this reason is God Himself, the supreme reason of things. A reason of
this kind, a necessary reason, is not a personal something. It is will
that gives personality. And it is because of this problem of the
relations between God's reason, necessarily necessary, and His will,
necessarily free, that the logical and Aristotelian God will always be a
contradictory God.

The scholastic theologians never succeeded in disentangling themselves
from the difficulties in which they found themselves involved when they
attempted to reconcile human liberty with divine prescience and with the
knowledge that God possesses of the free and contingent future; and that
is strictly the reason why the rational God is wholly inapplicable to
the contingent, for the notion of contingency is fundamentally the same
as the notion of irrationality. The rational God is necessarily
necessary in His being and in His working; in every single case He
cannot do other than the best, and a number of different things cannot
all equally be the best, for among infinite possibilities there is only
one that is best accommodated to its end, just as among the infinite
number of lines that can be drawn from one point to another, there is
only one straight line. And the rational God, the God of reason, cannot
but follow in each case the straight line, the line that leads most
directly to the end proposed, a necessary end, just as the only straight
line that leads to it is a necessary line. And thus for the divinity of
God is substituted His necessity. And in the necessity of God, His free
will--that is to say, His conscious personality--perishes. The God of
our heart's desire, the God who shall save our soul from nothingness,
must needs be an arbitrary God.

Not because He thinks can God be God, but because He works, because He
creates; He is not a contemplative but an active God. A God-Reason, a
theoretical or contemplative God, such as is this God of theological
rationalism, is a God that is diluted in His own contemplation. With
this God corresponds, as we shall see, the beatific vision, understood
as the supreme expression of human felicity. A quietist God, in short,
as reason, by its very essence, is quietist.

There remains the other famous proof of God's existence, that of the
supposed unanimous consent in a belief in Him among all peoples. But
this proof is not strictly rational, neither is it an argument in favour
of the rational God who explains the Uni