"As used in religion, Providence is understood in a theistic sense to denote the care of God for His creatures, His general supervision over them, and the ordering of the whole course of things for their good."

Providence is perhaps, next to redemption itself, the most typical and important of the medieval (pre-modern) doctrines of the Christian faith. It is the close and direct corollary of the central tenet of the Judeo-Chrisitan faith: the doctrine of Creation.

According to the doctrine of Creation, there is a supreme holy God who is the maker and lord of the entire universe. This is expressed in the creed as:

"I believe in God, the father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth."

This belief entails the exclusivity and supremacy of God throughout the universe, throughout the created order. Further this doctrine entails that the entire created order is subordinate to and amenable to the will of God: God made everything, God rules everything and everything that happens happens according to his will. God runs the universe. The immediate agency of his will (secondary causes) and the ultimate purpose were not always clear, but the conviction that God was providential was never doubted.

"In Christian theology Providence implies a God of unbounded wisdom, power, and goodness, who unceasingly directs human affairs, great and small, for the accomplishment of the highest spiritual ends....Christian faith holds that God rules and overrules all that takes place in the universe, so as ultimately to realize His own eternal purposes."

For man this doctrine entailed several things:

1) God, not man, was lord of the universe. Man was centrally important but only through the grossest sin could he assert his will against God's.

2) creation and providence suggested that man was specially favored, helped or protected by God.

3) man's duty in this life was to accept the Providence of God and adjust himself to God's will.

In a created, providential universe nothing was wholly evil, nothing made by God could cease to be, and nothing happened by chance alone. For the Christian fate, contingency or purposelessness were unthinkable. Neither man nor nature defined a space of being removed from the being of God nor could either ultimately oppose the will of God. Man and the universe in its entirety were creatures of God: created by him, directed by him, answerable to him. There was no inherently "secular" sphere of being aside of or unrelated to Providence.

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The idea of providence informed the entire thought world of medieval man. For St. Thomas it was seen directly in the idea of the divine government--an idea that embraces political and social order but also natural order:

"Therefore, as there can be nothing which is not created by God, so there can be nothing which is not subject to His government.

...Dionysius says, 'God contains all and fills all by His Providence and perfect goodness.' But government belongs to providence. Therefore there are certain definite effects of the divine government.

Now the end of the government of the world is the essential good, to the participation and similarity of which all things tend.

Thus there are, in general, two effects of government. For the creature is assimilated to God in two respects. First, with regard to this, that God is good, and thus the creature becomes like Him by being good; and secondly, with regard to this, that God is the cause of goodness in others, and thus the creature becomes like God by moving others to be good. Therefore there are two effects of government of the goodness, and the moving of things to good. Thirdly, we may consider the effects of the government of the world in particular instances, and in this way they are without number."

Providence supplied the sufficent rationale and explantaion of life, death, suffering, disease, famine, war, oppression, deliverance. God's ways might not be man's ways, his purpose might be obscure, but they were God's way's; it was God's purpose. To assume the contrary was not to entertain an alternative hypothesis nor to accept the equal validity of an alternative explanation: it was to set oneself outside the created order, to plunge into the abyss of non-being.

The ubiquitous credibility of the doctrine of Providence was so complete that is was, like the authority of the church, a hallmark assumption of the Medieval mind. A contrary assumption for the typical Medieval Christian was wholly unthinkable. The deep root of this assumption is nowhere more clearly shown than in its persitance into the modern period. Although the whole texture of modern thought is set against the doctrines of Creation and Providence, the notion that somewhere, back of it all, God is still in charge, has been the most difficult remnant of the Medieval mind for the Modernist mind to expunge.