“God’s creation is not necessary, because nothing, not even a metaphysical mechanism internal to God’s nature, necessitates it. But neither is it contingent in the sense that God confronts “Create” and “Don’t create” as alternative possibilities to deliberate or resolve upon. Creation is divine play: the spontaneous, gratuitous act of infinite goodness whose freedom consists neither in necessity nor in counterfactual choice, nor in any transcendent recipe comprising their combination. It is a metaphysical surprise and joy, unpredictable given everything God is, and yet perfectly expressive of who he is.

“Creation is the free spontaneity of divine plenitude.

“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.

“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.

“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.

Victor Cousin ›

Direct quote

“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.