“We are always doing that. All I can say is that it is the attempt to avoid it which causes my dissatisfaction with the usual Scholastic treatment of this question. Try as I may, I cannot reconcile the notion of alternative courses with what I know of God, and I observe further down on this page of Fr Boedde

“I don’t find that thinkable. I can think of choosing only as a response in face of a state of affairs upon which the chooser is in a sense dependent. If God is described as choosing, this can mean for me only that he finds himself faced with ‘possibles’ soliciting his will and therefore in a certain respect acting upon him and so making him dependent on them. Besides, I thought it was good Thomism not to allow that there are relations in God to creatures, but only in creatures to God.

“I don’t see that. Cousin’s doctrine as given by Fr Boedder seems to me not only intelligible but inevitable. He is saying, surely, that without the act of creation God would not be God, because (as all agree) he is his acts. It is meaningless, then, to envisage the possibility that there could have been no such act. And it does not even begin to follow that the term of God’s Act, ‘creation’ in the sense of the created universe, adds anything to God. It is a commonplace in this connexion that you cannot add chalk to cheese. Lewis is not suggesting that God and his creatures add up, when he rejects the use of the conditional mood in statements which have God as their subject. Indeed, I find it hard to see how the transcendence, the immutability, of God, is to be safeguarded on any other showing.

“I thought you would say that. You will agree that it is often not so much what is said in a condemned proposition as why it is said that is the reason for the condemnation. But before we discuss that, I wish you would explain to me the metaphysical principles on which you base your own position. For I suppose you don’t just take the answer ‘on Faith’. Let me say at once that I don’t find the ‘necessity of creation’ in Lewis, if by this we mean that the created universe contains within it the reason for its own existence. That is plainly a contradiction, for God is that reason.