The Thomist: A Speculative Quarterly Review

THE VALUE OF CREATION T HE OLD Testament is cosmologically as well as historically incomplete without the New. For it is only in the Revelation of the Trinity that the distinctive Mosaic doctrine of creation ex nihilo becomes capable of satisfactory articulation. The Name of Yahweh was indeed told to Moses. But in the Plenitude of Being, which is the Godhead, creation is obviously gratuitous. It is only in the generation of the Word that the Deity is necessitated, as it is only in the Subsistent Love of Father and Son that the Generative Act is necessarily adequated. Moreover, it is because of the Eternal Act of selffulfillment that creation becomes intelligible. If God is substantially One but subsistently Three, the separate subsistence of created substances is still gratuitous but no longer inexplicable, as it remains in non-Christian thought. In Christian thought God is One and Other and therefore the possibility of others who are not one with Him becomes at least tenable. Thus Christian cosmology is freed of the rigid Hellenistic rationalism , as neither the Hebrew nor the Mohammedan cosmologies could be. It is, then, the distinctive note of non-Christian thought that its wisdom is always of creation and never of God as He is in Himself. It is by the contemplation of the Christian doctrine of the Trinity that the philosopher may discover the meaning and value of the existential universe, i. e., of God and His creatures . All doctrines of the One remain ultimately unintelligible unless the One is the Three in One. For the manifestation of the Good which is expressed by creation is inexplicable in its origin unless the Good is primarily self-fulfilling. Creation as such is inadequate for the Creator except insofar as He is Creator. Yet, unless God is self-fulfilled intra se, namely, by the Trinity, He is necessitated to become self-fulfilled extra se, which is by emanation, not creation. If, however, He is self283 234 JAMES F. KELEHER fulfilled intra se, the creative movement is clearly understood as free. But it is only as a free action that creation is intelligible . As necessary, it is, of course, untenable. This is not to say, however, that the solution of the problem of the One and the many becomes self-evident. Rather it is given existential status which no Christian dialectic can deny. For if creation is worth the price of the Redemption it can hardly be a kind of emanation which occurs and recurs inevitably . H all things are one with the One, the Incarnation and the Redemption are both meaningless. But while the Incarnation and the Redemption explain the creation as we know it, the meaning and value of creation must be sought as it was in the beginning. That God made all things for Himself is an immediate corollary to the statement that He made all things. The question being asked herein is why He made things at all when He was obviously free not to do so. By a common agreement among Christian thinkers the process of creation is the outpouring of Divine Goodness in mode, species, and order, to use the classic phrase of St. Augustine. I do not find, however, that any Christian philosopher has answered adequately the question as to the motivation of the creative process, the why which the how presupposes. Certainly God does not need creation to show His Goodness, since He is Good, i.e., self-fulfilled, without creation. Yet He does create. It seems to me that God wills proximately, i.e., from our point of view, to create on account of the possibility of the goodness of things as they are to exist outside God. Although the Trinity Itself is a Plenum of Being, Truth, and Goodness which is incommunicable as such, yet It is communicable and communicated imperfectly as separately created and subsistent essences. These are of, by, and for God. However, they are not in God as subsistent essences but only according to their modes of being, truth, and goodness. Although the Divine Essence includes all possible essences in the sense that their proper perfections are verified in a higher way in God's essence...