1. THE RATIONALE OF CREATIO
EX NIHILO
1.
To the ancient Indian and Greek thinker the
notion of creatio is unthinkable. Yet what captured the
imagination of the dominant theistic strand in Jewish,
Muslim, and
Christian thought was expressed in the
first two chapters of Genesis.
“In the beginning God
created the heavens and the earth. And the
earth was
waste and void; and darkness was upon the face of
the deep:
and the spirit of God moved upon the face
of the waters. And God said, Let
there be light: and
there was light. And God saw the light, that it
was
good” (Genesis 1:1-4). The picture that unfolds in this
first chapter is that of a Creator-God responsible for
every created being.
What is further distinctive in this vision is the pas-
sage: “And God created man in his own image, in the
image of God created he him; male and female created
he them.... And God
saw everything that he had
made, and, behold, it was very good”
(Genesis 1:27,
31. See also Genesis 2; Jeremiah 27:5, 31:35; and
Isaiah
40:12-31). The phrase creatio ex
nihilo is not a biblical
phrase (though it does occur in
Maccabees II:vii, 28).
The dominant if not exclusive image in the biblical
account stands clear.
God and the world are not iden-
tical; nor are
the world and man “modes” of God's
being.
Furthermore, in creating man in his own image,
God makes man free in a world ultimately governed
by God's
purpose. When man freely chooses to abide
by God's purpose for him, he will
realize the best in
himself and in Nature.
Thus in postulating creatio, Judeo-Christian-Muslim
theism protects both God's unlimited freedom to create
and man's limited
freedom to be creative (or destruc-
tive).
This postulate is also directed against the view
that the human soul has
existed in some form before
its present existence. This view also leaves
the door
open to annihilation for, since man comes “from noth-
ing,” he may return to
“nothing.” Most theists, how-
ever, hold that God will grant personal immortality.
Furthermore, early Christian apologists, like Saint
Augustine (De civitate Dei XI:24; XIV II) used creatio
in order to stress that creation is God's own
“free act,”
born of his goodness. They hold that the
“stuff of his
own being” is never involved in
creating either the
world or man. Or the stress, as in Philo, is on the
fact
that no inner “fate” governed God's creating
this
world. God could have created a different one, and
he can
override the laws of this present world if he
sees fit.
2.
In the Timaeus Plato seeks an account of the
generation of the space-time world that is “inferior to
none in
likelihood” (Timaeus 29d). A good but not
omnipotent Demiurge desired that all should be “so
far as
possible, like unto himself” (29d). He was limited
by the fact
that he must deal with two other kinds
of being: the Receptacle and the
Forms. The Recepta-
cle is the
“mother” of all becoming, a kind of “mould-
ing-stuff” of everything
“invisible and unshaped, all
receptive.” It could
never be a cosmos unless “in some
most baffling way”
(51b), it could partake of Forms
or Ideas. Plato's Demiurge, keeping his
gaze fixed on
“these co-eternal Forms” (29a),
“persuades” the in-
choate Receptacle to take on as much form as possible
(48a). The
world thus generated is “planned” as “a
movable image” (37d) of the perfect Forms.
In postulating three co-eternal Beings, Plato departs
from his contention in
the Republic that the Good is
the source of
everything's being and being known. The
imperfect world is there likened to
the manifold radia-
tions of the Sun (the
Good). The theory in the Timaeus,
of a Demiurge
persuading a somewhat recalcitrant
Receptacle to take on form, seems better
able to ex-
plain imperfections in the world.
But a good Demiurge offends the religious conscious-
ness of most theists. God, to be God, must be
perfect,
limited by nothing but his own will and reason. At
the same
time, Plato's view, even as a “likely” account,
faces
theoretical difficulties. For if God, the Forms, and
the Receptacle are
co-eternally independent of each
other, why can God know the Forms? Or why should
the Receptacle be such that it could be persuaded to
take on
the Forms?
To avoid such religious and theoretical difficulties
the traditional theist
substitutes creatio ex nihilo. He
concedes
that creatio too is baffling, that the how of
creation is unknowable. But three co-eternal Beings,
interacting and yielding a cosmos like ours, compounds
mystery. Mysterious
as the how of creatio may be, it
offends no
theoretical norm, and protects the absolute-
ness and perfection of God.
3.
The words creatio ex nihilo are intended,
then,
to deny the existence of any other Being co-eternal
with God, or
any world identical with God.
For example, the theist cannot with Spinoza say
Rdeus sive natura (“God or
Nature”). Spinoza held that
a God who created the world must
have been imperfect
before its creation. If God is perfect the world
must
follow from his nature “as the nature of a triangle
that
its two angles should be equal to two right angles”
(Ethics, I, Prop. 17 Scholium).
In similar vein, the emanationist argues that the
mystery of ex nihilo can be avoided by thinking of the
world
as “radiating” the unchanged One in different
degrees. For Plotinus, influenced by Plato's image of
the Sun, the world is
the efflux of the ineffable, tran-
scendent, “creative” One. Such
emanation should not
be confused with the “creative”
or “emergent” evolu-
tion in which real novelty is produced “in time.”
For
the emanationist the temporal order of “descent”
is
not real; the One and the many stages of
“evolution”
are in fact one. Hence, emanation hardly
escapes
monism in its attempt to avoid the ex
nihilo that defies
imagination and intellect.
