which is love, which is health, which iscreativity. In other words, all these qualities, in the form in which they constituteGod, are one.* They are one because they are absolute. As we commonly meet themin life, they are, it is true, different from each other. We find, for example, powerwhich is not wisdom or love, wisdom and love which are not power nor Identicalwith each other. But we also find that the power is not wisdom or love just in thoserespects in which it falls short of being power, that if the wisdom were only morewisdom it would be love, while if the love did not stop short of being absolute love itwould be wisdom, and that then either would also be power. The more we reflect on* Cf. the remarkable statement of Lady Julian that she saw God “in a point.”42