The Act of Creation And Its Theological Consequences: A Creator Unique and Free
August 12, 2010
Prometheus dips into the inner F ring at its farthest point from Saturn in its orbit, creating a dark gore and a corresponding bright streamer. Gores created during previous apoapsis (the name for the farthest point in an orbit) passes, are seen above. The older gores are farther behind the moon in its orbit of Saturn. The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Nov. 1, 2006 at a distance of approximately 1.7 million kilometers (1.1 million miles) from Saturn and at a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 162 degrees. Image scale is 10 kilometers (6 miles) per pixel.
Another selection from David Burrell’s article on the theological consequences of the act of creation. He explores more of Aquinas’ contributions to our understanding of creation and how it underpins the whole Christian theology of revelation.
I had a dialogue with an atheist the other day, one who can’t help but associate “dogma” with “dogmatic.” I gave him Chesterton’s marvelous take on the wonders of dogma (pearls to swine) but I will repeat it here because I know that those who have an interest in these things will appreciate it greatly:
“I found this projecting feature of Christian theology, like a sort of hard spike, the dogmatic insistence that God was personal, and had made a world separate from Himself. The spike of dogma fitted exactly into the hole in the world — it had evidently been meant to go there — and then the strange thing began to happen.
When once these two parts of the two machines had come together, one after another, all the other parts fitted and fell in with an eerie exactitude. I could hear bolt after bolt over all the machinery falling into its place with a kind of click of relief. Having got one part right, all the other parts were repeating that rectitude, as clock after clock strikes noon. Instinct after instinct was answered by doctrine after doctrine…
All those blind fancies of boyhood … I was right when I felt that roses were red by some sort of choice: it was the divine choice. I was right when I felt that I would almost rather say that grass was the wrong color than say it must by necessity have been that color: it might verily have been any other. My sense that happiness hung on the crazy thread of a condition did mean something when all was said: it meant the whole doctrine of the Fall.
Even those dim and shapeless monsters of notions which I have not been able to describe, much less defend, stepped quietly into their places like colossal caryatides [vocab: A supporting column sculptured in the form of a draped female figure] of the creed. The fancy that the cosmos was not vast and void, but small and cozy, had a fulfilled significance now, for anything that is a work of art must be small in the sight of the artist; to God the stars might be only small and dear, like diamonds.
And my haunting instinct that somehow good was not merely a tool to be used, but a relic to be guarded, like the goods from Crusoe’s ship — even that had been the wild whisper of something originally wise, for, according to Christianity, we were indeed the survivors of a wreck, the crew of a golden ship that had gone down before the beginning of the world.”
From Orthodoxy by G.K. Chesterton
We begin to see the philosophical thickets into which the assertion of faith that God freely creates the universe can lead us. And rightly so, since that affirmation grounds all the other Abrahamic faiths as well. Indeed, both al-Ghazali and Moses Maimonides staunchly resisted the necessity endemic to the picture of creation as emanation which they encountered in the philosophy of their time, for fear that it would preclude the very possibility of revelation. Nothing short of a free creation can ground a free revelation, and with it, a free human response to the One from whom all that is comes forth.
Aquinas will enlist the resources of Neoplatonism to offer a philosophically coherent account of the creator as the One causing being, allowing him to insist that ‘the proper effect of the first and most universal cause, which is God, is existence itself (ipsum esse)’. Yet since this effect is that of an agent thoroughly intentional and free, he also insists that ‘what God principally intends in created things is that form which consists in the good of order of the universe (bonum ordinis universi)’
Calling the ‘good of order of the universe’ a ‘form’ is clearly as much an accommodation of Aristotelian terminology as calling the creator ‘the efficient cause of all being’, yet the stretch must begin somewhere. As always, one notices the transformation in the ways Aquinas employs these notions once they have been introduced; it is language in use which counts. And since mention of ‘good’ invites a discussion of ‘evil’, Aquinas’ concluding remarks to this section on ‘the distinction among creatures’, including ‘the distinction between good and evil’, are especially illuminating. He is confronted with the Manichaean argument that ‘we should postulate some supreme evil which of itself is the cause of evils [since were one to] allege that evil has an indirect cause merely, not a direct cause … it would follow that evil would crop up rarely, not frequently, as it in fact does.’ His response is forthright:
As for the reference to evil being present in the majority of cases (in pluribus), it is simply untrue. For things subject to generation and decay, in which alone we experience physical evil, compose but a small part of the whole universe, and besides defects of nature are minority occurrences in any species. They seem to be in a majority only among human beings. For what appears good for them as creatures of sense is not simply good for them as human, that is as reasonable beings; in fact most of them follow after sense, rather than intelligence.
This sharp exchange can be parsed as Aquinas’ countering the claim that there is more evil than good in the universe by means of a distinction: in the natural world — despite cataclysms, miscarriages, and other ‘defects of nature’ — there is manifestly more good than evil in creation. Here his faith perspective is reinforced by his Aristotelian cosmology, as it would be even more by the intricacies unveiled by modern science. The human world, however, reflects the opposite state of affairs, to which Aquinas assigns a cause here, only to explore it later (in ST, 1-11, 77 and 85).
