A. GOD AND THE CREATED POWERS OF IMAGINATION

Upon moving to Holland in late 1628 or early 1629, Descartes devoted nine months to questions of metaphysics and composed a short metaphysical treatise, now lost. Suggestions that this was the first draft of the Meditations have been largely discounted, and since his correspondence for the next several years concentrates on scientific questions, there is very little evidence to allow a reconstruction of even the main lines of approach taken by this treatise. But in a series of letters to Mersenne beginning 15 April t63o, Descartes did announce and explain an important conclusion he had reached, that God, the all-powerful creator of everything that is, had created eternal truths. Though they might have been created otherwise, they were the fundamental charter for the created world and everything that transpires in it, and it was possible for the human being to know them because they were inborn in our minds.^[1]

Are these eternal truths to be found in the Regulae ? Perhaps not. After all, in that work truth or falsity is said to pertain to questions and judgments, which typically derive from the combination or addition of natures (AT X 432, 420), and for this reason alone the eternal truths cannot be simply identified with maximally simple natures, especially since Rule 6 proposes comparing things with respect to natures as an alternative to the search for Aristotelian substances, essences, and the like. But in another sense the eternal truths are present in the Regulae. The subclass of natures that pertain to both corporeal and spiritual things, the "common notions," are the links by which we connect simple natures to one another. For ex-

[1] Descartes takes up the eternal truths in the letters to Mersenne of 15 April, 6 May, and 27 May 163o (AT I 135-154) and returns to the topic in a letter to Mersenne of 27 May 1638 (AT II 134-153). The theme appears also in the Meditations and the Principles ; see chap. 7, Sec. A, below.

ample, if A is the same as C , and B is the same as C , then A is the same as B ; and if A can be related to C in way F , while B cannot, then there must be some difference between A and B (AT X 419). These common notions are evidently not so simple as, say, the nature of extension or doubt; the first of the examples would seem at the very least to compound the simple natures of sameness or equality and unity (which makes A a thing discriminable from B and C ). Their intuitability would thus resemble more that of extended deductions than of first-order or even second-order intuitions.^[2] What is especially interesting is that these common notions lie at the foundation of the mathematics of proportionality: the fundamental ability to set up equations and inequalities is expressed in such formulas. Indeed, these examples might be said to reflect more clearly than mathematical disciplines like arithmetic and geometry what the character of mathesis universalis is. The thought that these common notions are at least part of what Descartes had in mind in the 15 April 163o letter is further suggested by the context in which he raises the issue of eternal truths: in the first instance it is mathematical truths that are called eternal.

The subsequent letters do not further clarify what kinds of truths are eternal, apart from a remark in the letter of 27 May 163o that they are the essences of existing things: "It is certain that he [God] is as much Author of the essence as of the existence of creatures: now this essence is no other thing than these eternal truths" (AT I 152). The major issue discussed in the letters is rather the relationship of these truths to the omnipotence and omniscience of God. Descartes's position is that eternal truths are not to be conceived along Augustinian lines as exemplary ideas in the mind of God that are coeval with him. This Augustinian notion would imply that the reason of God and the reason existing in the universe he created, including reason in human beings, are basically the same. Instead, the truths are to be considered creatures made by God and thus external to his essential Being. Consequently they do not give us direct insight into the mind of God, and we cannot say that the universe based on them exists in accordance with divine reason. In God, says Descartes, will, reason, and act are identical, so that it is wrong to say that God willed to create the universe because it was reasonable (or the best possible one, etc.). Such statements imply a division between God's power and understanding. Instead one should say that God created the universe because he willed it so and that his acts of creating, thinking, and willing are identically one. Consequently eternal truths are true not because they are reasonable but because

[2] A first-order intuition might be of, say, the numbers 3, 4, and 7, and of addition and equality; a second-order intuition would be "4 + 3 = 7." Note that the intuition of "4 + 3 = 5 + 2" would require a higher-order intuition: 4 + 3 and 5 + 2, both being recognized as equal to 7, are then recognized as equal to one another.

they are created—that is, simultanously willed, understood, and made to be—by the Lord of the universe.

In the context of medieval debates about the relative nobility of intellect and will, it was generally agreed that, since God was radically one and simple, such distinctions of powers are made in accordance with human reason rather than as they are actually present in God. In human beings every act of intellection involves a willing (a natural appetite for what the intellect knows), just as every act of will requires some light of intellect. Thus advocates of the primacy of intellect in human beings (e.g., Thomas Aquinas) as well as advocates of will (e.g., John Duns Scotus) gave due attention to the copresence of the other power. The controversy was crucially important, however, precisely because it concerned how human beings ought to conceive God and what difference it makes to the human conception of self and the created universe. Since human beings are made in the image and likeness of God, how is that likeness expressed, and how might it be perfected? In us, will and intellect are not radically one; how then do we come to most resemble God in the ultimate sense? Is it intel-lection that perfects our being, in the form of the beatific contemplation of God in the afterlife, or is it will, our purified and limitless love of the all-good Creator? The truth, as the controversialists of the Middle Ages presented it, embraced both powers, but the emphasis on one or the other had consequences for the conception of the pathway that was most choice-worthy in this life and of the nature of our existence in the next.

