The whole view of Erigena is in the direction that the existence of the universe is a necessary moment in the life of God, a necessary fulfilment of the process of the Divine Nature, so that if it were possible to conceive of God without the universe eternally grounded in Him, as His eternal thought and His eternal purpose, we should also be left with an impossible conception of the nature of the Deity as unfulfilled and defective. Without the universe, God would be only the possible Creator of all, the potental Lord of all. In other words, universal existence is not an accidental parergon of the Almighty, the accomplishment of a casual purpose in the mind of God which might conceivably never have existed in His mind, but the necessary fulfilment of what was eternally and essentially in the Divine Nature.
This conception has important consequences in religious thought. Unless the necessity is conceded, the whole of experience becomes infected with a casual and arbitrary character. A universe which might never have existed, and need never have existed, is only an Almighty caprice, after all, and it is not difficult to see that this reduces our moral and spiritual life to a sort of contingency that ultimately robs it of all its passionate and poignant reality. The whole of things can hardly “mean intensely and mean good“ unless it is grounded, not in a mere fiat, but in the eternal nature of God. To regard creation otherwise (as a modern philosopher has said) is to “represent the universe as in no way organic to the divine life.“
But the necessity of creation is not a physical or an external necessity. It is the necessity that belongs to a moral nature, and therefore it is a free necessity. When God acts necessarily He still acts freely, for the necessity is that of His own nature, without any external determination. The Absolute limits itself, but in accordance with a moral and rational necessity, for the Absolute is the source of all that is right and of all that is rational. As the Neoplatonists used to say, God must necessarily create, as the sun must shine, and as the flowers must be fragrant. The Eternal Goodness is creative, and could not be otherwise, in its very nature.
This doctrine of creation has been criticised generally by Lotze on the ground that “it leads consistently to nothing but a thoroughgoing determinism.“ But he describes it as the conception which regards the world as “a necessary, involuntary and inevitable development of the nature of God.“ This, surely, is begging the question, at least as far as our philosopher is concerned. For Erigena held that it was a necessary development of the nature of God and equally of the will of God: there can be no schism between what God is and what God wills. And there is no question of necessity, except the necessity which resides in the character of God. God, being what He is, must will and must create that which is good. But the only constraint is that which makes God true to Himself. The question of human freedom is not involved at all, for that is as conceivable on the supposition that the world exists necessarily as a result of what God eternally is and what God eternally wills, as on the supposition that it exists incidentally as a result of an arbitrary volition of God,—a single act of will unrelated to His essential nature. The last conception, indeed, is surely impossible when once it is plainly represented to the mind. And, apart from early mythology in the book of Genesis, it is more consonant with the teaching of Scripture to think of the work of creation as a continuous and characteristic activity of God, than to think of it as a “paroxysm of initiation.“
While Erigena insists, with a Platonic emphasis, upon the goodness of God as the essential source of His creative activity, and therefore of the existence of all that is, his doctrine of the superexistence of God leads, on the other hand, to the startling conclusion (which reappears in many of the mystics) that God may be said to be nothing—that the Divine Nature, dum incomprehensibilis intelligitur, per excellentiam nihilum non immerito vocitatur. The whole of this paradox is precisely equivalent to Mr Bradley's remark that a God who should be capable of existing would be no God at all. Any conception of God which makes Him one of a number of things that exist, a mere item in the catalogue of universal being, is manifestly untenable. The stipulation that He is the greatest of all existences does not save the situation. Our thought of God is wholly inadequate unless it makes Him at once the source and the sum of all that really is, and therefore greater than all, before all and beyond all. But if He be that we cannot classify Him according to the categories that apply to all else in the universe: the terms of thought that we are compelled to apply to every other existence cannot apply to His existence. This means that His existence is beyond our formal knowledge: we may affirm the existence of God, and we may have a spiritual assurance of it, but we can no more define and express and comprehend His existence than we can the existence of nothingness. The terms Deus and nihil are therefore logically equal: both express something beyond the pale of existence as we know it in the universe. They are equal only in the sense that extremes meet, and Erigena is careful to explain that in another sense there is all the difference in the world between the nothing that is so called because it surpasses all knowledge (and therefore is not to our finite understanding), and the nothing that is mere privation of existence (nihil de nihilo). In other words, though the super-existent and the non-existent are worlds apart, yet on the dialectical level they are the same, because neither of them exists as far as our logical understanding is concerned: it is not possible for the mind to formulate the existence of either the one or the other.
Taken from a chapter in Johannes Scotus Erigena: A Study in Medieval Philosophy by Henry Bett. Available now from Angelico Press.