God and Creation

Reflections on our "that-ness"

Photo by Greg Rakozy on Unsplash

The great theological traditions, East and West, have tended to treat the questions of “God” and “Creation” together, and this for at least two reasons: the experience of gratuity, and the experience of contingency.   First, the question of “God” arises whenever we appreciate the sheer gratuity of existence:  the sense of wonder that there is anything at all, the shock of recognition that stops us in our tracks when we stop for even a moment to realize that we are alive. From whence comes this gift? 

Here, the question of “God” is answered intuitively, occasioned by reflection on unitive experiences – those moments of profound connection to reality that transcend subject/object consciousness – that leave a sense of awe, gratitude, and love in their wake.  This experience of life as a gift awakens the desire to know the Giver, a desire fathomed in religious rituals, sacraments, and, most profoundly, silence.  This is the contemplative or mystical path, in which delight in being leads to its source, and knowledge of God is an act of trust.

Secondly, the question of “God” arises whenever we consider the absolute contingency of reality.  What I am speaking about here is much more than the question of why there is something instead of nothing.   While the world’s lack of inherent necessity certainly gives one pause, what strikes us even more upon reflection is the nature of the physical universe: everything that exists is dependent upon realities outside of itself.  Nothing within the universe contains its own being:  all things are composite, subject to dissolution; impermanent, subject to change; conditioned, subject to causes and conditions outside itself. 

In classical metaphysics, every finite thing (including the universe as a totality of finite things), is the union of an essence (what it is) and existence (that it is), neither if which is explainable in terms of the other or of itself.  All things receive their essence and existence as the result of a chain of causal dependencies and dynamic conditions and are thus radically contingent.  Physical reality cannot account for its own existence.  Scientific materialism or philosophical naturalism can elucidate the what-ness of existence, but not the that-ness of existence.  Between existence and non-existence there is an infinite qualitative difference that cannot be overcome by any quantitative calculation of processes or forces or laws. 

To put it another way, nature – physical reality – is that which, by definition, already exists.  Existence, therefore, logically precedes the system of causes that nature comprises.  That a thing exists is prior to our ability to ask what it is.  Existence is literally hyperphysical, or in Latin, super naturam.  Nature must admit of a supernatural explanation, that in virtue of which it can exist at all. 

Thus, no matter how refined the work of theoretical physics in chronological terms, pushing back the origins of the Universe to the “Big Bang,” or in descriptive terms, elucidating the fundamental building blocks of matter at the subatomic level, it cannot escape the “pleonastic fallacy” – the belief that an absolute qualitative difference can be overcome by a successive accumulation of extremely small and entirely relative quantitative steps.  Scientific discovery remains locked within the limits of nature itself, unable to get behind, so to speak, the thatness of existence. 

The reality of God is deduced from the fact of cosmic contingency.  The principle of causality, stated in its simplest form, is that the contingent is always contingent on something else.  The classical arguments for God are based on this principle of causality in relation to the ubiquitous contingency of the observable universe.  There must be some unconditioned reality upon which all else depends for its existence in each moment.  This unconditioned and eternal source of being is what the classical religious traditions identify as “God.” 

Here, some scholastic distinctions may prove helpful.  The first is between a causa in esse and a causa in fieri.  A “cause in being” is that donation of being or continuous influx of actuality that gives existence to contingent being.  A “cause in becoming” is an accidental or limited substance or force or event, which can influence other contingent beings but which is itself a contingent being.  The causa prima of reality creates out of nothing, giving of its infinite actuality to created being, while causa secundae are created realities that have the power to affect and be affected, but not to create out of nothing. 

Creation strictly speaking refers only to causa prima in esse:  the creation of being out of nothing, the continual donation of actuality to everything that is.  God is neither the first temporal agent within cosmic history, nor the agent of transition of reality from one state of being to another, but rather the eternal reality present in all things as source of their actuality ex nihilo.  Thus, God is not a being, an object among other objects, not even the most powerful or comprehensive being, but rather being-itself, that which completely transcends being as its source.   God is the infinite source of all actuality. 

Another way to express this would be to say that our being is contingent, while God’s being is necessary.  God’s nature is such that God cannot not be; God’s being does not admit the possibility of nonbeing, transcending the distinction between potentiality and actuality that defines all finite beings.   God is not actual, but rather actuality itself.

