Chapter 12

'Corollary II' — Demonstration of creation

1228. This truth is extraordinarily productive. It is the principle which gives rise to all teaching about the divine nature, as natural theology must show. Amongst the other truths which it contains embryonically, is a direct, rigorous demonstration of the necessity of creation. As far as I know, this demonstration has not yet been noted.
The following propositions provide briefly some notion of it.
All immanent acts which have a beginning and end are mingled and connected with transient acts which are precisely the beginning or end of immanent acts. Such immanent acts, which begin from a transient act, cannot cause this transient act.

The transient act, therefore, which provides a beginning for an immanent act, must be caused by an immanent act which has no beginning and no end, and is not mingled with any transient act. This immanent act, as we saw, is called God who, in producing the transient act which gives rise to an immanent act, must operate in such a way that he produces the transient act outside himself. He must do this without any passage, any mutation or any transient act arising in himself. This way of acting is called creation, relative to the transient act produced as the principle of the immanent act.

Creation, therefore, must be.

In other words, creation is necessary to explain the existence of the world, which is a complex of immanent and transient acts bound together.

I have no doubt that the careful reader will understand that this proof is on a par with any of Euclid's proofs [App., no. 10].