Descartes on the Creation of the Eternal Truths, E.M. Curley The Philosophical Review, Vol. 93, No. 4 (Oct., 1984), 569-597. Stable URL hitp:/flinks.jstor-org/sicisici=0031-8108% 281984 10% 2993%3A4%3C569%3 ADOTCOT%3E2.0,CO%S The Philosophical Review is currently published by Comell University Your use of the ISTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at hup:/www,jstororglabout/terms.hml. ISTOR’s Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at hupulwww.jstor.org/journals/sageschool. html, ch copy of any part of'a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the sereen or printed page of such transmission, ISTOR is an independent not-for-profit organization dedicated to creating and preserving a digital archive of scholarly journals. For more information regarding JSTOR, please contact support @ jstor.org. hupulwww jstor.org/ Fri Aug 5 11:57:26 2005The Philosophical Review, XCIUI, No. 4 (October 1984) DESCARTES ON THE CREATION OF THE ETERNAL TRUTHS E. M. Curley I April 1630 Descartes wrote, in a state of some excitement, to the faithful Mersenne, to announce a metaphysical doctrine which caused then, and has caused ever since, much puzzlement among his readers: (1) The mathematical truths, which you call eternal, have been es- tablished by God and depend on him entirely, just as all other crea- tures do... he has established these laws in nature as a king estab- lishes laws in his kingdom.! Subsequently Descartes explains that the eternal truths—what we would call necessary truths—depend on God's will, that since God's will was free, he could have created a world in which these truths did not hold, just as he could have not created any world at all? So, for example, God was free to create a world in which the lines from the center of a circle to its circumference were not all equal. We ‘cannot comprehend this possibility, but that is because our intel- lects are finite, whereas God's power is infinite and incomprehensible. Clearly this is a bizarre doctrine. But how bizarre is it? What exactly is Descartes committed to by this doctrine? Why does he hold it? What is the best that can be said in defense of it? Those are the questions I hope to answer in this paper. But before I proceed to say what I think Descartes is committed to by this doctrine, let me Letter of 15 April 1680, in Descart edited by F. Alquié, (Paris: Garnier, 1963. after as Alquié: 2Letter to Mersenne, 27 May 1680, Alquié I, 268. Oevceres philosophiques, Vol. 1, 1973), pp. 259-260. Cited here 569E. M, CURLEY 1 ‘There is an interpretation of Descartes, often found in the liter- ature, and interestingly developed recently by Harry Frankfurt.$ according to which Descartes's doctrine commits him to the thesis that there are no necessary truths, no truths whose negation is impossible, that, from a logical point of view, anything is possible. this thesis might be expressed in the symbolism of modal logic by (PMp, that is, for any p, pis logically possible. Frankfurt puts it by saying that the eternal truths are “inkerently as contingent as” or “no more ultimately necessary than” any other propositions (p. 42). take it that the force of the qualifying expressions which T have emphasized is to allow that, although we, of course, perceive the eternal truths as necessary, that is just a fact about us, it does not show anything about the intrinsic nature of what we perceive: (2) The propositions we find to be necessary. .. need not be truths atall. The inconceivability of their falsity... is not inherent in them, Itis properly to be understood only as relative to the character of our minds (Frankfurt, “Creation,” p. 45), ‘The inability of our minds to conceive of the falsity of the eternal truths is “merely a contingent characteristic of our minds’ (p. 44). God might easily have created us otherwise. And if he had created us otherwise, he would not have deceived us in any absolute sense, because there's nothing in contradictions themselves which makes them impossible. Descartes, of course, never says this in so many words. Otherwise Frankfurt’s interpretation would not be an interpretation, but merely a restatement of the doctrine. So what did Descartes say that has led interpreters to ascribe this doctrine to him? Descartes on the Creation of the Eternal Truths,” The Philosophical Review Vol. 86, no. 1, (1977), pp. 36-57. Cited hereafter as Franklurt, “Creation.” CE. Cronin, T., Objective Being in Descartes and Suarez, (Rome: in University Press, 1966), p. 37; Wells, NJ., “Descartes and the Scholastics Briefly Revisited,” New Scholastcisn'35 (1961), p. 182. 1 had originally been inclined to read J-L. Marion's Sur la théologie blanche de Descartes (Paris: PUF, 1981) as operating under the same assumption, but M. Marion tells me, in conversation about a draft of this paper, that he agrees with me against Frankfurt on this point. 