1. In questioning possible worlds I join the growing band of those who reject the notion that God employs possible worlds in the processes of creation. See David Burrell Freedom and Faith in Three Traditions (Notre Dame IN: Notre Dame Press, 1993), 111–118; idem ‘Creation and “actualism”: The dialectical dimension of philosophical theology’, in David Burrell Faith and Freedom (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 76–90; James Ross Thought and World (Notre Dame IN: Notre Dame Press, 2008), 45–65. Barry Miller's thoughts tend in a similar direction. He rejects that common preconception that before their actuality individuals can be referred to; Barry Miller The Fullness of Being (Notre Dame IN: Notre Dame Press, 2002), 87–95. See also my Ontology and Providence in Creation: Taking Ex Nihilo Seriously (London: Continuum, 2008).

2. Wisdom of Solomon, 7.29–8.2 (New American Bible).

3. Augustine Confessions, Book X, vi, 8 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 183 (translation slightly adapted). To keep with the traditional references to Wisdom as female I have slightly adapted some translations both here and below.

4. Ibid., Book X, xxvii, 38, 201.

5. Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works (London: Classics of Western Spirituality, 1978), 76–77 (translation slightly adapted); quoted in Patrick Sherry Spirit and Beauty (London: SCM Press, 2002), 56.

6. Patrick Sherry and Richard Harries are just two of the scholars who have drawn attention to the neglect of the beauty of God in recent times. See Sherry Spirit and Beauty, 21–27; Richard Harries Art and the Beauty of God (London: Continuum, 1993), 1–17. See also Edward Oakes's essay ‘The apologetics of beauty’, where he looks at how the ugly is often glorified in modern art and culture. He tries to show (drawing upon the ideas of Von Balthasar as his chief inspiration) how the idea of beauty must be an integral part of the Christian witness; Edward Oakes ‘The apologetics of beauty’, in D. Treier, M. Husbands, & R. Lundin (eds) The Beauty of God (Downers Grove IL: Intervarsity Press, 2008), 209–226.

7. Anselm Monologium, ch. 11 (La Salle IL: Open Court Publishing, 1962), 104 (translation slightly adapted).

8. Ibid., ch. 12, 105 (translation slightly adapted).

9. We need not enter the debate about whether possibility is best understood as maximally consistent sets of propositions, or whether it is best seen as sets of states of affairs, or, indeed, whether propositions just are states of affairs. If the reader is sceptical about possibility being understood to be propositional in content, he or she can adjust my parable so that God shows states of affairs to His audience. Whatever one chooses as one's preferred way of understanding possibility, some of those possibilities will be ugly – if, that is, we accept the possible-worlds account of the divine understanding.

10. It might be claimed that my complaint is not against possible worlds, but any comprehensive account of God's omniscience. I have argued elsewhere that rejecting possible worlds does not compromise divine omniscience. See Robson Ontology and Providence in Creation, 54–57. Possible worlds are especially iniquitous in my view since they are discrete, eternal, necessary, determinate, and are seen as part of the divine mind. I am not so sure that writers like Augustine (who undoubtedly believed in God's omniscience) would have been ready to accept possible worlds. Most writers (up to Leibniz) seemed content that God had ideas of humanity and equinity, rather than knowledge of individual essences like Socrates and Bucephalus.

11. The most standard formalization of modal logic (S5) accepts that possibility is a matter of necessity; that is to say, whatever is possible is possible necessarily. So whatever is possible, will continue to be possible for all eternity. Even before the world existed and there was only God, then, murder, rape, torture, and all other moral horrors were possible. These possible horrors will continue, if we accept the possible-worlds' picture, to haunt reality forever.

12. Not all the ugly worlds that God would contemplate would be evil; some would just be horrible to look at, or just entirely without rhyme or reason. Consider the world whose only constituent is a snarling, ugly face inscribed on the surface of some rank sewage. Presumably (if there are possible worlds) this world (or its story) is present in the divine consciousness for all eternity.

13. For ease, I will refer to the possible-worlds' theorist as a ‘Leibnizean’ in honour of the chief inspiration of this way of understanding the divine mind.

14. There are some complex issues here. Some people fantasize about rape and murder. They do not want these things to become actual, however. They realize that actualization would be morally terrible: real people would get hurt. So they entertain certain evil possibilities without wanting them to become actual. However, most would accept that such fantasies are morally compromising. The line between fantasy and mere contemplation of an evil is quite hard to draw. For ease of presentation, I ignore this difficulty.

