In this paper I want to explore the relationship between the idea of possible worlds and the notion of the beauty of God. I argue that there is a clear contradiction between the idea that God is utterly and completely beautiful on the one hand and the notion that He contains within himself all possible worlds on the other. Since some of the possible worlds residing in the mind of the deity are ugly, their presence seems to compromise God's complete and utter beauty.Footnote ¹ Let me try to give the reader an idea of the contradiction by way of this short parable:

You have been invited to the house of a saintly person who is famed throughout the land for the beauty of her thoughts. Indeed, such is her fame that she is often called Wisdom. Shortly before you arrive, as a dutiful preparation for your visit, you read some accounts of this person's beauty. You read witness reports like the following:

Another writer is also full of praise:

The same writer in a very famous passage declares:

You read in The Divine Names: ‘And they name her beautiful since she is the all-beautiful and the beautiful beyond all. She is forever so, unvaryingly, unchangeably so … . She is the superabundant source in herself of the beauty of every beautiful thing.’Footnote ⁵ There are numerous other references to her beauty, although you note that recent writings about this person concentrate more on her possession of knowledge and power. This, you find, a little disappointing.Footnote ⁶

Having found such wonderful promises about this person, you are understandably keen to meet her face to face. The time comes and with infinite grace and gentleness, she approaches. She is so beautiful that you find yourself feeling foolish for finding anything else beautiful before. You say to yourself: ‘This is beauty – sheer, utter, unadulterated beauty. Anything else is only a pale reflection of this.’

Being a philosopher, however, you are keen to know her thoughts. She is famed for the beauty of her reflections, her contemplations, the wonderful stories she can tell. Sitting before her, she tells stories to you of such sheer ingenuity, originality, style and beauty that you find yourself feeling an awesome inspiration. Sometimes the stories are comfortable, relaxing – you feel intensely calm, meditative. In other stories – more sublime – you feel as if confronted by the terror of a mountain or an infinite abyss. But behind the awe-inspiring terror, you feel an all-encompassing love such as a parent would feel to its offspring, but immeasurably more intense.

You ask her: ‘Are these your thoughts, Beautiful One, or are they copied from elsewhere?’. She replies, ‘Yes, they are mine. There is no other but myself who is the source and originator of these stories of great beauty. I copy from nowhere, but look only inward at the infinite reserves of my own contemplations.’ You think to yourself: ‘Her thoughts are beautiful, so wonderful, so inspiring. They are noble, grandiloquent – you can hardly find words adequate to express their wonderfulness. And she is their originator!’ You remember the lines of another worshipper of this person:

And again the same author expresses her originality like this: ‘it is equally certain that whatever she created, she created through nothing other than herself; and whatever she created, she created through her own most intimate expression’.Footnote ⁸

‘Let me tell you another of my stories’, she says gracefully, with a voice so utterly sweet and gentle. You settle down thirsting for another beautiful story. You love this exploration of her mind. However, your eagerness turns sour as her new words unfold. You find yourself feeling uncomfortable, then feeling physically sick. The story she tells you is an incredibly detailed tale of the rape and murder of a child. Nothing is left to the imagination. The story is so detailed, so minute in its descriptions that it is as if the terrible events are unfolding before your very eyes. It is a story of such ugliness that you are appalled.

Then, despite your protestations, she launches into a story of how Hitler conquers Europe, takes his murderous policies all over the planet and then establishes a galactic empire that takes never-ending, sadistic delight in killing the innocent. The story exactly parallels what the real world would be like were this possibility to have been actualized. She tells another tale. This time she tells you a narrative whose horror is so acute, so perverse that no mere human mind would have been able to originate such filth.

‘Beautiful one’, you respond (you find this epithet less appropriate now), ‘again I ask “are these stories part of yourself, or do you look outwardly at another source?” ’. ‘My child, they are part of me and I have other tales of such perversity, such dreadfulness, of such moral depravity that your mere finite mind could not even to begin to comprehend the sheer horror of their ugliness. I have possessed all these stories for all eternity. Never once has any part of them been lost from my consciousness. I have contemplated their appalling nature for all time. Even as I see you now I am vividly aware of the story of you being tortured to death on a rack. This story is, also, an eternal part of who I am.’