The monist and emanationist usually urge that the
One cannot be described in
terms that reflect, as human
thinking must, only a part of the world. The
One is
super-personal. The human at best is part of the world
and can
provide no adequate analogy to the nature
of the One. Hence Spinoza
declared that to conceive
of the one Substance as a person is like
comparing the
constellation The Dog to a barking dog. Similarly, the
most noble ideal of human goodness, or will, or reason,
cannot serve to
characterize the One.
The theist agrees with the monist and emanationist
that God cannot be One
among equals, or co-eternal
with any other being or beings. But he counters
that
mystery is not decreased by considering an imperfect
world,
manifesting the One, ultimately good. Nor does
he see how human freedom is
consistent with emana-
tionism or monism.
Creatio allows him to think of the
Unity as the
ultimate Agent who in creating is self-
guided by his ideals of goodness and of reason. God
is not even, as
Aristotle seems to have held, the Thinker
whose perfection is the unifying
lure of all finite beings.
God is the Creator who thinks and acts in accordance
with goals
intrinsic to his being. In creating the order
of Nature which supports
human effort without anni-
hilating man's
freedom, God expresses his loving pur-
pose—a mutually respecting and responsible commu-
nity of persons. Hence, this world, as
Leibniz put it,
is the best possible world once it is seen as the
arena
for the development of persons who cannot escape the
responsibility for their own actions.
In the theistic view, the natural world may be con-
ceived as the order of interacting nonmental entities
(in
Thomistic realism) or as part of the mental nature
of God (as in Berkeley),
or as a world of psychic unities
of different grades (as in Leibniz'
panpsychism).
The conception of man's interaction with Nature and
with God varies in each
of these theistic views. But
the religious and moral relation of men to
each other
and to God is not significantly affected by viewing the
natural world as mental or nonmental. Yet man's con-
fidence that the natural world expresses God's reason
and
goodness, supports the scientific conviction that
man's disciplined
observation and reflection is not alien
to the order of Nature.
In sum, then, the classical theistic model of the uni-
verse is of a self-existent God who, in accordance with
his
rational and loving nature, relates himself con-
stantly to a world contingent on his creative activity.
His
general providence for free persons is expressed in
the natural structure
of things and persons. His individ-
ual
providence depends on the fellowship each person
freely seeks with God in
prayer, worship, and action.
Even when theists, like Calvinists, denied
human free-
dom, the ethical effect seemed to be
strenuous effort
by individuals who used their worldly accomplishment
as an index to their divinely ordained destiny.
This emphasis on responsible fellowship, as the ideal
of worship and of
human community, influences the
theist's interpretation of the religious
and mystical
experience. Many mystics hold that in their experience
of
God the finite self is literally lost in God or the One,
and they argue
that this “union” favors monism. The
theist objects:
religious “union” is also frequently ex-
perienced, and interpreted, as interaction
with, and not
absorption in, God. In any case, the experience of love
and worship is meaningless if the lover and the beloved
are in fact one.
Furthermore, to say that man is, and
is not, identical with God is more
mysterious than
creatio and self-contradictory. How can the perfect
God “somehow” include all the imperfection in man
and
in the world? Must not responsibility for all human
error and for evils in
Nature be God's? Indeed, if
whatever happens in Nature and in man is
ultimately
good, there is neither final distinction between good
and
evil nor any standard for human progress.
4.
Such reasoning in support of the doctrine of
crea-
tio
helps to clarify what it is intended to mean: God
creates what was
not in existence and could not exist
unless God created. Nothing less than
a radically new
model of coming-to-be and passing-away is advocated.
A
finite being is a no-being, a no-being, until it is
created; it cannot come into existence or
continue to
exist on its own initiative.
This model, the creationist argues, is mysterious only
in the sense that any
ultimate state or quality of being
is mysterious. Given this model of
ultimate Being and
coming-to-be, problems such as those indicated
above
can reasonably be resolved. Creatio itself
cannot be
understood by reference to any event within the world.
The
theist often refers to the creative activity of an
artist as providing only
a faint analogy, because the
artist perforce uses materials not of his own
making.
Indeed, the creationist is at pains to suggest that
unfortunate
picture-thinking leads to misunderstanding
of creatio. Picture-thinking leads to the question: How
can any being,
however powerful, make something out
of nothing, or, to put it crudely, how
can he make
something out of little bits of nothing? As Anselm said,
ex nihilo does not mean de
nihilo ipso (Monologium,
VI-VII).
Incomplete understanding underlies the objection
that “from
nothing, nothing comes.” Lucretius, for
example, argues (I,
154), “if things came from nothing,
any kind might be born of
anything, nothing would
require seed” (Oates, 1957). The
creationist grants this.
But creation, he argues, is the activity of the
self-
existent God, not of nothing.
This God creates what
was not existent. Hence, no beings come
“from
noth-
ing”; the Creator-God creates,
and this means that
what was not, is now because of his act.
This model of creatio is intended to replace all
others. But theists have nevertheless moved toward
deism, emanationism, and
pantheism as they dealt with
such questions as: Having created, is God then
indiffer-
ent to his creation? Does God
need the world? Are
the world and God thinkable without each other?
How
can the unchanging God remain unchanging if he is
immanent in his
changing world? The thought of sev-
eral great
thinkers makes such theoretical tensions
within theism clearer.