As absolute, infinite, unconditioned source of being, it follows that God is simple: God is not composed of or dependent upon constituent parts.   God cannot be reduced to anything else, and there is nothing that limits or conditions God’s power; this is what it means to speak of the simplicity of God.  Therefore, when the classical theistic traditions speak of the attributes of God, what they are describing is a single thing seen from a particular perspective.   God’s “mercy” and God’s “justice” are inseparable.  God’s mercy is God’s justice, God’s omnipotence is God’s omniscience, etc. 

It is important to remember that all language about God is necessarily analogical – there is no other way to talk about the Absolute.  This means that whatever predicate we may attribute to God is more unlike God than it is like God.  So, when we speak of God as Love, we must accept the caveat that God is more unlike love (as humans experience it) than like love.  The scholastic tradition referred to this principle as the maior dissimilitudo: Between Creator and creature no similitude can be expressed without implying a greater dissimilitude.   This principle is one the great bulwarks against idolatry.

For example, to say that God is a se – independent or impassive, unchanging -  is not to say that God is “unfeeling” in the way that a rock is seemingly unfeeling; it simply means that God’s love does not involve any change in God metaphysically speaking, because it is not based on a privation or lack within God’s nature.  God’s knowledge of created things is not separate from God’s eternal act of creation; God is not modified by that knowledge in the way that we are necessarily modified by our encounter with things outside ourselves.

This has some important implications for our understanding of God’s relationship to Creation, and, to that part of Creation with which we are most interested, namely, human beings.  The first thing to note is that the traditional understanding of God’s eternal donation of being to creatures does not imply any kind of mechanistic determinism, but rather is conceived as the creation of a contingent reality with truly free secondary causes.  It is in this sense that I would agree with Thomas Berry, who notes that the emergent process of the universe is neither determined, nor random, but rather creative. 

The second thing to note is that creation ex nihilo does not mean that God imposes God’s will on creation.  Prior to God’s creative act, there is nothing to impose on.  Creation therefore is not some kind of divine imposition or manipulation of reality; rather, everything that is, is of God.  It is an act of self-donation whereby God gives actuality to everything that is out of the plentitude of being that is God. 

Thus, creation is absolutely dependent upon God for its being.  God chooses, so to speak, to create what is not God in an act of freedom.  What this means for human beings is that, however we may imagine our identity, we must come to grips with this fundamental dependence.  To imagine ourselves as agents or givers is to express our need to know we exist for another.   

In the beginning is the relation.  None of us is self-created, in either a biological or cultural sense, much less in an ontological sense.   In an ultimate sense, we are fundamentally dependent upon God for our being.  In a relative sense, we are mutually dependent upon other creatures, human and non-human, and cultural institutions for our life and sense of identity.   This awareness brings with it a recognition that we are all receivers before we are givers, and give only as a response to what we have received. 

This relative freedom and relative dependence as causa secundae means that the negotiation of identity in relationship with others is a risky business.  Not all giving is a gift.  We receive oppressive cultural definitions as well, and can become the raw material for other people’s identities in ways that deform all the parties in the relationship, such as that between a master and a slave; we are no longer seen as for another as an agent, but merely as an object.   Even under the best conditions, no other finite reality can ground my being as an agent, can provide a sense of meaning to my life.  There is a certain inescapable anxiety inherent in our relative dependence upon others. 

This is where the doctrine of creation ex nihilo becomes important.  It provides the ontological and existential ground of trust in my capacity to be an agent, a giver, to be seen as for another.  To know oneself as unconditionally dependent upon God for one’s existence in the world is to know that one is inherently and irrevocably “of God,” given a reality and identity that is rooted in God’s freedom.  Because God is in this sense for us, we can be for others in the risky business of interdependent relationship that is life in the world. 

Even more, we can trust God as for us because God is in no way a rival with us in the negotiation of identity.  God does not suffer any privation or need, requiring us to become objects of manipulation to secure God’s identity or sense of security in being.  When we know God as the absolute Giver, and trust this giving, we no longer need be in rivalry within anyone or anything else to secure our identity or ground our agency.  We are relatively free to be for others without anxiety, coercion, or violence.  We recognize our mutual dependence without fear or resentment, and no longer need make others function as the absolute ground of our being; which is, of course, an illusion and a violation of our mutual relation.

