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Updated: May 12, 2025
M. Diroys' argument contains a false assumption, in his statement that nothing can change except by passing from a state less good to a better or from a better to a less good; and that thus, if God makes the best, what he has produced cannot be changed: it would be an eternal substance, a god.
For God decrees nothing without knowledge, and he makes no separate decrees, which would be nothing but antecedent acts of will: and these we have sufficiently explained, distinguishing them from genuine decrees. M. Diroys, whom I knew in Rome, theologian to Cardinal d'Estrées, wrote a book entitled Proofs and Assumptions in Favour of the Christian Religion, published in Paris in the year 1683.
M. Diroys makes some apt remarks concerning this, which I will not repeat, since I have sufficiently answered the objection in more than one passage, and that has been the chief end of all my discourse. But he makes one assertion with which I cannot agree. He claims that the objection proves too much.
They are mistaken rather in claiming that the best in the whole should be free from evil in the parts, and that therefore what God has made is not the best. But M. Diroys maintains that if God always produces the best he will produce other Gods; otherwise each substance that he produced would not be the best nor the most perfect.
I have already spoken of M. Diroys and others who have also been deluded by this strange opinion, one that is far too commonly accepted. Those who uphold it do not observe that it implies a wish to preserve for, or rather bestow upon, God a false freedom, which is the freedom to act unreasonably.
M. Diroys therefore imagines that the Dualists, in their insistence that the single good principle produce no evil, ask too much; for by the same reason, according to M. Diroys, they ought also to ask that he should produce the greatest good, the less good being a kind of evil.
I hold that the Dualists are wrong in respect of the first point, and that they would be right in respect of the second, where M. Diroys blames them without cause; or rather that one can reconcile the evil, or the less good, in some parts with the best in the whole. If the Dualists demanded that God should do the best, they would not be demanding too much.
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