 An alternative view (developed and defended by Edwin Curley) is that Descartes holds that eternal truths are necessary, but that they are not necessarily so. On this reading, Descartes’ view involves iterated modalities: a number of truths are possibly necessary, but God chooses only some of these possibilities to be the actual necessary  truths.[12]  One of the passages that supports such a reading is from the already-cited letter to Mesland: