Divine Freedom: Could God Have Not Created the Cosmos?

In 1948, Dom Illtyd Trethowan, a monk of Downside Abbey, published this dialogue between himself (Criticus) and a Thomist (Scholasticus) on the question of divine freedom and divine creation. Trethowan was Augustinian in his theology and decidedly unsympathetic to Thomism. Given Robert Fortuin’s recent articles on theodicy in which he argues that the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo entails the proposition that God could have done otherwise–that is to say, in his freedom he might have decided not to create the world. I thought this dialogue would be of interest. I have copied the dialogue as it is presented in Trethowan’s book Absolute Value. It differs on minor points from the journal article, to which I provide a link at the bottom of the page.

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Criticus: I have come across a passage in C. S. Lewis’s The Problem of Pain which I should like to read to you:

With every advance in our thought the unity of the creative act and the impossibility of tinkering with the creation as though this or that element in it could have been removed will become more apparent. Perhaps this is not the “best of all possible” universes but the only possible one. Possible worlds can mean only ‘worlds which God could have made but didn’t’. The idea of that which God ‘could have’ done involves a too anthropomorphic conception of God’s freedom. Whatever human freedom means, Divine freedom cannot mean indeterminacy between alternatives and choice of one of them. Perfect goodness can never debate about the means most suited to achieve it. The freedom of God consists in the fact that no cause other than himself produces his acts and no external obstacle impedes them—that his own goodness is the root from which they all grow and his own omnipotence the air in which they may all flower.

Tell me, Scholasticus, do you regard this as a defensible position in Catholic Theology?

Scholasticus: I do not. Surely you know that Abelard was condemned for saying that God can do only what in fact he does and that the Vatican Council condemned Guenther for teaching the necessity of creation.

Criticus: 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.

Scholasticus: I have here Fr Boedder’s manual of Natural Theology which contains a comment on a passage of Victor Cousin’s. Cousin, as you will see, took a line which is substantially the same as Lewis’s. Here is the passage:

The creative act is a necessary act because it results from the nature of a cause which needs must act, and it is free, for it proceeds from the proper, independent, primitive spontaneity of a cause which acts by itself, which determines itself, so that its determination, though necessary, is nevertheless its own, and is not under any influence from without. Fr Boedder’s comment is as follows:

Against these assertions we maintain that God has created only because He freely willed the existence of creatures, being equally free not to will had He pleased’. Cousin’s words, Fr Boedder considers, imply that ‘creation was a necessity required to supply some deficiency in God.

Criticus: 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.

Scholasticus: There is of course a difficulty, and I can show you a passage in which Fr Boedder deals with it. He distinguishes the necessity of Pure Act from that free will to create which is yet the same Pure Act looked at from a certain point of view. He says, you see: ‘the internal act of [God’s] will, which is really identical with the essence, can without change involve or not involve that relation to an object which we call choosing and willing’.

Criticus: 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.

Scholasticus: I admit that this language of relations has its drawbacks. But you seem to suppose that, just because we cannot conceive of an act which combines freedom of choice with freedom from external solicitation, we cannot allow that God’s act of creation is of this kind. You are dragging God down to your own level.

Criticus: 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 Boedder’s book the following sentence: ’The will of God in its relation to creatures is absolutely necessary in its entity (i.e. in its internal actual state) but not in its term (i.e. it does not necessarily bear to creatures that relation which we call volition).’ This is the regular Scholastic formula, isn’t it? Now to say that the will of God is not necessary in its term is perfectly acceptable if it only means that God’s creatures do not enjoy his necessity. Creatures stand in a unique relation of total dependence upon God. This relation in which they stand to him is such that he is other than they, utterly transcendent: yet at the same time they have a mysterious ‘likeness’ to him. This is what we find in our experience; and we cannot justify it except by showing that we do find it. My difficulty is that the Scholastics seem to introduce this lack of self-sufficiency, which is the mark of God’s creatures, into the creative act which is God himself.

Scholasticus: I don’t think you fully grasp the Scholastic position.

It may help if I contrast it with your own. Your own is, I think, that it is the nature of God to create. God’s nature is necessary. Therefore his act of creation, which is identical with his nature, is also necessary. But I say that it is not so simple as that. It is just as much God’s nature to create as not to create. By which I mean that his simple perfection is indifferent to creating or not creating; it includes both. It is his nature to create or not to create at his pleasure.

Criticus: God created because it was his will to do so; and his will is free. But the meaning which you give to ‘free’ seems to set up a contradiction in God. How can we avoid the conclusion that if God had chosen not to create there would have been something ‘unrealized’ in him? You may say that I am obliged to accept your meaning by the condemnations to which you referred. But it is not unreasonable, I think, to suggest that those condemnations bear simply and solely upon an error which inspires the condemned propositions, the error, namely, that creation is necessary in an ‘emanationist’ sense, that God is incomplete without creatures.

The condemnation which controls the Scholastic discussion I take to be that of the Guentherist proposition that God created with the necessity with which he loves himself, which certainly leads to a confusion between God and creatures. For it suggests that there is a relationship between God’s will and his creatures of the same kind as that between God’s will and himself. If we work in these terms, since we must say that there is a relation of identity between God’s will and himself, we must say that there is this same relation between himself and his creatures. Naturally Rosmini was also condemned for saying that there is a ‘moral necessity’ for God to create ‘because he loves himself in creatures’. And Abelard was condemned for saying that God ‘can do things only as he does them in fact’ because in the light of his other statements this seems to be setting bounds to God’s omnipotence. But all I am saying is that God would not be God without his act of creation.