As you leave, you recall Augustine's words about her beauty, her peace, her fragrance, but with the taste of bile still bitter in your mouth and your mind reeling at the ugliness of the stories she uttered, you find these words very hard to believe.

What have I tried to convey in this parable? I have tried to alert the reader to a problem I think exists. I have presented the problem in a dramatic and deliberately shocking way. It seems to me that many of us are so used to the idea of possible worlds that we employ the idea without much perception of its hidden, theological dangers. Let me draw attention to the central ideas I tried to convey in the parable:

First, the stories God tells (the woman, of course, represents God) are meant to be the equivalent of possible worlds or, to put it another way, they are the possible world books that God possesses as a part of His contemplations.Footnote ⁹ In this model of God's understanding, God eternally contemplates a whole host of possible worlds. These worlds are understood to be maximal, determinate, and represent every possibility.Footnote ¹⁰ Basically, the idea is that God knows what His creation will be like by looking toward these possible worlds. He examines these as a kind of prelude to creation. Second, these worlds are usually understood (in best Christian Platonist fashion) to be part of God. Unlike the Demiurge, God looks inwards at Himself to find these possible worlds, and so His aseity is preserved. He relies on no other thing but Himself in order to effect the creative act. Third, the worlds are eternal. They are eternal parts of the divine being.Footnote ¹¹

My argument is simple. Given this understanding of possibility, i.e., that God possesses from all eternity ugly, depraved, terrible stories representing every ugly possibility, then, how can He be utterly and completely beautiful?Footnote ¹²

For the rest of this paper I will consider what a possible-worlds' theorist could offer in defence of the claim that his model of the divine mind does not compromise the divine beauty. I will consider the following replies:

1. (1) Possible stories are neither ugly nor beautiful – only if they become actual can they be ugly or beautiful.

2. (2) God's beauty consists of a union of truth and goodness. God has to know the truth of what is possible if He is to be beautiful, even if those truths are themselves horrible. His goodness means that He looks upon these horrible truths with a healthy hatred.

3. (3) The conception of beauty I am working with is not up to scratch since it is sentimental. True, unsentimental beauty can cope with ugliness and defeat it, so that the narrative is made beautiful.

4. (4) God's beliefs are so wholly unlike ours that my parable fails to tell the truth of what God's cognizance of stories of possible events is like.

Let us look at the first reply. Here the LeibnizeanFootnote ¹³ claims that only if the stories become actual, can they be understood to be ugly or beautiful. He might begin his argument by saying that this is, for example, true of the moral goodness or evil of possible actions. If I contemplate the possible evil of a particular action (and, on that basis, reject it) I have not been morally compromised. Merely entertaining the possibility of an evil action does not affect me morally.Footnote ¹⁴ To put it another way, a possible evil action is only really evil if it is actualized; if, that is, it becomes real. Possible evil worlds are only evil if they come to be. Arguing in a parallel way, the Leibnizean claims that stories of possible ugliness are only really ugly if they are actualized – if, that is, they become real. The same, of course, would be true of beautiful stories.

I do not think that this reply works. We might accept that mere possibilities cannot be evil or good, but we do say of stories that they are beautiful or ugly. When I say of a story that it is ugly I do not just mean that if the story were to become true it would be ugly; I mean the story itself is ugly regardless of whether or not the events it describes become real.Footnote ¹⁵ To claim that stories themselves – regardless of their actualization – cannot be aesthetically judged would surely be an outrageous claim.

Now the Leibnizean might reply that a more nuanced understanding of what it is for a story to be ugly can save the day. He might say that, strictly speaking, no story is in itself ugly or beautiful – it is only the telling of the story that deserves aesthetic approbation or disapprobation. Here the Leibnizean separates content from form and claims content is aesthetically neutral, while form (the way the story is told) is amenable to aesthetic judgement.

Doubtless, there is something in this claim – the drab and the mundane can be transformed by the form, but I doubt whether this kind of transformation is always possible. If it is always possible, then, all stories can be beautiful if they are told well. The form always has the final word. This is hard to believe. Let us return to our parable. Imagine Wisdom after seeing your reaction to the child rape and murder story assures you with the words, ‘But haven't I told it with flair and charm and an eye for detail?’. I do not think you would be convinced. I think that the content is just intrinsically ugly regardless of the form in which it is conveyed. What is true for a child rape and murder seems even more true of other such horrors as the story of a possible galactic holocaust.

