Sertillanges and Chastek - Creation - Divine Outpouring

• (Creation is not a change)
• Change requires changeable being, which can't exist before ('Big Bang') it exists
• Cannot come from nothing, as a bridge with one pier and no span can't be crossed
• Can be no intermediary between God who creates, and the world which is created. Creation is a total action which supposes nothing pre-existing, which supposes duration and being
• So, can be no infinite regress of universes in any via from God to world
• Creation is an action of God, cause is in eternity, effect is in time
• Time is a creature along with everything else
• Taking away from the notion of creation all idea of passage, movement and becoming, it remains nothing but a pure relation
• If the world were eternal, i.e. if its duration were infinite in every way, it would depend on God, successively and continuously, and the act of creating would still be incessant.
• God has given a sort of extension of His being, which we call the world, therefore the world depends upon him: from the creature's standpoint, time is coextensive with (dependent also on) God. From God's standpoint his creation includes duration while he is in eternity.
• God created the world at the beginning of time and that since then he keeps it in existence.

God's action is God.

His only possible motive in acting is to show forth his goodness, and communicate his perfection. Every other primary motive is excluded from him . . He needs nothing, His only act is to give, and what he gives must in some way be Himself, since there is nothing beside Him.

Relation analogous to musician playing music rather than engineer maintaining a machine

Creation is multiple because one solitary being could not suffice to show forth the riches of God, which is the ultimate purpose of all things. Therefore it is impossible that they should be entirely unconnected and unrelated. They must have an order, for order is heaven's first law. God wills them, not for their individual worth, but for their collective worth. The world essentially is God's work, and order is it's form. God wills, first and foremost, not this or that creature, but the order which they proclaim.

Complement

 https://thomism.wordpress.com/2019/04/05/20265/

Divine outpouring

April 5, 2019 at 3:34 pm (Uncategorized) 

1.) God, as infinite perfection, lives out this perfection by outpouring, like someone becoming more sure of a truth by living it out, teaching or writing it.

2.) The first outpouring is into the infinite: deep calls out to deep with the sound of many waters. One outpouring is source and the other complete reflection – complete because unlike the reflection of light off a mirror or sound off a wall the whole substance of one infinite is reflected in the other, making the first infinite Source and the second infinite Logos, both being identical in nature as Father and Son.

3.) In virtue of its perfect reflection, the Logos outpours just as the Father; in virtue of its distinction from the Father it is outpouring with the Father. In the first sense, it is identical to the Father, in the second both the Father and Logos are distinct from a third.

4.) All modalities of outpouring are therefore fulfilled. Nothing is left to be done – all perfection is complete and no potentiality remains unfulfilled.

5.) There is an outpouring into the finite simultaneously making the possibility of the finite and its existence in fact. That said, we visualize this as fulfilling some subjective possibility, i.e. what is in reality from nothing is conceived as actualizing a subjective possibility.

6.) Absent creating, there is neither actual finite things nor their real possibility. Real possibility is of a thing in time to a later time, and there is no such state before creation.

7.) When a productive action ceases at X, we have only what existed before X. In the case of creation, there was nothing at all before X, not even the possibility of the thing. Creation must therefore be seen as continuous and ongoing.  Absent any ongoing creative act, creatures are not even really possible. Creation is the outpouring of the infinite into the finite.

8.) The creature is distinguished into a possibility receiving the creative power and the actualization of that possibility. Taken in the first way it is a reservoir and therefore a limit; taken in the second way it must be taken as neither infinite nor finite. If water could fill all reservoirs then the lake qua water is infinite, but qua basin or reservoir it is finite. This is why Thomas teaches that esse as such is neither finite nor infinite.

9.) Creation manifests infinite perfection and is desirable because of its suggestion of it. In one sense the existence in creatures is infinite and divine so far as it is esse, but as received it is limited to one dimension of this esse. 

Purus Actus

May 17, 2020 at 7:21 pm (Uncategorized)

When we describe creation as ex nihilo we take it on the side of the thing created (ex parte creatorum), so what is it when we consider it on the side of the creator? Here it becomes an action that occurs with no corresponding change in the one creating,* i.e. God is absolutely the same and in second actuality whether he creates or not.
All this follows from the proportion or likeness between cause and effect: an action taken passively ex parte creatorum with no potential subject of change corresponds to an action taken actively ex parte creatoris with no potential subject of change.
So taken, creation necessary IF we take it purely negatively, i.e. as the denial of contingency in the entitative nature of the will. Formally as an act of will, however, the object of creation cannot be necessary since it has no necessary connection to the divine happiness. God would be just as blessed had he not created – in fact, he would not have been any different at all – so creation could not be willed necessarily. Pace Analytic philosophers and some Eastern Orthodox, God’s freedom, act of creation, and blessedness are not in some sort of aporetic standoff but all trace back to the same purus actus. 

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*This ability to change without changing in oneself is proper to immateriality, and there are other areas in life where we bungle our understanding of causality when we fail to appreciate how A can change B without A changing, cf. the interaction problem, the causality of life in physical systems, etc.


https://thomism.wordpress.com/2018/02/22/a-critique-of-chomsky-on-the-mind-body-problem/