15. The story would not even have to be told to anyone for it to be ugly. Even if Wisdom had kept her stories to herself, they would still have been in her mind – a kind of secret stain! Perhaps these secret stories would be even more worrying.

16. I deliberately use the word ‘copy’. Part of my discomfort with possible-world accounts of the divine mind is what I see as its consequence that God inevitably has to yield to the eternal dictates of possible rapists and murderers. It is as if there are independent currents of sin swirling in the divine consciousness. (The number of these independent currents is infinitely multiplied by those who believe in middle knowledge.) This independence of the possible from the divine will is, of course, acknowledged by the Leibnizean. Leibniz himself explicitly rejected the idea proposed by Descartes that the logical laws themselves were subject to the divine will. Leibniz, in contrast, claimed that the logical laws depend upon the divine understanding, but not upon His will. I have no wish to endorse Descartes' universal possibilism. I think that the logical laws (say, for example, the law of non-contradiction) is somehow embedded in the divine being, but this acknowledgement of the existence of this law does not legitimize the inference that there are whole, determinate, possible worlds in the divine mind which already obey it.

17. Another way the Leibnizean might try to ameliorate the ugliness of God's stories is to say that God's knowledge of possibilities are not so much stories, but sets of truths or sets of propositions. So God knows the truth ‘if Leatherface were to work in an abattoir, he would acquire an unhealthy interest in chainsaws’. God merely knowing sets of truths might seem less ugly. A proposition, it might be argued, is just a proposition – it is aesthetically neutral. I am not so sure – the set of possible truths about a possible galactic holocaust seems ugly and seems to constitute a story, a narrative, a way things might go. On God only knowing truths see William Lane Craig Time and Eternity: Exploring God's Relationship to Time (Wheaton IL: Crossway Books, 2001), 263–265.

18. David Brown in his commentary on Grünewald's Isenheim Altarpiece says that originally the painting was intended for a hospital ‘which cared for those suffering from a particularly ravaging illness that produced gangrene, boils, blackened skin and muscular spasms’. Those suffering would be able to find some consolation in Christ sharing their pain. See David Brown Tradition and Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 351–352.

19. Of course, were all the ugliness eliminated by its being looked upon with hatred, there would no longer be much left to look upon!

20. It is also worth recalling that when Picasso painted Guernica he was reacting to an event outside of himself. He wanted to show the ugliness of what had happened. But God in His possible stories is not reacting to things outside of Himself; He is looking inwardly at the contents of His own mind. If, then, God hates the story of child rape and murder (which surely He does), is He hating a part of Himself? Do we have to agree with those theologians who have speculated about the existence of a divine darkness? If so, we must accept that God is not wholly beautiful. He contains ugliness as well as beauty.

21. Richard Harries argues for something like this in Art and the Beauty of God, 48–62.

22. There are some complex issues here. I suspect that a Leibnizean would try to remove any taint of moral imperfection on God's part by trying to show that evil can only be weakly actualized by God. He is, therefore, evil's weak grounding. Another way out is to claim that evil has no grounding at all. This was Leibniz's preferred option. See Gottfried Leibniz Theodicy (La Salle IL: Open Court Press, 1985), 140–141. Nevertheless, according to Leibniz, God still can see the story of evil's unfolding in His understanding. Leibniz says, ‘where shall we find the source of evil? The answer is, that it must be sought in the ideal nature of the creature, in so far as this nature is contained in the eternal verities which are in the understanding of God, independently of his will … . And [in the divine understanding] is found not only the primitive form of good, but also the origin of evil’ (135–136).

There is no time to pursue these claims here, but I find the idea that evil's ontological status is somehow identical with a lack or privation to be deeply implausible. Certainly evil's existence can be explained by a lack or deficiency, but to identify it literally as a lack is to say something deeply puzzling. However, even if these replies were successful in rebutting the claim that God is the ultimate eternal ground of evil, it would not answer the central charge that having these stories as a part of God's being is compromising to the beauty of God. As we have just read, Leibniz says that part of God's understanding contains the ‘origin of evil’ – i.e. in the eternal deficiency of the possible creature in the mind of God.