Scholasticus: But are you not involved in these errors? For you find it inconceivable that God should exist without creatures.

Criticus: It is his nature to be generous, to give, to produce what is not himself, not because he requires us.

Scholasticus: If he does not require us, why can he not do without us?

Criticus: In an obvious sense he does without us: that is, God is simply God and we ‘make no difference’ to him.

Scholasticus: Very well, then, if God had not created us it would have made no difference to him. Why should you hesitate to admit the hypothesis?

Criticus: To say that the act of creation makes no difference to him in that sense would be to say that there is something unnecessary in him, as I have said before. You seem to think that by asserting this power of God’s to abstain from creating, you are maintaining one of his prerogatives. I am prepared to ‘take refuge in a mystery’ if I am bidden to do so by the Church. But I cannot pretend to attach any meaning to what you are talking about. The act of creation ‘makes no difference’ to God, so far as I can see, only in the sense that it is identical with his nature.

Scholasticus: But consider what consequences follow from your position. Are you not in effect denying all meaning to ‘possibility’? If there are no alternatives for the First Cause, are there any alternatives for anyone?

Criticus: ’To say that this is just the world is not to say that possibility is meaningless. It means that God has only one plan of creation. But it is a plan which involves human freedom—because it involves human blessedness; so we can refuse to accept God’s actuations. But this ‘can’ is not itself a possibility for actuation by God. It is something sui generis to which we can refer only in negative terms.

Scholasticus: Do you really mean to say that this world could not be improved upon?

Criticus: St Thomas, as you know, says that God governs his chosen world with supreme wisdom and benevolence. But you refer, no doubt, to his doctrine that God could have chosen another and a better one. Does that doctrine satisfy you?

Scholasticus: It seems to me imposed upon us. Anything created could always be better than it is. There is no assignable limit to the power which God could confer upon a creature. And this applies to the created universe as a whole. It has always been the answer of the Thomist school to philosophical optimism that the ‘best of all possible worlds’ is a meaningless expression.

Criticus: I am suggesting that there are no ‘possible’ worlds. I should find it hard to believe that God could have a better purpose for his creation than the communication of himself in knowledge and love to his creatures, even if I could entertain the notion of God’s having any plan different from that which in fact he has.

Scholasticus: Our knowledge and love of him are created qualities. They must always be capable of increase.

Criticus: Yours and mine considered in isolation—but in view of the knowledge and love of him enjoyed by Christ in his sacred humanity, in which we participate?

Scholasticus: It is all the same.

Criticus: I wonder. Are you not perhaps the victim here of your imagination? A maximum quantity is unthinkable in itself, but an optimum quality not necessarily, I suggest. Could there be anything created of higher value than Christ’s human soul? And is not our world ‘ordered’ to Christ? Could God’s purpose have been achieved with a more perfect adaptation of means to end?

Scholasticus: What, then, do we mean by speaking of God’s generosity in redeeming us if there was no question of his not redeeming us, or of not redeeming us in the manner in which he has done?

Criticus: We mean, I suppose, that God’s unchanging and supreme generosity is here most clearly indicated to us.

Scholasticus: ’That is true. But there is more behind it—a mystery of God’s freedom which you are trying to evacuate. You seem to think that you can explain God’s proceedings. You are claiming to see things from his side. You seem to think that God must have a reason, a reason perceptible to yourself, for what he does. But he is the reason for his act of creation and for the terms of this act.

Criticus: The real question seems to be this: what do we know about God? Do we or do we not know what we mean when we call him supreme wisdom and superlative generosity? Do we know him as creating out of that superlative generosity? And, if so, when we are asked to believe that he could create a better world and has not done so, how can we help saying ‘why not’?

Scholasticus: God in creating has no end in view save his own glory. He cannot subordinate himself to our advantage.

Criticus: Gloria Dei vivens homo! You cannot be suggesting that God gains anything by his creation. And, since we do, isn’t it God’s purpose in creating that we should?

Scholasticus: St Thomas says that God does not will anything for any reason (except himself), although he wills one thing to be on account of some other thing, as means to end. Vult ergo hoc esse propter hoc: sed non propter hoc vult hoc.

Criticus: That is obvious enough if it means that God cannot be moved to will by anything outside himself. But if it is taken to mean that God has no concern with what he creates we are back at Aristotle’s First Mover. Again I ask: are we, as theologians, really so ignorant of God’s nature as your position would suggest? Is he so dark to us that we may as well give up trying to attach any meaning to liberty or necessity as applied to him and take refuge in the indifferentia dominatrix of the Thomist commentators? Or do we in fact find in the Christian God the reconciliation of liberty and necessity? God is love—and Lover of us.

Scholasticus: I can think of one recent Thomist who uses, up to a point, the sort of language which you wish to use, and he—oddly, in view of what you have just been saying—was considered excessively ‘agnostic’ by some of his fellow-Thomists. Sertillanges says that it is only a way of saying that the creature could not be or be otherwise when we say that God could have not produced it or produced it otherwise—that the world has no necessity of itself.

Criticus: Of course I agree that the world has no necessity of itself, and if that is all that I am called upon to say in this matter of God’s freedom, then there is no difficulty. It does not surprise me that Sertillanges was considered ‘agnostic’. It was his realization of who God is that made him reject so much which ordinarily passes for appropriate language about him.