In any case, exactly what form is God supposed to use? According to the typical Leibnizean, these stories must represent exactly what the actual event would be like in all its detail. I tried to show this point in the parable when I mentioned the minute detail of the story that Wisdom tells. The story I said ‘exactly parallels what the real world would be like were this possibility to be actualized’. There can be no extraneous, technical flourishes on God's part, no blurred, impressionistic representations. He must, it seems, faithfully copy for all eternity what the rapist would do if the rapist were to rape and murder a child.Footnote ¹⁶ Here, it seems, the content masters the form and completely overwhelms it.Footnote ¹⁷

Of course, many great works of art represent scenes of great ugliness. There are, for example, Picasso's Guernica, and Matthias Grünewald's Isenheim Altarpiece. These are indeed great works of art but it is hard to believe that anyone considers them beautiful in themselves. Indeed, we think of them as ugly, but their intrinsic ugliness is mitigated by the painter's skill in the mastery of form. We, also, value such great works because of the way they make us think of the pervasiveness of suffering in the world.Footnote ¹⁸ It is worth recalling here that the Leibnizean has to show that there is no vestige of ugliness whatsoever in God's stories of possible events. Any ugliness, no matter how minuscule, will sully the purity of the divine beauty. The ugliness of Wisdom's story of child rape may be softened by her absolute hatred of it, but is all the ugliness completely obliterated?Footnote ¹⁹ I do not think so.Footnote ²⁰

Let us summarize our conclusions. (1) Stories do not have to wait to be actualized before they are ugly. I take this point to be obvious. (2) Form may help to transform content, but some content is so ugly that no amount of amelioration by form can remove all the horror. In any case, I have argued that God must faithfully represent the horror. He must obey the dictates of the rapist's possible actions. God cannot transform the actual content; the narrative must be a faithful copy of the action.

It is now time to look at another, perhaps more promising line of reply. God's beauty does not stand alone says the Leibnizean – it is a union of truth and goodness.Footnote ²¹ The argument might go something like this: God's beauty contains all truth. Because He contains all truth He must contain all the truths about what is possible. It is an eternal truth about possibility that if free agents were to exist then some of them might freely choose to commit rape and murder. God sees these agents and He sees their possible acts. His goodness means that He sees that this possibility, if made actual, would be a great evil. He uses this knowledge to find the truth of what an actual world would be like. He weighs these matters employing His moral perfection to create the world which is reported in Genesis as being ‘good’. As part of the magnificent omniscience and moral perfection of God, even these terrible stories are involved in His beauty.

The Leibnizean might put it in this way: it is a perfection or part of God's perfection that He knows what the rapist and the murderer might do. Imagine a God at a loss to know what the rapist might do next – such a God would be always being caught out by creation! He would not appear to be perfect – He would be a being who might well be unworthy of our worship. So we need these stories – horrible as they are – if we are to worship one who properly deserves our praise.

I think that this reply fails. First, is it really part of perfection to be the ultimate ground of these stories?Footnote ²² I have no problem with a God who looks outwardly at the actual rapist and murderer and knows their possibilities, their capacities, their desires, their thoughts – indeed, just like the Leibnizean, I want Him to know what these people might possibly do. This is a God who sees possible evil in creation itself. Such a God sees ugliness (and moral imperfection) outside of Himself. But in the Leibnizean picture, we have a God who before creation is even actual, looks inside Himself and sees the rapist performing his possible actions. Such sights or such stories would be ugly, and their ugliness would not be exterior to the divine being but be a part of His very essence. This is bad enough, but for the Leibnizean, these stories continue to inhabit God for all eternity. As I tried to suggest in the parable, presumably there are darker, more perverse, more ugly stories inside the divine being – whole worlds of sadism, whole worlds of rape, whole worlds of holocausts.

