"Reddit" posted:

He considers a world without God. His first thought is that this is impossible, given that St. Thomas Aquinas proved the existence of God. (His famous "five ways", which are pretty complicated but can be simplified to: 1. Something must have been the first thing to create the universe without being created itself and this must be God (he essentially restates this argument three times), 2. The world possesses regularity which must be regulated by God, 3. If things can be better or worse than each other than there must be a perfect pinnacle to which all things are compared to.)

Then he remembers that William of Ockham (given his French name in the subs, Guillaume) stated that human reason cannot prove the existence of God. (Because human reasoning strictly requires cause and effect, which God is not bound by)
Ockham believed that the only way we can actually learn anything about God or the soul is through faith and revelation, sort of echoed when Bernard questions whether that's the whole point of having faith to begin with.

Then he brings up Aristotle's Term Logic. Long story short, you can't ever really say something which is both positive and negative at the same time. E.g. I can say "All cats are mammals" and "All cats are not mammals", but I can't say that all cats both are and are not mammals at the same time. I'm presuming Bernard brings this in here because he considers God's (or at least a similar figure's) existence a predicate to the universe's existence (basically because of Aquinas's first argument up there). So it'd be incoherent to imagine a world without God because you'd be following this logic: "God is necessary for the world. There is no God. There is the world. God both exists and does not exist."
Then he realises that bit where he considers that God ("The Unchanging") might not be necessary for the universe to exist. He thinks, in a very Aquinas-like turn, that he should question the existence of God like this to find true faith. (Aquinas believed God gave humans rationality so they could uncover truths about God.) He briefly worries what'll happen if he can't prove God's existence through reason alone. He dismisses the possibility because it would be inconceivable. He considers if the universe could exist without God ("The Universal"). He comes to the revelation that "Esse est Deus", or "Existence is God," presumably invoking Anselm, who argued that the existence of existence itself proves God's existence (It's complicated).

But then he moves on and manages to pre-empt Descartes by a couple of centuries by realising that his own awareness proves its own existence (The famous "Cogito Ergo Sum" or "I think, therefore I am" argument that famously begins Descartes' proof for the existence of God). He realises that he can only prove God's existence by first proving his own existence, which almost seems to indicate that his own existence is prior to God's (Bernard's doing well for himself here, since he's managed to think up existentialism, which isn't going to propagate in the Western world for another half-millennia).

Bernard's reasoning skips forward a couple more hundred years, picking up a bit of Nietzsche and Sartre in realising that, in a world without an active God, the only person responsible for one's actions is one themselves, and the only person who is capable of making up for your sins is you yourself. Up until now, there's been a bit of a Augustinian/Calvinist bent in assuming that human free will is controlled by God. Here, Bernard rejects that, bringing up Pelagius, a famous heretic who argued that God does not control your free will as this would turn humans from moral agents into mindless automatons who have no right to go to heaven.

Of course, Bernard doesn't reject God. His final bit makes it clear that he still believes that the existence of God is an obvious fact we can observe. Thus, humans control the human world and their own works, and worship God at the same time. They save their own souls, and are able to go into Heaven. A balance is struck between God involving himself in the world (he admits people into Heaven) and free will (people earn through their own deeds the right to enter Heaven). This sort of brings in Irenaeus, but I won't complicate things further.

To sort of sum up, Bernard's final conclusion is that we realise our own existence before God's existence. He sort of leaps here to taking this to mean that we must have free will, and we aren't controlled by God. Thus, we can't rely on God to sort out all our problems, as this would deny our own free will. If we acknowledge that God isn't going to involve himself in our affairs, then we must be responsible for them. That being the case, we have to exercise our free will to ensure that we carry out Christ's will as best we can ourselves. Or, as Maria puts it, we have to stand on our own two feet.