Marsilio Ficino’s Platonic Theology, Volume I

14It wills them with a certain conditional necessity, and sometimes with no necessity at all, whenever one of them is such that the end can be possessed without it. Divine goodness has no need of creatures.

15Seventh argument. Our position is further supported by the fact that, in willing his own goodness, God wills other goods only as images of it. Since divine goodness is boundless, innumerable images can be fashioned after its exemplar—innumerable, I say, beyond those fashioned in these ages. If God's necessary willing of his own goodness entailed that he must will the existence of every thing capable of imitating it, he would certainly will infinitely many creatures, representing divine goodness in infinitely many ways. And if he willed them, they would exist. Here we must remember the view of the blessed Thomas Aquinas, that splendor of our theology: although an act of divine will may be called necessary upon a certain condition or supposition in willing this thing or that—namely, once God has willed it, since the divine will is as immutable as the divine essence—the act by its own nature does not bear toward its effects the same relation of absolute necessity that it bears toward God himself. Eighth argument. If God is the perfect cause of being, and being is God's proper effect, then God's activity can extend at least as far as the potency of being can extend.

16This is especially so because passive potency must be drawn forth by a higher actuality. Within this potency of being lies whatever does not conflict with the principle of being, just as the potency of corporeal nature contains whatever does not abolish corporeal nature. Nothing can be conceived that conflicts with the principle of being except being's opposite.