Second, even if the Leibnizean were to show that God's being the ultimate ground of all evil is not morally compromising, it would not answer the principal charge being pursued in this paper that it is aesthetically compromising. According to the typical Leibnizean, the realm of possibility is a set of discrete worlds or world books. If it is possible that a world of child rape and murder can exist or worlds of galactic holocausts, then, these are individual worlds or stories in the mind of God. They do not form a uniting part of some aggrandizing, beautiful vision; instead, they seem to be ruinous blots on the landscape of the divine contemplations. Being individual worlds representing what is possible in that individual world, they are units of ugliness, individual paintings, if you will. We may try to put them in a fancy frame, but the ugliness of their content is still present. Some parts of God, it appears, must be ugly. It does not seem to me that we can integrate these ugly, possible worlds together to make some kind of beautiful whole.

Let me summarize the argument: we might be able to show why it is not morally objectionable for God to be – in some way – the ground of the possible actions of a possible rapist, but we cannot make the rapist's possible actions beautiful, even by trying to make these possible actions part of some grander scheme. The rapist's possible actions are ugly in themselves. God's stories of what possible rapists might do must carefully represent each part of the rapist's actions. How can these kinds of story be made beautiful?

Now the Leibnizean might put his objection in a different way. He might say, ‘Do we want God to be ignorant of what is possible? Surely the resultant blanks, the lacunas in God's mind would be a serious lack – a kind of ugliness. Knowledge is more beautiful than ignorance, even if that knowledge is knowledge of ugly things.’ The question is this: does denying God access to knowledge of possible worlds leave Him with an ugly ignorance? This entirely depends upon whether one thinks that there is an ignorance being introduced into the divine being. As open theists often say, their denial that God does not know what free agents are going to do is not necessarily a limitation on omniscience.Footnote ²³ More correctly they are putting forward a thesis about ontology, or what is there. Similarly, if possible worlds do not exist in any shape or form, then there is no denial of divine omniscience if we say that God ‘cannot’ know them. Such things as possible worlds may be just unpleasant figments of the philosophical imagination. If they are really just figments, then, no ignorance is introduced into the divine being.

Now let us consider another objection to our argument. I might be accused of a having an incomplete notion of beauty – perhaps the notion of beauty that is implicit in this essay is a prettified, cosy kind of beauty.Footnote ²⁴ Beauty, properly understood, is not sentimental. As Jeremy Begbie claims in an excellent recent essay, beauty is sometimes unveiled after a period of darkness.Footnote ²⁵ He says that the darkness or ugliness of Holy Saturday is a part of the drama of the eventually vindicating Easter story. I agree with Begbie. I agree that the transforming power of God, especially in the Cross, can defeat darkness, and that the overall story that Christianity offers is a positive, victorious one, despite the horrors. God will defeat darkness, and that defeat of darkness will be an unsentimental beauty, one that looks evil in the face, but eventually defeats it.Footnote ²⁶

Unfortunately, however, this is not the vision God will have in some of His possible worlds, the stories which are an eternal part of Himself, the stories that He eternally has as part of His very essence. Every possibility is represented in these worlds. We might agree, for the sake of argument, that the only worlds God would actualize would be those worlds in which He redeems all and defeats the ugliness, and His triumph is seen as an unsentimental, beauteous victory.

But what of those darker worlds which God would never actualize?Footnote ²⁷ What of those possible worlds where He does not redeem the victim and free the enslaved? These worlds – which God would never actualize – are, according to our typical Leibnizean, present in the mind of God. They are possible, it is said, because they are internally self-consistent sets of events. Consequently, there will be myriads of possible world stories where sadistic torture is eternal, and injustice reigns for all time, where the child murderer carries on delighting in his perversion. We can delight in the fact that God turns His face away from these worlds in the sense that He does not allow them to be actualized, but nevertheless they are still there as possible stories in God's mind. They represent the possible ways worlds would be if those worlds were to be unredeemed. They would be ugly worlds without a trace of the divine victory.

Finally we turn to the last objection to the idea that God's stories of possible events compromises the divine beauty. Linda Zagzebski discusses William Alston's claim that we must not think of God literally having beliefs. Beliefs are units or chunks of information, and it seems wrong to think of God's access to knowledge being parcelled into the sub-units or chunks that beliefs provide. Finite sentient agents, of course, have to believe in a multiplicity of truths, some about this and some about that. Our access to reality is, it seems, irredeemably chunky. Alston's suggestion, which is inspired by Aquinas, is that God's access to knowledge is radically different. According to this claim, all is seen in one undifferentiated vision. So instead of propositional units (which are for us the mediating objects of beliefs), God sees all truth directly in one grand vista.