What might well startle us, however, is the matter-of-fact assertion that our cultural world displays more evil than good. He would have had no truck with modernity’s claim about human perfectibility, so he hardly needed the chastening of the twentieth century to disabuse him. He did feel the need to account for our role in systematically distorting creation, however, though our experience with the way that claims of human perfectibility have distorted the natural environment of humans could expand exponentially on his.
Yet ironically enough, that hubris peculiar to humans can at least in part be traced to the way we find his earlier claim, that ‘things subject to generation and decay … compose but a small part of the whole universe’, so quaint. For a universe bereft of intelligences, whether they be identified as heavenly bodies or angels, can only place human beings at its pinnacle, thus leading us to read that fatal line in Genesis as licensing us to transform the natural world to serve our needs.
Aquinas’ lapidary [vocab: Marked by conciseness, precision, or refinement of expression] explanation for this propensity of ours — that most of us ‘follow after sense rather than intelligence’ — recalls the ‘good of order of the universe’ as well. For he notes that this propensity also contravenes our given nature, since ‘what appears good for them as creatures of sense is not simply good for them as human.’ Moreover, this is a humanity firmly placed within the ‘good of order of the universe’ and hence included within a vast world of nature, indeed inserted at the point where the material and the spiritual dimensions of that universe intersect. An awesome picture indeed, and one Aquinas could glean from his Aristotelian cosmology, yet one which can only be available to us by faith.
A Platonic legacy
Another arresting feature of Aquinas’ account for us is the way he links being with good, as we have seen. Here we need to turn to the celebrated Liber de causis, an Islamic adaptation of Proclus published in Arabic as al-kitab al-Khaîr (Book of the Pure Good), on which Aquinas commented. Aquinas found in this manifestly Neoplatonic text an idiom for expounding the elusive category of ‘cause of being’ to explicate the act of creation.
We might pose the question this way: how is it that the One, whose proper effect is things’ very being, effects that? The ‘first cause infuses all things with a single infusion, for it infuses things under the aspect (sub rationem) of the good.’ Aquinas concurs, reminding us that it had already been shown that ‘the first cause acts through its being…hence it does not act through any additional relation or disposition through which it would he adapted to and mixed with things.’
Moreover, ‘because the first cause acts though its being, it must rule things in one manner, for it rules things according to the way it acts.’ The following Proposition 21 links this ‘sufficiency of God to rule’ with divine simpleness. ‘since God is simple in the first and greatest degree as having his whole goodness in a oneness that is most perfect.’ Hence Proposition 23 can assert: ‘What is essentially act and goodness, namely, God, essentially and originally communicates his goodness to things.’ With such a One there can be no anxiety about ‘control’; indeed, the simile which the proposition on divine rule elicits is that ‘it is proper for a ruler to lead those that are ruled to their appropriate end, which is the good’.
Thus to ‘infuse things under the aspect of the good’ is precisely to bring all things to be in a certain order, inherent in their very existing, so there is nothing ‘external’ about divine providence, no imposition — neither ‘inasmuch as it establishes things, which is called creation; [nor] inasmuch as it rules things already established’. Indeed, the initial diversity comes from the first cause, who ‘produces the diverse grades of things for the completion of the universe. But in the action of ruling … the diversity of reception is according to the diversity of the recipients.’
Yet since the original order comes from the One, the One, in ruling, will ‘effortlessly’ adapt itself to the order established in creating. Another way of putting all this, and one which should dissolve most conundra regarding ‘divine action’, is to remind oneself that the creator, in acting, acts always as creator; and this proposition elucidates Aquinas’ contention that creating and conserving are the same action, differing only in that conserving presupposes things present.
Yet since the manner of that action will ever escape us, for its very simplicity belies any manner at all — no ‘relation or disposition’ — the best we can do is to remind ourselves that it ever acts by constituting the order which inheres in each existing thing, in the measure that it is. (And since essence measures esse, it is pointless to oppose essence to existing in things that are.) Yet, since ‘order’ is a consummately analogous term, we can never be sure we have detected the originating divine order in things, though our conviction that there is one, inscribed in their very being and our intentional attitudes towards them, will continue to fuel our enquiry. Crude classifications — inanimate, animate, intentional — can be supplemented by refined mathematical structures and symmetries (as in DNA), yet at each stage of their development, analytic tools will be serving our innate desire to unveil the activity present in these infused ‘goodnesses’ which constitute our universe. Moreover, to grasp something of that constitutive ordering is to come closer to its source,
[Because] every knowing substance, insofar as it has being more perfectly, knows both the first cause and the infusion of its goodness more perfectly, and the more it receives and knows this the more it takes delight in it, [so] it follows that the closer something is to the first cause the more it takes delight in it.
All is not light or delight, of course, because in truth we cannot ourselves hope to know ‘the first cause and the infusion of goodness’. Indeed, ‘the most important thing we can know about the first cause is that it surpasses all our knowledge and power of expression’, for ‘our intellect can grasp only that which has a quiddity [vocab: The real nature of a thing; the essence.] participating in “to-be” [while] the quiddity of God is “to-be itself.’’ Indeed, that is why Aquinas can concur that ‘the first cause is above being inasmuch as it is itself infinite “to-be”’ And its action will outstrip our ways of conceiving as well, since one can never know how ‘pre-act’ acts. Yet since ‘what belong to higher things are present in lower things according to some kind of participation’, we can be said to share, as beings, in this inaccessible One.
