The ridiculing of Pythagoras' claim to have recognized the soul of a departed friend in the voice of a barking dog (B7), together with the attacks on divination credited to Xenophanes in A52, reflect the broader denial of knowledge of divine attributes and operations set out in B34.
("And so you see", wrote John of Hildesheim smugly, "the difference between divine and human operations").Small wonder, perhaps, that though the kings became patron saints of trouble-on-the-road from the 12th century they were not all that popular, because they were not that lucky.
"Our ideas", says Philo, "reach no further than experience: We have no experience of divine attributes and operations: I need not conclude my syllogism: You can draw the inference yourself".
So it looks like the operations of divine quirkiness will do their mysterious work.
This was part of why he saw his remarkably dull life as full of adventure – daily observation of his own inner experiences and the world around him took him near to ecstasy through fascination with the micromanaging operations of divine providence.
(He died as the full horror of the Second Vatican Council, with its abolition of the Latin or "Tridentine" mass, was becoming fully apparent to him. The recent rise of Josef Ratzinger might have struck him as another of the operations of divine grace).
Updike, who has found in Rabbit an indispensable, if unlikely, vehicle for his truest insights into the mysteries of manhood, the promise of American life and the operations of divine grace, could no more pass up the opportunity for a further Rabbit report than Rabbit himself could forgo a bowl of macadamia nuts.
The story is told as a testimony to the operation of divine providence: "... you meant evil against me; but God meant it for good......
According to Waugh, a convert to Roman Catholicism, the novel was intended to show "the operation of divine grace" in the affairs of a particular group of people.