570DESCARTES ON THE CREATION OF THE ETERNAL TRUTHS First, in some passages in which Descartes expounds his creation doctrine he does abstain from saying, in his own person, that the eternal truths are really eternal. So in the letter to Mersenne ‘quoted above (1), he speaks of “the truths of mathematics, which you call eternal ..."! Someone might well take that to imply that Descartes himself thinks that the truths of mathematics are not really eternal or necessary. More serious are passages like the following, which comes froma letter to Mesland (2 May 1644): (6) As for the difficulty of conceiving how it was a matter of free- dom and indifference for God to make it not be true that the three angles of a triangle were equal to two right angles, or generally, that contradictories cannot exist together, one can easily remove it by con- sidering that the power of the God cannot have any limits... (Alquié MII, 74 What is particularly striking about this passage is that Descartes allows that the denials of mathematical truths do involve a contra- diction and yet maintains that their contradictoriness is only a rea- son for regarding them as false, not for regarding them as impossi- ble. Take any contradiction you like. God could have made it true. Hence, it could have been true. Hence, it is possible, even if false. Hence, anything is possible, there are no necessary truths. " Whatever we may think of the intrinsic merits of the doctrine that there are no necessary truths, we should recognize that there are compelling systematic reasons why Descartes should not hold it. The most obvious, of course, is that Descartes thinks God has the property of existing necessarily (Alquié II, 593), Surely this entails that there is at least one necessary truth, viz., that God exists. But some interpreters (though not Frankfurt) exempt eternal truths “Alquié 1, 259. There is a similar passage in a leter to Mersenne of 17 May 1638, Alquié II, 62. 5As Gueroult did in his Spinoza, vol. I (Paris: Aubier-Montaigne), p. 80, 1, 238, Marion (op. cit, pp. 161~178) also emphasizes this language, but apparently does not draw Gueroul’s conclusion. onE.M, CURLEY about God from the scope of the creation doctrine. So let us pass to other examples. Consider the ontological argument. As Descartes expounds this, it requires the assumption that I conceive of countless things which have true, immutable and eternal natures, even though they may never have existed or have been thought of (AT VII, 64). These eternal natures do not depend on my mind; my thought does not impose any necessity on things, rather the necessity of the things themselves determines me to think of them in the way that I do.® ‘This hardly sounds like a man who would write, as Frankfurt does on his behalf, “the necessities human reason discovers ... are just necessities of its own contingent nature” (“Creation,” p. 45). Moreover, not only do we perceive that the truths of mathemat- ics are necessary, sometimes, at least, we perceive clearly and dis- tinctly that they are necessary (e.g., at AT VII, 65). If they aren't in fact necessary, then it looks as though Descartes will have to give up his criterion of truth, Not everything we perceive clearly and dis- tinctly is true. At the time of writing his article on the creation of the eternal truths, Frankfurt replied to an objection of this kind that it presupposed a realist conception of truth which he had independent grounds for denying to Descartes. At that stage he evidently still thought that the most satisfactory solution to the problem of the Cartesian circle required us to ascribe a coherence theory of truth to Descartes (“Greation,” p. 52). Subsequently, how- ever, Frankfurt has apparently recanted, acknowledging that “whenever Descartes gives an explicit account of truth he explains it unequivocally as correspondence with reality."? So invoking a coherence theory of truth will not give us a plausible way out of the difficulty that we clearly and distinctly perceive certain truths to be necessary. ATT VIL, 67. In a paper read at the APA meetings in Boston, December 1980, "Descartes on Gods Ability to Do the Logically Impossible,” Richard La Croix emphasized an analogous passage in the Sixth Replies (AT VII, 436), “Descartes on the Consistency of Reason,” in Descartes: Critical and In- Lerpretive Essays, edited by M. Hooker (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Unive sity Press, 1978), p. 87. He cites no texts, but presumably has in mind passages like that in the letter to Mersenne of 16 October 1689 (Alquié II, 144). See also the discussion in my Descartes Against the Skeptics, (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978), pp. 