We might say that the optimal form of human agency, of being for another, is to be the object of another’s love, to cause them delight in virtue of sheer being.  I cannot love myself if I have not been the object of another’s love:  self-love presupposes self-giving, and manifests as self-giving.  Based on our experience of human flourishing as love, we can imagine more fully what is at stake in affirming the aseity of God, that God has no need. 

God’s flourishing does not depend upon God’s waiting be the object of love for what is not God.  God needs only God to self-actualize as it were; speaking analogically.   Yet, there is that which is not God – creation, you and me – indicating that God desires to be God for that which is not God; to be for us, desiring our flourishing as objects of God’s love. 

This desire is groundless, completely internal to God, since God needs nothing other than God to be God.  It appears therefore, that self-affirming, self-giving, self-love is intrinsic to the Godhead, it is God’s nature to give and receive love, as it were.  In the plenitude of divine being, this self-giving love overflows into the creation of that which is not God, so that God can be for the world as God loves God.  The absolute difference between God and the world presupposed by the doctrine of creation out of nothing becomes a way of asserting the continuity between the being of God and the gift of actuality whereby God creates the universe. 

We have here already the elements of a Trinitarian understanding of God as intrinsic self-love and self-gift, as the infinite, eternal relation of subject, object, and the love that unites and overflows the relation.  Creation, while not “needed” by God is in complete accord with God’s nature as being-for-another. 

Such an understanding takes us beyond the conclusion of logic and deductive reasoning that the contingent receives its existence from the Absolute, and into the assertion of faith that God so loved the world; not, I think, a groundless assertion, but an expression of an intuitive knowledge nurtured by gratitude and contemplation.  It is an intuitive knowledge exemplified, for example, in Julian of Norwich’s Showings:

“[God] showed me a little thing, the quantity of a hazel nut, lying in the palm of my hand, as it seemed. And it was as round as any ball. I looked upon it with the eye of my understanding, and thought, 'What may this be?' And it was answered generally thus, 'It is all that is made.' I marveled how it might last, for I thought it might suddenly have fallen to nothing for littleness. And I was answered in my understanding: It lasts and ever shall, for God loves it. And so have all things their beginning by the love of God.”

I want to conclude with an observation about God and creation that Jacques Pohier has made:  “God does not want to be Everything.”  Pohier recalls Thomas Aquinas’ denial that we ought to love things or persons as a means of loving God or leading us to God; rather, we should love them for their “autonomy and consistency,” for what the free love of God has made them.  “God is the reason for loving, he is not the sole object of love.” 

To love as God loves is to love things as they are, for their intrinsic dignity, and not in view of their utility – even their usefulness in raising our attention Godward.  It seems to me that this is an understanding that is sorely needed in our time, when the commodification of the world and the instrumentalization of nearly every relationship makes little room for love. If we love other people, we will not attempt to make them functional for our needs alone, turning our mutual dependence into domination.  If we love the Earth, we will recognize its integrity as distinct from, and setting limits upon, its utility for human need or greed.

It also means that to treat God as “Everything” is to misunderstand the nature of our unconditional dependence upon God.  God grounds the existence of the world, and thereby establishes its integrity and gives it meaning.  But God does so precisely by creating the world as other than God.  God therefore is not the immediate justification or explanation for every process or event within creation.  This is to confuse causa in esse with causa in fieri.  It is to make of creation an idol, seeking to reduce God to an accomplice in our need to understand and control, rather than receiving God and creation as gift.

The classical theological understanding of God and Creation presents us with some stark choices.  We either believe that the Absolute grounds the existence of the contingent, or we believe that reality is, finally, absurd:  absolute contingency, unconditioned conditionality, an uncaused effect.  The consequences of our belief are either trust in God exemplified by self-giving love, or nihilism exemplified by the will-to-power.  If we choose self-giving love, we act like “believers,” whether or not we know it.

[I am deeply indebted to the work of David Bentley Hart, especially his The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss and Rowan William’s On Christian Theology, which inform these reflections.]