The embellished Augustinian strategy proceeds by pointing out that omniscient God's
“thinking” about The Triangle is actually God's having comprehensive knowledge of The
Triangle. Such comprehensive knowledge entails knowing The Triangle's essence.
Generalizing, we may say that each Form has an essence, a set of properties that the Form
must have if it is to be the Form that it is. Many of the necessary truths, then, are
propositions specifying the essential properties of the Forms. In knowing these
propositions to be necessarily true, God knows, among other things, that he cannot have
comprehensive knowledge of The Triangle without knowing that its interior angles
necessarily sum to 180 degrees. To say God cannot comprehend The Triangle in any
other way is not to point out a constraint on God's powers, but rather to say something
about the rational structure of God's mind.
Let us see if we can make this notion more precise. The Augustinian strategy insists on
three points. First, there are necessary truths. Second, the necessity of these truths entails
that it is impossible even for God to alter them. Yet—this is the third point—these
necessary truths depend on God's cognitive activity for their status. The apparent tension
between the latter two claims can be alleviated by appealing to the notion of supreme
rationality to explain the necessary truths rather than vice versa. The necessary truths are
the deliverances of a supremely rational mind. Had this mind failed to exist, there would
have been no necessary truths. Had this mind failed to have been supremely rational,
there would be no explanation of necessity. Of course, the Augustinian strategy maintains
that the proposition that supremely rational God exists is itself a necessary truth. What
follows from this, on the Augustinian strategy, is that God is the explanation of his own
existence. That consequence is an important part of a doctrine of God's aseity, to be
discussed below.
Here are two final observations about the Augustinian strategy. First, although we
launched it from a Platonic platform, the strategy can be redeployed without commitment
to the existence of the Forms. We can, for example, replace reference to The Triangle
with reference to genuine triangles. The Augustinian strategy delivers a theory about
necessary truth dependent on supremely rational divine cognitive activity. Whether it is
accurate to describe that activity as trafficking in Forms, ideas, or whatever is something
about which we can remain agnostic. It may just be that these descriptions are human
ways of gesturing to an activity that is otherwise literally incomprehensible to us. There
is an additional benefit of freeing the strategy from the Forms. I said earlier that on the
“Formal” version of the Augustinian strategy, many of the necessary truths are
propositions specifying the essential properties of the Forms. It is hard to see how to
extend the claim to all necessary truths. What about, for example, “God is omniscient”?
end p.46
Many theists claim that it is a necessary truth. But on the Augustinian view itself, God is
emphatically not a Form. If the Formal version does not provide a uniform account of
necessary truth, if we must make exceptions to it, perhaps we should favor a version that
does provide a uniform account.
Second, on the standard, modal-logical interpretation of necessity, necessary propositions
are necessarily necessary and contingent propositions are necessarily contingent. That is,
on the standard interpretation, every proposition has its modal status fixed necessarily. If