Linda Zagzebski is sympathetic to Alston's account. In her discussion she combines his idea that God's access to the truth is not via the mediating units of belief with the Thomist notion that God's primary vision is Himself. She writes:

To understand this idea and to explain how God is able to know the contingencies of the created world even though His conception is of Himself, Zagzebski suggests using an analogy from the act of human vision. Imagine, she says, seeing a young man's face.Footnote ²⁹ This is the primary act of seeing. It is a single act of vision – one sweeping influx of visual information. Now, she explains, primary acts of vision can have different secondary objects as well. Let us suppose that we see the mother's features through our primary act of seeing the young man's face. It is a familiar enough experience. This secondary object is, Zagzebski notes, a mere accidental property of the first vision. Given a visually different mother would mean you ‘see’ another secondary object. In other words, it is not an essential part of the primary vision that the secondary object is what it is.

Now she applies this analogy to God's knowledge.Footnote ³⁰ God sees only Himself. His primary vision is His own beautiful perfection. Secondary objects of the divine primary vision are different depending upon what the world is like. As we have said, these secondary objects are merely accidental, and because of this they are able to reflect the contingencies of the actual world. Just as visually different mothers could be ‘seen’ even though the face of the son remains the same, God sees different worlds even though His primary vision is necessarily identical.

Now we are in a position to explain how an objection to my account could go. The objector argues that God's vision is only Himself. This vision is, of course, pure, unadulterated beauty. Stories of possible rapes and murder (ugly stories) are known only ‘through’ this vision of unalloyed beauty. These are merely the secondary objects of the divine contemplation; primarily His vision is of Himself. An objector could argue that such an account saves God from the compromise of ugliness. After all, God only sees the beauty of the divine perfection.

Does this account work as an objection to my argument? First, I have to admit to being attracted to the Thomist understanding that God's access to the truth of things is direct and undifferentiated. It does not appear to me to be plausible to understand God's knowledge as being parcelled up into units. Alston's account seems to avoid an implausible and unwelcome anthropomorphism in our understanding of divine knowledge. Zagzebski's addition that God knows the (accidental) vagaries and imperfections of this world through the primary vision of Himself is ingenious and thought-provoking. I do not, however, think it can be used to avoid the charge that God's knowledge of the possible compromises His beauty. The crucial difference is that God's vision of the possible is not, according to the Leibnizean, a merely accidental feature of the divine contemplation. Orthodox Leibnizeans are committed to the necessity of the possible. God's knowledge of the possible is not, therefore, a mere accidental object of the divine vision. God, according to the Leibnizean, sees all the possibilities that there are, and He sees them as necessary objects of His contemplation.

Given the necessary nature of God's musings concerning the possible, it is hard to understand in what sense they could be mere secondary objects of the divine vision. Certainly we can accept that what becomes actual is a contingent matter – perhaps Zagzebski's idea might be used here to avoid the charge that God's everlasting knowledge of actual rapes compromises the divine beauty. But what is possible is not contingently possible – it is a necessary part of the divine understanding.Footnote ³¹ It appears, then, that ugly stories of the most appalling kind would be an integral, essential part of the divine self and so ruin the beauty of the divine vision.

As I say, I accept that God's knowledge is radically unlike ours. His knowledge may not be divided like ours into stories and narratives (chunks of information). The idea that God knows stories may well be just an accommodation to meet the inadequacies of our finite, limited understanding. Nevertheless it is hard to accept that what to us is appallingly ugly can be converted into beauty by its being subsumed into divine undifferentiated vision. Recall that God's vision of the possible must exactly parallel the actual act which could emerge. God's vision cannot be blurred – any subsuming must not allow the horrific visions He sees to be changed in any way. The Leibnizean wants God to see exactly what might happen. These visions are part of who God is. I think that such an understanding of God necessarily fills the divine beauty with ugliness.