The problem with the greater nobility of intellect is its implication that God created the world as he did because it was the (divinely) reasonable thing to do. But then God's reason seems to limit his power: he cannot do what is unreasonable without ceasing to be God. The greater nobility of the will reinstates God's omnipotence; the only thing that restrains God's power is his being, that is, he cannot do anything that would subvert that very being and power.^[3] A medieval analogue to what is now called Ock-ham's razor, the principle that entities are not to be multiplied without necessity, was provided by the contrast between the absolute power and the

[3] Speaking ontologically, that God can do nothing to impair his own being and power is not a limit at all, because it in effect asserts that God is God and cannot not be God. Put in this way, the principle of noncontradiction, which the medieval nominalists did not consider a limit on the power of God, is simply an expression of God's being and power. On the issue of noncontradiction Descartes went further than they, in that he granted that God could violate the principle of noncontradiction at least as it has meaning to human beings (whether God has such a principle is questionable), but he firmly held that God could do nothing to contravene his own being and power (this principle is ultimately the guarantor of God's veracity in the Meditations, since to deceive would reveal an imperfection in God, a defect in his being). For a discussion, see Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, trans. Robert M. Wallace (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1983), esp. pt. 2, chap. 4.

ordinate power (potentia absoluta and potentia ordinata ) of God. What God can do absolutely is unlimited; however, given that he has ordered things as they are, he has also freely chosen that things should remain within that order. Therefore we can trust it. The evidence of that order would not, however, limit his ability to undo it at some future time, nor does it give human beings any special insight into his being, will, or intellect.

It is within this context that we must understand Descartes's claims in letters of 163o about our knowledge of God and his power. Whatever we can conceive God to do, that he most certainly can do; but what we conceive as impossible is not necessarily impossible for the All-Powerful. Our minds cannot measure what is impossible for God; rather, we reckon according to what God's ordination has made possible, according to the eternal truths he has created, and this ordination enables us to conceive of the humanly possible, the humanly impossible, and some small portion of the divinely possible. The only thing impossible for God is not to be God. Whether this impossibility allows us to know something positive about God becomes an issue only in the Discourse and the Meditations.

The notion of God's absolute power undermines any significant analogy or proportionality between his being and that of his creatures. Whatever we know is known only by virtue of the eternal truths that God has created. As the essences of existing things they govern all God's creatures; therefore they form the basis only for analogies between creature and creature, not between creature and God.^[4]

Clearly this metaphysical turn precipitates a crisis for the universality of the method of the Regulae, beyond any tensions to which it was already subject. Its pretended scope was everything that is knowable. Among the simple truths that it promised we could know was that my own existence implies God's, and it even claimed that what we could genuinely know about God and other theological matters, as distinguished from what pertains to faith (which is a matter of will), was subject to the same prescriptions of method (AT X 370). But if there is no proportionality between God and his creatures, then there is no way for the method of the rules, based on natures and the proportion of objects' participation in them, to bring us to any knowledge of him whatsoever. Of course Rule 12 had already stipulated that the natures we put together by impulse from a superior power were infallible and outside the scope of the art the Regulae teaches (AT X 424). This would presumably apply, for example, to Descartes's judgment about his three dreams of 10-11 November 1619 that

[4] There is an exception: between God and the creature Homo sapiens there exists an analogy, one that we can know, however, only because Scripture tells us that we are made in his image and likeness. I shall discuss this further, especially as it enters into Descartes's later conception of our relationship to God.

the Spirit of Truth had descended on him and even perhaps to individual judgments within his detailed interpretation of the dreams, for instance that the dictionary in the third dream represented the sum of the sciences and the collection of the poets, wisdom and science conjoined. How far would this infallibility extend? To all the judgments of poets (and philosophers too?) made by dint of enthusiasm? But then one has to wonder whether any spiritual, Olympian, or intellectual matters also lie beyond the scope of the method and thus would have to be judged by different standards. The failure of analogy with respect to heavenly things threatens to undermine the legitimacy of any Regulae -like procedures, except perhaps in the most mundane matters.

The eternal truths guarantee that the universe is knowable. They are made innate in us by God; at least in that respect they resemble the original seeds of truth the Regulae had vaunted. However, the knowability of the eternal truths is different from the knowability of things according to the Regulae. The imagination and simple natures no longer have the status they had in that work; they too are transformed by the failure of proportionality/analogy.