23. See, for example, G. Boyd ‘The open theism view’, in J. Beilby & P. Eddy (eds) Divine Foreknowledge (Downers Grove IL: InterVarsity Press, 2001), 13–47.

24. I have tried to avoid this charge by having Wisdom in the parable tell some awe-inspiring, even terrifying stories. I do not think that God's beauty is safe or tamed. (As C. S. Lewis so rightly said, Aslan is not a tame lion!) I think that the terrifying can be beautiful. A story of child rape and murder, on the other hand, is terrifying and ugly – it is certainly not sublime! On the relationship between the sublime and the beautiful, see Jeremy Begbie ‘Created beauty: J. S. Bach and the arts’, in Treier, Husbands, & Lundin The Beauty of God, 19–44.

25. Jeremy Begbie ‘Beauty, sentimentality and the arts’, in Treier, Husbands, & Lundin The Beauty of God, 45–69.

26. Begbie talks about seeing the Easter events in two ways. In one view we see the events in the light of the Resurrection, as the crucified Lord eventually being vindicated. In another view we live through the trauma of the uncertainty of this transformation – as the disciples lived with the uncertainty of Easter Saturday. Begbie is very insistent (and I think rightly so) that God's eventual vindication of the crucified Lord is not a vindication of the moral horror of crucifixion. See Begbie, ‘Beauty, sentimentality and the arts’, 66. We cannot fit horror into a pattern which makes the horror itself beautiful. Another important point: any talk of God defeating evil must also look at the problem of hell where evil (and ugliness) seems eternalized. On this see Hans Urs von Balthasar Dare We Hope ‘That All Men Will Be Saved’? (San Francisco CA: Ignatius Press, 1987).

27. There is a problem here. In what sense are possible worlds possible, if they could never be actualized? In what sense is something possible if it cannot (possibly) ever be or ever have been? And yet we hear some philosophers, following the inspiration of Alvin Plantinga The Nature of Necessity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974), 169–174, saying that there are possible worlds that even God cannot actualize. William Lane Craig, for example, claims that God's free knowledge ranges over all possible worlds, but then, confronted with the counterfactuals of creaturely freedom, God finds that there are some worlds He cannot create, or which are not ‘feasible’ for Him; William Lane Craig The Only Wise God: The Compatibility of Divine Foreknowledge and Human Freedom (Eugene OR: Wipf & Stock Publishers), 130–131, and idem ‘The middle-knowledge view’, in Beilby & Eddy Divine Foreknowledge, 119–143, 122–123. I am always at a loss to understand how worlds are possible if it is absolutely impossible for the Ground of All Being to actualize them? It is almost as if these unactualizable creatures and worlds defy God before they even exist. Thus again, according to the Leibnizean, there are whole swathes of God utterly defiant to the divine wishes. This defiance remains stubbornly recalcitrant for all eternity.

28. Linda Zagzebski The Dilemma of Freedom and Foreknowledge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 88.

29. Ibid. 89.

30. Ibid. 90–91.

31. Again, we need to note that orthodox Leibnizeans commit themselves to S5.

32. Richard Creel in Divine Impassibility (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986) puts forward the idea that alongside God there is a plenum representing every possibility.

33. I would agree, however, with Begbie that one cannot beautify horror by making it part of some grander narrative. So, even if the only worlds which are possible are those in which God defeats evil (and so the whole is good), there will still be areas of local ugliness. This local ugliness must be represented in the possible worlds that God scrutinizes prior to creation.

34. Robert Adams Leibniz: Determinist, Theist, Idealist (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 178.

35. The problem would be even worse for someone like Alvin Plantinga who accepts impossible worlds as part of his ontology; Plantinga The Nature of Necessity, 158. So even if we were to say that these worlds are somehow logically impossible, their ugliness as impossible worlds would continue to infect the divine being.

36. Gottfried Leibniz, Correspondence with Arnauld (La Salle IL: Open Court Publishing, 1902), 97.

37. See Robson Ontology and Providence in Creation, 101–105.

38. Acknowledgements: Fr Andrew Downie provided some very helpful comments on the paper and helped clarify some vital issues; David Burrell and John O'Callaghan read the paper and encouraged me to send it for publication; David Brown also read an earlier version of the paper, as did Medi Volpe. I am grateful to all of them for their time and help.