TIMOTHY B. NOONE Richard Rufus on Creation, Divine Immutability, and Future Contingency in the Scriptum super Metaphyslcam Nearly all Christian philosophers and theologians had, from the Patris- tic period onward, attempted to answer the following question. How could the unchanging and everlasting God bring about something radically new, namely, the created universe, without Himself undergoing any change? The doctrine that God is absolutely unchanging and invariable, that He suffers neither essential nor accidental change, is called divine immutabi- lity; the doctrine that the universe was brought into being through God's causal activity alone and through God's free choice is called creation. What the question asks is whether these two doctrines are jointly tenable, whether or how they are ultimately reconcilable. The problem that this question raises is perhaps even more complicated than it originally seems. For de- pending on how God's immutability is explained, the necessity of God's knowledge may both render impossible any contingent state of affairs in the world - including those future ones that most medieval logicians con- sidered paradigmatic instances of contingency - and compromise the free- dom of God's creative action. Alternatively, if the freedom of God's creative action and genuine contingency are maintained but without proper distinc- tions being made, the resulting theory may compromise the divine immuta- bility. During the Patristic period in the Latin West, St. Augustine provided the basic framework within which medieval thinkers sought their various solutions. St. Augustine's solution, succinctly stated, was that the 'new- ness' of creation is on the part of the things created; God in His indivisible eternity had spoken the eternal Word through Whom all things are made 1 • Yet the difficulties associated with explaining how the newness 1 For St. Augustine's discussion of the problem see, among many other places, ST. AUGUSTINE, Confessionum libri XIII, 11.6-31, (CCL 27, pp. 198-216); Io., De Trinitate, 5.16 (CCL 50, pp. 224-227).