In the previous article, (New Blackfriars October 1980) I spoke of the radical questionableness of the universe and suggested that it seems anomalous to ask “How come?” about individual events or things or whole classes of things and yet refuse to ask this question about the whole world. The belief that such a question is unaskable is based, firstly, on the fact that we have no answer to it, and, secondly, on the fact that the language in which it is asked is exploratory; we are using words in ways that are stretched beyond their familiar use. I suggested that both these things are characteristic of the creative growing points of our understanding whether in science or in the arts. To assert the existence of God is not to state a fact within an established intellectual system but to claim the need for exploration; it is to claim that there is an unanswered question about the universe: the question “How come the whole thing instead of nothing?”

By “creation” we mean the dependence of all that is, in so far as it is. We do not know what it is that it depends on, we do not know the nature of God. There is, as I suggested, a great gap between creation and making or causing in our familiar sense. Other causes bring things about in a “world without them”, (X is brought about in a world with an X-shaped gap in it). What is caused comes about in a world in which it is in some way potential, a world, for example, containing what can be made into it, but there is nothing within which resides the possibility of the whole world before.it is created. Creation is a matter of the existence of the world over against nothing at all.

In a previous article (New Blackfriars, September 1980) I launched an attack on the ultramontane party and policy which appears to dominate the Vatican at the moment, and to be attempting a return to the high centralisation in the Holy See of all authority, all decisive control over the Church that marked the epoch between the first and second Vatican Councils, 1870 — 1962. I said this looks to many people like an attempt to dismantle the work of Vatican II, or at least to quench the spirit of that council.

Many Catholics assume, wrongly, that this concentration of authority and controlling power in the hands of the Holy See, i.e. of the pope as an institution, is how the Church was instituted by Jesus Christ. They assume that in essentials the Church has always been like that from St Peter onwards. This is an assumption that the pervasive ultramontane theology — or rather ideology — does nothing at all to discourage. A trivial illustration may be had from the new English breviary. The old Latin breviary (and the new Latin one also, I presume) used to give saints their ecclesiastical rank in naming their feasts or in heading selections from their writings; so we would have “St Elizabeth, widow”, “St Edward, king”, “St Bede the venerable, priest”, “St Thomas, martyr and bishop”, “St Augustine, bishop”, “St Gregory the Great, pope”, and so on. The new English breviary has dropped this old-fashioned formality — whether rightly or wrongly is a matter of taste. But it has made one exception. Holy popes remain popes first and saints second; so we have, for example, “A reading from the letter of Pope St Clement I to the Corinthians”, or “From a sermon of Pope St Leo the Great”, but not “A reading from the first letter of Apostle St Paul to the Corinthians”, and certainly not “From a sermon of Bishop St Augustine”.

My purpose in this article is (a) to consider the value and the coherence of the concept of divine necessity and (b) to offer some suggestions about the way in which divine necessity might reasonably be understood. I shall argue that there are reasons for denying the value and coherence of one notion of divine necessity but that another way of understanding it is not incoherent. Secondly, I shall defend the view that belief in divine necessity can plausibly be understood as an item of negative theology, as a way of refusing to tolerate certain positive affirmations.

Some philosophers have argued that belief in divine necessity amounts to belief that ‘God exists’ is a necessary proposition. As many recent writers have pointed out, however, there is more than one kind of necessary proposition. The kind which comes immediately to mind is, perhaps, that of logically necessary propositions. These are analytic, i.e. they are coherent and their negations are incoherent. But not all necessarily true propositions are logically necessary. There are, for example, propositions which are not analytic but which seem necessarily true when we think of what is picked out by the referring expressions used in them. An example is ‘The number which is the number of the planets is necessarily greater than 6’. The number referred to here is 9, and 9 is necessarily greater than 6. But the number which is the number of the planets could have been 4.

It is not, then, helpful simply to say that belief in God’s necessity is belief that ‘God exists’ is a necessary proposition. One influential view of divine necessity is, however, unaffected by this fact.