First Meditation: Who Is God?
Here my particular concern is the general principle that
the doctrine of creation constitutes an assertion regarding the
eternal identity of God. The doctrine in itself is, after all, chiefly
an affirmation of God's absolute dispositive liberty in all his
acts - the absence, that is, of any external restraint upon or
necessity behind every action of his will. And, while one must
avoid the pathetic anthropomorphism of imagining God's re-
solve to create as an arbitrary choice made after deliberation
among options, one must still affirm that it is free, that cre-
ation can add nothing to God, that God's being is not depen-
dent on the world's, and that the only "necessity" present in
the divine act of creation is the impossibility of any hindrance
being placed upon God's expression of his own goodness in
making the world. Yet, for just this reason, the moral destiny
of creation and the moral nature of God are absolutely insepa-
rable. As the transcendent Good beyond all beings, God is also
the transcendental end that makes every single action of any
rational nature possible. Moreover, the end toward which he
acts must be his own goodness; for he is himself the begin -
ning and end of all things. This is not to deny that, in addition
to the "primary causality" of God's act of creation, there are
innumerable forms of "secondary causality" operative within
the created order; but none of these can exceed or escape the
one end toward which the first cause directs all things. And
this eternal teleology that ultimately governs every action in
creation, viewed from the vantage of history, takes the form of
a cosmic eschatology. Seen as an eternal act of God, creation's
term is the divine nature for which all things were made; seen
from within the orientation of time, its term is the "final judg-
ment" that brings all things to their true conclusion.
Moreover, no matter how great the autonomy one grants
the realm of secondary causes, two things are certain. First, as