 A compatibilist reading of the Fourth Meditation resolution of the problem of error would have to emphasize the following: that the Meditation provides reasons that push and compel the will to refrain from affirming perceptions that are not clear and distinct; that the Meditation speaks of the will as being pushed and pulled by reasons that are presented to it (CSM 2:40–41); and that Descartes insists that upon further reflection – reflection which occurs past the Meditations – it is clear that the entirety of our mental lives depends on God’s eternal and immutable will and that, as a result, nothing that happens (including pain and death, and presumably error) is bad; and that something (like error) can be the outcome of God’s will if we just understand it in its full context. In the Sixth Meditation, Descartes offers a similar theodicy to explain the occurrence of misleading sensations – for example, the feeling of a pain in a part of the body that has been amputated. Descartes argues there that if we are going to have a body, things like that will sometimes happen; they are just part of the territory for a mind that is embodied, and for reasons that are not entirely clear to us, it is better to be embodied than not (CSM 2:57–61). The Fourth Meditation theodicy might be exactly parallel. If we had just a will or just an intellect, we would never err, but there are advantages to having both. When the two are brought together, however, the intellect sometimes pushes and pulls the will to affirm or deny. A finite intellect has limited information, and some of the affirmations that it compels the will to make will not conform exactly to reality, but it is better that we have both than that we have just one. Furthermore, we can trust that “insofar as these acts depend on God, they are wholly true and good” (CSM 2:42), and so perhaps there is a perspective from which even our erroneous affirmation are getting at truth, in an incomplete manner, or just confusedly.