Paying Attention To The Sky

Hubble's view deep inside the Eagle Nebula, looking at a feature that's now known as the "Pillars of Creation."

The Issues
It is certainly remarkable that It took the fledgling Christian movement four centuries to respond to its central faith question concerning Jesus: who and what is he? Moreover, the longstanding quest for clarity regarding Jesus doubtless overshadowed more explicit reflection on the first article of the Creed as well: ‘I believe in God, the Father almighty, creator of heaven and earth.’ As Robert Sokolowski observes: ‘The issue the church had to settle first, once it acquired public and official recognition under Constantine and could turn to controversies regarding its teaching, was the issue of the being and actions of Christ.’ Yet he goes on to insist:

[While] the Council of Chalcedon, and the councils and controversies that led up to it, were concerned with the mystery of Christ, they also tell us about the God who became incarnate in Christ. They tell us first that God does not destroy the natural necessities of things he becomes involved with, even in the intimate union of the incarnation. What is according to nature, and what reason can disclose in nature, retains its integrity before the Christian God [who] is not a part of the world and is not a ‘kind’ of being at all. Therefore, the incarnation is not meaningless or impossible or destructive.
The God of Faith and Reason, Robert Sokolowski

Moreover, what Sokolowski calls the Christian distinction between God and the world, the denial that God in his divinity is part of or dependent on the world, was brought forward with greater clarity through the discussion of the way the Word became flesh. The same distinction was also emphasized as a background for the Trinitarian doctrines and for the controversies about grace. Thus many of the crucial dogmatic issues raised in the relationship between God and the world, and the positions judged to be erroneous would generally have obscured the Christian distinction between the divine and the mundane.

So creation not only comes first, as it were, in our God’s transactions with the world; it is also true that the way we understand that founding relation will affect our attempts to articulate any further interaction. For were the One who reached out to us ‘in Christ’ not the creator of heaven and earth, the story would have to be told in a vastly different (and inescapably mythic) idiom, as indeed it has often been on the part of Christians so preoccupied with redemption that creation is simply presumed as its stage-setting.

Moreover, since the narrative of incarnation and redemption captures the lion’s share of the tri-partite creed associated with the initiation rites of baptism, creation can appear a mere preamble. Furthermore, an adequate treatment of the unique activity which constitutes creating, as well as the quite ineffable relation between creatures and creator which it initiates, will tax one’s philosophical resources to the limit, so more timid theologians prefer to finesse it altogether. Yet as Sokolowski reminds us, we cannot afford to do this since the interaction among these shaping mysteries of faith is at once palpable and mutually illuminating.

Nor can Christians treat the Hebrew scriptures as a mere preamble to their revelation of God in Jesus, since the God whom Jesus calls ‘Abba’ is introduced in those very scriptures. They too reflect similar structural parallels between creation and redemption, with the engaging story of God’s affair with Israel beginning at Genesis 12 with Abraham, while the initial chapters detailing God’s creation of the universe seem designed to offer that particular story universal grounding.

A Third Abrahamic Voice
By the time Aquinas came to engage these issues, a third Abrahamic voice clamoured for recognition, though reflecting a new scripture. The Qur’an’s account is far more lapidary: ‘He says “he” and it is’ (6:73), yet the pattern is repeated. The heart of the drama turns on Mohammed’s God-given ‘recitation’; Allah’s identifying Himself with ‘the Creator of the heavens and the earth’ (2:117) assures us that we are not merely trafficking with an Arabian deity. So the forces conspiring to elaborate the Christian ‘doctrine of creation’, were at once historical and conceptual, scriptural and philosophical, with discussions from other faiths shaping the context.3

Both Jewish and Christian readings of Genesis had taken the equivocal language regarding pre-existent stuff as part of the inherently narrative structure of the work, insisting that God created the universe ex nihilo; that is, without presupposing anything ‘to work on’, as it were. So the philosophical task will be to articulate ‘sheer origination’, while the theological goal will be to show this action to be utterly gratuitous. If creator and creation are to be what the Hebrew scriptures presume them to be, neither stuff nor motive can be presupposed. Here is where what Sokolowski has identified as ‘the distinction’ proves so critical: creation can only be creation if God can be God without creating. No external incentive nor internal need can induce God to create.

Aquinas’ Approach
Aquinas’ capacity to integrate philosophical with theological demands is displayed in the initial article in the Summa Theologiae on creation: ‘Must everything that is have been caused by God?’ Relying on his identification of God as that One whose very essence is to exist, Aquinas shows why one must ‘necessarily say that whatever in any way is is from God’. For if ‘God is sheer existence subsisting of its very nature (ipsum esse per se subsistens), [and so] must be unique, … then it follows that all things other than God are not their own existence but share in existence.

So the Neo-platonic distinction between essential and participated being is invoked to give everything but the creator the stamp of created. Very little, if anything, is said here about causation, but the elements are in place to press for a unique form of it, even though another way of posing the initial question employs Aristotle explicitly: ‘whether God is the efficient cause of all beings?’

An objection asks about those ‘natural necessities’ which Aristotle presumed simply to be, or always to have been: ‘since there are many such in reality [ spiritual substances and heavenly bodies which carry no principle of dissolution within themselves ], all beings are not from God’. Aquinas deftly diverts this objection by recalling the primacy of existing: ‘an active cause is required not simply because the effect could not be [i.e. is contingent], but because the effect would not be if the cause were not [existing]’.