108-112, 572DESCARTES ON THE CREATION OF THE ETERNAL TRUTHS Perhaps the most interesting systematic reason for hesitating to ascribe to Descartes the thesis that there are no necessary truths is that the recognition of necessary truths seems to be central to his philosophy of science. In Le monde Descartes classes the fundamen- tal laws of physics together with the principles of mathematics as necessary or eternal truths: (4) In addition to the three laws I have explained, I do not wish to suppose any others, except those which follow infallibly from those eternal truths on which the mathematicians are accustomed to base their most certain and evident demonstrations, those truths, I say, according to which God himself has taught us that he has disposed all things in number, weight and measure, and whose knovledge is 50 natural to our souls that we cannot but judge them to be infallible when we conceive them distinctly, nor doubt that if God had created several worlds, they would be as true in all of them as they are in this one (AT XI, 47). Here Descartes assimilates principles of physics—principles of in- crtia and of the conservation of motion—to mathematical truths. ‘To that extent he may remind us of Quine. But in Descartes's case the assimilation is made in order to claim necessity for both mathe- ‘matical and physical laws. Even more interesting, perhaps, is the fact that Descartes here anticipates an idea usually credited to Leibniz, that necessary truths are those which are true in all possible worlds. The same idea is ‘emphasized again in the Discourse on Method, when Descartes sum- marizes what he had done in Le monde: (6) I showed what were the laws of nature, and without basing my arguments on any other principle than the infinite perfections of God, Tried to demonstrate all those of which one could have any doubt and to show that, even if God had created several worlds, there could not be any in which they would fail to be observed (AT VI, 43), Ies important for the methodology of Cartesian physics that the laws of nature should be true in all possible worlds; only if they are, can physics be a priori to the extent that Descartes thinks it is. Not that Descartes thinks physics is wholly an a priori science. He does recognize a role for experiment there, as many recent studies have 573EM, CURLEY ‘emphasized.’ The function of experiment, however, is not to de- termine what the laws of nature are, but to determine how, given those laws of nature, the effects are produced, to determine the initial conditions, typically unobservable mechanisms, from which the phenomena can be deduced.’ If Descartes thought there were no necessary truths, it would be difficult to see why he should not extend his empiricism even to the laws of nature.!® m1 We have, then, at least three systematic reasons why it would be awkward for Descartes to affirm, what the standard interpretation of his creation doctrine requires, that there are no necessary truths. ‘The standard interpretation is hard to reconcile with (i) Descartes's commitment to true and immutable natures in the ontological ar- gument, (ii) his acknowledgment that we clearly and distinctly per- ceive certain truths to be necessary, and (ii) his (limited) use of an a See, for example, Daniel Garber's “Science and Certainty in Descartes,” in Hooker, op. cit, and the literature cited there. "The whole issue is undoubtedly more complicated than I suggest here, but evo passages which support this reading would be in the Discourse, vi (AT VI, 64-65) and Principles IV, 199-206. Alquié’s annotation of the former passage is particularly relevant to our present theme. Descartes writes: “First 1 tried to find in general the principles, or first causes of ‘everything that i, or shat can be, in the world...” (my emphasis). Alquié (I, {636, n. 1) observes that this formula “indicates sufficiently that the a priori deduction which will be carried out on the basis of principles will result in the reconstruction of a possible world rather than in the explanatory de- scription of the real world, Nevertheless, it will suffice so long as itis a matter of generalities (heavens, stars, etc). It will no longer suffice when ‘one wishes to descend to more particular things, that is, .o explain why this possible body, rather than some other, exists." I would prefer to say that the deduction shows what any possible world is like. That is why it suffices. TOL agree with Kripke that we ought to keep the logico-metaphysical issue of necessity or contingency separate from the epistemological issue of 4 prioricity oF a poserioricy, There may be contingent a prion «ruths and necessary a posterion truths. Cf. Naming and Necessy, (Cambridge, Mass. Harvard University Press, 1980 passim). All