21. Could (the divinity) have made Himself different from what He made
Himself? (If he could not, He would not have been omnipotent). If you
remove from Him the power of doing evil, you thereby also remove the
power of doing good. (In the divinity), power does not consist in the
ability to make contraries; it is a constant and immutable power whose
perfection consisted precisely in not departing from unity; for the
power to make contraries is a characteristic of a being incapable of
continuously persisting in the best. Self-creation (the actualization
by which the divinity created Himself) exists once for all, for it
is perfect. Who indeed could change an actualization produced by the
will of the Divinity, an actualization that constitutes His very will?
But how then was this actualization produced by the volition (of the
divinity) which did not yet exist?
What could be meant by the "volition of (the Divinity") if He had not
yet willed hypostatic form of existence (for Himself)? Whence then
came His will? Would it have come from His being (which, according to
the above objection) was not yet actualized? But His will was already
within His "being." In the (Divinity), therefore, there is nothing
which differs from His "being." Otherwise, there would have been in
Him something that would not have been His will. Thus, everything in
Him was will; there was in Him nothing that did not exercise volition;
nothing which, therefore, was anterior to His volition. Therefore,
from the very beginning, the will was He; therefore, the (Divinity)
is as and such as He willed it to be. When we speak of what was the
consequence of the will (of the Divinity), of what His will has
produced, (we must indeed conclude that) His will produced nothing that
He was not already. The statement that (the Divinity) contains Himself
means (no more than that) all the other beings that proceed from Him
are by Him sustained. They indeed exist by a sort of participation in
Him, and they relate back to Him. (The Divinity) Himself does not need
to be contained or to participate; He is all things for Himself; or
rather, He is nothing for Himself, because He has no need of all the
other things in respect to Himself.