So even ‘necessary things’ will require a cause for their very being: this is a radical revision of Aristotle, depending on the Avicennian distinction of essence from existing. What it suggests is that Aquinas was seeking for a way of understanding created being using Aristotelian metaphysics, yet the ‘givens’ of that philosophy will have to be transformed to meet the exigency of a free creator. Put another way, which anticipates our elucidation, the being which Aristotle took to characterize substance must become (for Aquinas) an esse ad creatorem (an existing in relation to the creator) This is another way of saying that ‘all things other than God are not their own existence’, either in the radical sense on which this article insists, distinguishing creatures from the creator, or even in a more attenuated sense in which the being which they have cannot be ‘their own’ in the sense of belonging to them ‘by right’ or by virtue of their being the kind of things they are (which was Aristotle’s view).

Everything other than God receives its being from the creator as a gift. Yet such derived or participated things are no less real than Aristotle’s substances, since now there is no other way to be except to participate in the ipsum esse of the creator. So, the nature of the creating act depends crucially on our conception of the One from whom all-that-is comes.

Now if that One is most properly identified as ‘He who is’, since ‘the existence of God is his essence and since this is true of nothing else’, then we are in the presence of One whose characteristic act will be ‘to produce existence [esse] absolutely . . . which belongs to the meaning of creation’ defined as ‘the emanation of the whole of being from a universal cause’ or ‘universal being’? That being’s ‘proper effect’, then, is the very existence of things. One implication of this unique form of causation is that

creation is not a change, except merely according to our way of understanding, [since] creation, whereby the entire substance of things is produced, does not allow of some common subject now different from what it was before, except according to our way of understanding which conceives an object as first not existing at all and afterwards as existing
Summa Theologiae, I, 45, 2 ad 2. 

So creating is not a process answering the question: how does God create? God creates intentionally, that is, by intellect and will, though these are identical in God, so Aquinas has no difficulty adopting the metaphor of ‘emanation’ to convey something of the act of creation: God’s consenting to the universe coming forth from God — that One whose essence is simply to-be.  The revelation of God’s inner life as Father, Son and Spirit will in fact allow Aquinas to say more, while respecting the absence of process. For it is this revelation which directs us to

the right idea of creation. The fact of saying that God made alt things by His Word excludes the error of those who say that God produced things by necessity. When we say that in Him there is a procession of love, we show that God produced creatures not because He needed them, nor because of any other extrinsic reason, but on account of the love of His own goodness.”
Summa Theologiae, I, 32, 1 ad 3.

So the act of creating is not a ‘mere overflow’ (or emanation) from this One whose very nature is to-be. It is rather an intentional emanating and so a gracious gift. Yet the mode of action remains utterly consonant with the divine nature, hence the natural metaphor of emanation.

The other metaphor which Aquinas invokes is that of the artisan: ‘God’s knowledge is the cause of things; for God’s knowledge stands to all created things as the artist’s to his products’, with the implication that ‘natural things are suspended between God’s [practical] knowledge and our [speculative] knowledge’.

The deft way Aquinas employs Aristotle’s distinction between practical and speculative knowing here allows him to utilize the metaphor of artisan critically, and so avoid pitting divine and human knowing against one another. Since God’s knowing brings things into being and sustains them, we need not worry ourselves whether God’s knowing ‘what will have happened’ determines future contingent events, since the knowing which God has of what will have taken place is not propositional in character.

God knows what God does; the model is practical knowing. Taking a cue from Aquinas’ strategy regarding God’s knowledge of singulars, we must say that divine knowledge extends as far as divine activity, for God does not work mindlessly. We can have no more determinate model for divine knowing than that. Yet the artisan metaphor for creation might lead one to suspect that the product could subsist without any further action on the part of its maker. So emanation will need to be invoked to remind us of the revolution which the presence of a creator and the act of creation has worked in Aristotle: the very being (esse) of creatures is now an esse-ad, ‘a relation to the creator as the origin of its existence’.

Aristotle’s definition of substance as ‘what subsists in itself’ can still function to distinguish substance from accident, but the being inherent to created substances proceeds from another, from the source who alone subsists eternally as the One whose essence is to be. And if substances must now be denominated ‘created substances’, the causality associated with creating can hardly be comprehended among Aristotle’s four causes. For the two contenders, efficient and formal, each fail since an efficient cause without something to work on would be unintelligible to Aristotle, while trying to fit the creator into Aristotle’s formal cause would directly foster pantheism, as Aquinas notes in ST, 1, 3, 8.

So a ‘cause of being’ must be sui generis (a Latin expression, literally meaning of its own kind/genus or unique in its characteristics. The expression is often used in analytic philosophy to indicate an idea, an entity, or a reality which cannot be included in a wider concept.) confirming ‘the distinction’ of creator from creation, while the founding ‘non-reciprocal relation of dependence’ will be unique as well, and best characterized by the borrowed expression ‘non-duality’. Aristotle’s practical knowing involves both doing and making, but that involved in creating will be more like doing, suggesting James Ross’s prescient image of the ‘being of the cosmos like a song on the breath of a singer’, while emphasizing that ‘God’s causing being can be analogous to many diverse things without even possibly being the same as any one of them.’