my argument requires, 1 think, is that it should be natural to assume that only the necessary is knowable a priar. So there is some plausibility in the historical thesis that the empiricism of modern natural science had its origin in the Judaeo- Christian conception of nature as the product of divine will. CE. the essays ‘of O'Connor, Foster and Oakley in Part I of Creation: The Impact of an Idea, cedited by D. O'Connor and F, Oakley, (New York: Scribners, 1969). a4DESCARTES ON THE CREATION OF THE ETERNAL TRUTHS priori method in physics. In the next section I shall argue that there are textual grounds for questioning the standard interpretation ‘even in those passages in which Descartes is expounding his cre- ation doctrine. But before we come to those passages, let me amp! fy a remark made above in passing, Descartes, I maintain, anticipated an idea usually credited to Leibniz, that necessary truths are those which are true in all possi- ble worlds. You might object that in the passages cited in support of that claim Descartes does not explicitly use the notion of a possible world, the notion he uses is that of a world God might have created. He identifies necessary truths with those which would have been true in any world God created. And that’s certainly true. Nevertheless, the grounds for crediting Descartes with this idea are as good as those for crediting Leibniz, ‘with it. The same question has been raised about Leibniz. So far as Thave been able to discover, there is no passage in which Leibniz, explicitly identifies necessary truths with those true in all possible worlds, The best support for attributing that view to him!! comes from the following passage: (6) Essential {propositions] are those which can be demonstrated by a resolution of the terms, which are necessary, or virtually identical, 30 that their opposite is impossible or virtually contradictory. These have ‘eternal truth, Not only will they obtain so long as the world lasts, they would also have obtained if God had created the World in another way. In one respect, Descartes is closer to most modern conceptions! in that he speaks of other worlds, rather than other ways of creating the World. In another, he is more remote, in that he conceives of his alternative worlds as ones which do not exclude one another 'Gited by Benson Mates, in “Leibniz on Possible Worlds,” in Frank- fure’s Leibni, a collection of eiial essays, (Garden City, N.Y.2 Anchor, 1972), 337. The atribution to Leibniz of the idea that necessary truth is truth, ‘mall possible worlds is questioned by William Lycan in “The Trouble with Possible Worlds,” in The Posible and the Actual, ed. by M. Loux, (Ithaca, N.¥.: Cornell University Press, 1979), p. 274, n. 1 2Opuscules et fragments inédts de Leibniz, edited by L. Couturat (Paris: Alcan, 1903), p. 18. 13The qualification is necessitated by Kripke's cautions about the term ‘possible world? in Naming and Necesst, p. 48n, pp. 15 ff. 875,EM, CURLEY (“If God had created several worlds . ..”—my emphasis). But both in Descartes and in Leibniz the connection between necessary truth and truth in all possible worlds is expressed in terms of divine ‘creation, of a world God might have created, or a way God might have created the world. Iv Apart from the systematic difficulties the standard interpreta- tion of the creation doctrine involves, there are suggestions of a different interpretation, one which acknowledges the existence of necessary truths, even in those passages in which Descartes is ex- pounding or defending the doctrine. Consider that first puzzling letter to Mersenne. In it Descartes endeavors to prepare Mersenne for dealing with objections by constructing the following imaginary dialogue: (7) They will tell you that, if God had established these truths, he could change them, as a king does his laws; to which one must reply yes, if his will can change.—But [ understand them as eternal and immutable —And I judge the same concerning God —But his willis free.—Yes, but his power is incomprehensible (Alquié 1, 260-261). The point here is to reassure the imaginary opponent that the truths in question are genuinely necessary, in spite of having been created by a free act of God's will. As Beyssade explains, (8) The incomprehensiility of the divine power, far from extend ing contingency to the domain of mathematical truths, where we pet ceive only necessity, is invoked, on the contrary, to safeguard necessi- ty, where we can only imagine contingency. It is true that our imagination can only represent the work of a free will as con- tingent.... But the Cartesian reminds us that our inability to imagine will which is free, and nevertheless immutable, and creative of truths truly necessary, does not prove (that there can be no such thing).!4 "La philosphie premidre de Descartes, by J-M. Beyssade (Paris: Flam- marion, 1979), p. T12. Cited without any appearance of disapproval by Marion, op. cit, p. 278n. 376DESCARTES ON THE CREATION OF THE ETERNAL TRUTHS And Descartes's imaginary dialogue in the first letter to Mersenne is not the only such passage. Consider the not-so-imaginary opponent Gassendi, who ob- jected, against the ontological argument, that it seemed hard to ‘maintain that there is an eternal and immutable nature other than God. Descartes's reply does not deny that the true and immutable natures are really eternal. “You would be right,” he says, that i, it ‘would be a hard thing to maintain that there are true and immuta- ble natures. (9) If it were a question of an existing thing, or even if I had established something so immutable that its very immutability does not depend on God. But just as the poets feign that the destinies have indeed been established by Jupiter, but that after they have been established, he is himself bound to observe them, so I don't think that in truth the essences of things and those mathematical truths which ‘can be known concerning them, are independent of God; rather I think that, because God so willed it, because he disposed them so, they are immutable and eternal. Whether that seems hard or soft to you ‘matters litte. It is enough for me that itis true (AT VIL, 880; Alquié M1, 887). ‘The eternal truths are truly eternal, even though they have been created. If we suppose that this is Descartes's position, we trade one para- dox for another. The standard interpretation requires us to ascribe to Descartes the paradox that there are no necessary truths. The alternative I am pursuing is that there are necessary truths, but that some or all of them are created. Out of the frying pan into the fire, you may say. And in the end, perhaps, I agree. But apart from the historical interest we may have in determining just what mistake Descartes made, I think there is some philosophical interest in seeing just what there is about this doctrine that makes ita mistake. '5One disquieting note about this passage. Here Descartes accepts the comparison between God's relation to the eternal truths and Jupiter's relation tothe destinies, whereas in the letter to Mersenne of 15 April 1630 (Alquié 1, 259-260) he rejected that comparison as demeaning to God. ‘The solution to that puzzle seems to be that in the leter to Mersenne he did not think of the destinies as being in any way dependent on Jupiter, whereas in the 5th Replies he does, 377E. M. CURLEY A natural objection is this. Creation, if itis anything, is an act, hence an event, hence something essentially related to time. For any event, it must make sense to ask “At what time did that event occur?” It may be difficult to answer that question, but it must always make sense to ask it. The eternal truths, on the other hand, are essentially not related to time. For any eternal truth, it does not make sense to ask “At what time did that eternal truth come into existence or come to be true?” If it’s really eternal, the question is improper; there can be no time at which it came to be true. It’s clear, I think, what Descartes will say to this. He will reject the assumption that if the eternal truths were created, there must be a time at which they were created. He does use temporal language in various places in connection with his creation doctrine. In the pas- sage quoted above (9), he is willing to compare God to Jupiter, who was bound to observe his decrees after he had made them. And in the Conversation with Burman, when Burman asks: (10) Does it follow from this {the doctrine of the creation of the eternal truths] that God could have commanded a creature to hate him, and thereby made this a good thing to do2!® Descartes replies (11) God could not now do this: but we simply do not know what he could have done. In any case, why should he not have been able to give this command to one of his creatures? (my emphasis). ‘These are only the most striking instances of Descartes’s use of temporal language in expounding his doctrine of the creation of the eternal truths. It’s quite characteristic for him to talk about what God could have done, rather than what God can do, as if there was a time at which God hadn't yet established the eternal truths. Stil, Descartes can’t mean this temporal language to be taken at face value. For whereas he apparently does think of the creation of the world as a datable event, occurring approximately 5000 years ‘Descartes Conversation with Burman, wansated by John Cottingham (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), p22. 578.DESCARTES ON THE CREATION OF THE ETERNAL TRUTHS ago,"7 he evidently does not so conceive the creation of the eternal truths. What God did, to create the eternal truths, was to will and understand them from all eternity."® There is no time at which they came to be, no time prior to which they were not true. This is at least one difference between God's actions and men's. Another is, that the act by which God understands, wills and brings about all things occurs at all times as one “perfectly simple” act.!® So the concept of an action, when applied to God, does not have the same implications it does when applied to man. Whether this doctrine is consistent or not, I make no attempt to decide. There would seem to be a problem in reconciling the fol- lowing three propositions: () God created the world in time. (ii) God created the eternal truths from eternity, (ii) God created all things by one perfectly simple act. But perhaps I do not adequately understand the divine simplicity. Perhaps no finite mind is supposed to understand it. In any case, rather than focus on the disanalogies between God's actions and men's, I prefer to exploit an analogy between them, 1 take my cue from Beyssade (8), who observes that Descartes's doctrine is invoked “to safeguard necessity where we can only 7 To Burman’s objection that eternity is all at once and once for all, Descartes replies: “That i imposible to conceive of. I is alla once and ‘once forall, insofar as nothing s ever added to or taken away from the natare of God. But is not lla once or once for all in the sense that it fasts all at once. For since we ean divde it up now after the creation ofthe world wy should i not have been posible to do the same before creation, Since duration remains constant? Thus eternity has now coveisted with Created things for say, 5000 years, and has occupied time along with them; so it could have done just the same before creation if we had had some Standard to messure by" (op. ce, pp. 6-7: ef. the Sixth Replies, AT VII, 139, "eLetter of 27 May 1680 (Alqué 1, 268) and ef. the Conversation with Burman, pp. 15-16. BCE Brinpes 1, 28, Burman, pp. 31-32. snd the comment on it in the Conversation with 579FM. CURLEY imagine contingency,” that is, in the domain of the will. One way of expressing the connection between volition and contingency is to say that itis, in general, true of any agent, a, that if a wills that p, then it is at least logically possible that a not will that p.2° Using a symbolism which I hope will be perspicuous,2! we might express this as follows: (@ @(p(Wap > MWap) @ seems to express a general logical truth about acts of will. If we express God's omnipotence by saying that a proposition is true if and only if God wills it to be true, (i (>) (Pp > Wep) then it seems possible to derive from these assumptions a thesis involving iterated modalities which might plausibly be taken to express Descartes's creation thesis in atemporal language. Let py, be any necessary truth, so that ii) Lp, In virtue of (ii), we have (iv) Lp, > Wetp, In virtue of (), we have () WgLp, > MWaLp, Detaching the consequents of (iv) and (v), we get 20am much indebted in this paragraph to Wayne Wasserman, whose comments on an earlier version ofthis paper prompted me to simpli the segment at pon. The cr prince) okey James Ron Phisuphial Theology second edition, (Indianapolis: Hacket, 1980), p. xx "W... "asa two-place predicate tobe read. wilthat —"y'MT and to ymin og pos and neces, rept sit repre 580DESCARTES ON THE CREATION OF THE ETERNAL TRUTHS (vi) MWeEp, that i, its possible that God doesn’t will py to be necessary. But since p, is necessary only if God wills it to be necessary (by (iv), (vi) entails (vii) MEP, Since py was a randomly selected necessary truth, the deduction from (ii) to (vii) allows us to generalize to (iii) (p) (Lp > MEp) (The principle invoked here is that p + q, then Mg Mp.) or equivalently, (ix) (p) (MMp) So the suggestion is that we should understand Descartes’s doctrine Of the creation of the eternal truths as involving, not a denial that there are necessary truths, but a denial that those which are neces- sary are necessarily necessary. To think of these truths as created is neither to think that they are not necessary, nor to think that there was a time when they were not necessary, but to think that itis not necessary that they be necessary. Iterated modalities in the timeless present express Descartes's thought better than his own temporal language does.2? As we shall sce later, I think that (p)MMp is not the bet formula for expressing Descartes’ creation doctrine. I adopt it here only provisionally, to avoid for the time being the explanations a more exact formula will require. Lee Horwitz has pointed out a difficulty with the argument of thi paragraph, Descartes holds that creation is continuous and that the distinc fion between creation and conservation is