"In God there is no hunger that needs to be filled, only plenteousness that desires to give. The doctrine that God was under no necessity to create is not a piece of dry scholastic speculation. It is essential. Without it we can hardly avoid the conception of what I can only call a 'managerial' God; a Being whose function or nature is to 'run' the universe, who stands to it as a head-master to a school . . . . But to be sovereign of the universe is no great matter to God. In himself, at home in 'the land of the Trinity,' he is Sovereign of a far greater realm. We must keep always before our eyes that vision of Lady Julian's in which God carried in his hand a little object like a nut, and that nut was 'all that is made.' God, who needs nothing, loves into existence wholly superfluous creatures in order that He may love and perfect them. He creates the universe, already foreseeing—or should we say 'seeing' there are no tenses in God—the buzzing cloud of flies about the cross, the flayed back pressed against the uneven stake, the nails driven through the mesial nerves, the repeated incipient suffocation as the body droops, the repeated torture of back and arms as it is time after time, for breath's sake, hitched up. If I may dare the biological image, God is a 'host' who deliberately creates His own parasites; causes us to be that we may exploit and 'take advantage of' Him. Herein is love. This is the diagram of Love Himself, the inventor of all loves."
- C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves (New York: Hardcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1960), 175-76.
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