only a distinction of reason (AT VII, 49). If I continue to exist from one time to another, I do so because God, by one and the same action, wills my continued existence. In the case of the eternal truths, God’s continuous volition of their truth is supposed tobe an immutable act. God's immutability is what explains the necessity of these truths, But if God's continuous volition of these truths is immutable, then, once he has willed them, he cannot not will them, in violation of (i). I 581E,M, CURLEY ‘This suggestion about how to interpret Descartes's creation doc- tine was first made, I think, by Geach.2 Geach does not support the suggestion textually, but it’s worth noting that there is a quite explicit textual basis for supposing Descartes to have been making a claim about iterated modalities. A passage that we considered earlier (3), from Descartes’s letter to Mesland of 2 May 1644, continues: (12) Then also by considering that our mind is finite and created of such a nature that it can conceive as possible the things that God has willed co be truly possible, but not of such a nature that it can also conceive as possible those which God could have made possible, but nevertheless willed to make impossible, [That God's power has no limits} tells us that God cannot have been determined to bring it about ‘that it was true that contraries cannot exist together and that, hence, he could have done the contrary .... though God has willed that cer” tain wuths were necessary, that is noc to say that he has willed them necessarily. For to will that they were necessary and to will them necessarily, or to be necessitated to will them, are completely different (Alquie 111, 74) Here we have Descartes invoking a scope distinetion between () Welp and (2) LWep in a way that has a clear bearing on a scholastic argument we shall shortly consider (see pp. 585-588). It should be evident that in this passage Descartes wants to allow that there are some propositions which are in fact impossible, but which might have been possible, take this to be a difficulty in Descartes’s philosophy, rather than in my interpretation of it, a difficulty perhaps first seen by Spinoza (ef. the Ethics itled “Omnipotence,” first published in Philosophy 48 (1973), pp. 7-20, and subsequently reprinted in Providence and Evil (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1977). Geachrs suggestion is discussed by Alvin Plantinga in Does God Have a Nature? (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1980), pp. 103-114, but rejected as “contrary to the fundamental thrust” of Descartes's system. 582DESCARTES ON THE CREATION OF THE ETERNAL TRUTHS and that others are in fact necessary, but might, nevertheless, not have been necessary. There is nothing epistemic about these “mights.” We are not saying: “These things seem necessary, but, for all we know, they might not be necessary.” We are saying: “These things are necessary, but there is nothing necessary about that.” v Why did Descartes hold this doctrine? Clearly he thought that God's omnipotence required it. But this simple, obvious answer does not take us very far. Why should he have thought that God's omnipotence required God to be the creator of eternal truths? Descartes writes as if his doctrine were the only alternative to pos- tulating something eternal that is independent of God: (13) As for the eternal truths, I say again that they are true or possible because God knows them to be true or possible, but not tha they are known by God to be true as if they were true independently of Him. ... One must not say, then, that if God didnot exist, nevertheless those truths would stil be true, for the existence of God is the first and most eternal of all the truths which can be, and the only one from which al the others proceed. But what makes it easy to be mistaken in this is that most men do not consider God as an infinite and incomprehensible being, who is the only author on whom all things depend.2* But why should Descartes suppose that if God does not create the eternal truths, they are true independently of Him? The Thomistic view, after all, conceived the eternal truths as neither created nor independent of God: (14) If no intellect were eternal, no ruth would be eternal. But because the divine intellect is eternal, truth has eternity in it alone. Nor does it follow from this that anything other than God is eternal; because truth in the divine intellect is God himself (Summa Theologiae 1a 16, 7). Why does Descartes reject this Thomistic solution? Frankfurt addresses this problem and suggests that Descartes To Mersenne, 6 May 1630, Alquié I, 264-265. Italicized phrases are in Latin in the original, whereas the rest of the letter is in French. 583EM, CURLEY thought the Thomistic doctrine compromised God's simplicity. It made the eternal truths depend on God, all right, but on God's intellect, not on his will. To say this is to imply a distinction between God's intellect and his will. And certainly Descartes does think it essential to identify God's intellect and will, and does connect this identification with his creation doctrine. In the passage quoted above (13), I omitted the following sentence: (15) 1f men understood properly the meaning of their words, they could never say without blasphemy that the truth of a thing precedes the knowledge God has of it, for in God willing and knowing are one, in such a way that from the very fat that he will something, he thereby knows it, and on that account only such a thing is true. 25 But it should be noted that here the identity of God's will and intellect is invoked against an opponent who maintains that the truth of a thing precedes God's knowledge of it. This can hardly be ‘Thomas. ‘One difficulty with Frankfurt’s account is that it speaks not of ‘Thomism, but of Scholasticism, and treats “Scholastic philosophers such as Suarez and Aquinas” (“Creation,” p. 39) as if there were no important differences between them. But there are. If we examine Suarez’s criticism of the Thomists, we will find that itis Suarez who best fits the profile of Descartes’s opponent.2® Descartes neglects Alquié 264. Again, the italicized phrases ae in Latin in the original. Frankfurt cles passage from the Sith Replies (AT VI, 431482), but that passages lest satstactory for his purposes than (15), since it appears to make God's intellect subordinate to hi will CE. Alguié's annotation, ‘Aig 1, 8721.2, and Manion, 262-289 in what follows tam much indebted to Cronin, op. ci. The interpreta- tion of Suarez iva delicate business and Cronn's reading may not be correct. In "Suaver onthe Eternal Truths,” The Modern Schooiman 38 (2981), pp. 73-104, 159-174, Norman Wells emphasizes the difference between Suarez various Thomistc opponents and the danger of taking some of Suare'ssatements a representative of his own final position. For the purpose of identifying a likely opponent for Descartes, however, 1 believe twill be sufficient if Cronin’ iiterprtaion represent 4 natal misreading of Suarez, No doubt the histolel situation is far more plex than either Cronin or I repreaent it as being. The best available {ccountis now, no doubs, the massive and erudite, but very dificult work of Marion cted in fn. 3 584DESCARTES ON THE CREATION OF THE ETERNAL TRUTHS ‘Thomas's alternative theory, I suggest, because he tacitly accepts, the validity of Suarez’s criticism of Thomas. In the Metaphysical Disputations,2” one of the problems Suarez takes up is what we might call the problem of the existential import of necessary truths. Suarez takes it for granted that there can be ‘eternal (necessary) truths—for example, “All men are animals"— about beings whose existence is contingent. But the orthodox doc- trine in medieval quantification theory was that universal gener- alizations entail the existence of members of their subject class. On. the other hand, it is orthodox doctrine in anybody's modal logic that a truth entailed by a necessary truth is itself necessary. How ‘can “All men are animals” be necessary while “There are men” is contingent? This is not Suarez’s way of setting up the problem. His way of putting it is as follows: if the essence of a thing perishes when the thing ceases to exist, then those propositions in which essential predicates are predicated of a thing are neither necessary nor of perpetual truth. This conclusion is unacceptable, since it would entail that all truths about creatures would be contingent, and hence, since all science is of necessary truths, that there could be no science concerning creatures. Suarez notes that “some modern the- ologians” have been willing to grant that propositions putatively of perpetual truth might come, and cease, to be true as things come, and cease, to exist, but finds the opinion contrary to the wisdom of the philosophers and of the Church fathers. Suarez then considers and rejects a Thomistic solution: that eter- nal truths about creatures might be true, regardless of the exis- tence of the creatures, “not in themselves, but in the divine intel- lect.” This, he says, won't do. For contingent truths have a perpetual truth in the divine intellect as much as necessary ones do. And—what is more important for our purposes—the eternal truths. .. (16) ...are not true because they are known by God, rather they are known because they are true, otherwise no reason could be given ="Dispulationes metaphysicae, 2 vols. (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1965). The passages I shall be concerned with are in Disputation XXX1, S 38-47, pp. 294-298. 585