Transcript

What does it mean to say that God has created the world and that God governs the world?

When Aquinas talks about creation, he uses a very important, brief Latin phrase, where he says, Creatio non est mutatio.

For God to create is not for God to change one thing into another.

Creation is not God, as it were, igniting the first spark of physical things, or changing or moving things from one state to another.

Rather, it's God giving existence and being to everything, simultaneously and always.

Insofar as things exist, they depend upon God who causes them to be, and this activity is creation.

So, creation is happening now.

Everything that exists is being created by God, sustained in being.

Aquinas talks about creation as a relation of dependence.

That's to say, when he thinks about what a thing is, insofar as it's created, he says, Well, a thing is created because it has a relation to God.

Here he talks about mixed relations or non-reciprocal relations.

It's not really true to say that God is in a relation of dependence towards creation, even when he creates.

It doesn't improve or alter God's perfection to create us.

But we, on the other hand, are entirely dependent upon God, so you might say it's non-reciprocal.

We depend entirely on him in this relation of dependence, and he gives us being as an entirely free gift.

This means creation is not a historical reality, first and foremost.

It's something deeper and more perennial.

It's undergirding all things.

It's the presence of God giving them being and sustaining them in being.

Notice that this understanding of creation does not depend upon any particular picture of the cosmos, but obtains even as we gradually fill in the picture of the history of the cosmos through the medium of the modern sciences.

You might say no matter what we find out there or no matter how we fill in the picture, as it were, of the origins of life, the origins of the cosmos and the Big Bang, all of what is there is something that exists.

And insofar as it exists, it has its existence from God, not only at the beginning but all the way through.

It's also important that when Aquinas defines creation as a relation, he's saying that it isn't as such the essence of a thing that is created.

The essence of a thing is something we can come to know by studying it by being adjacent to it, as it were.

If you want to know the essence of a tree or the essence of a dog or the essence of a human being, you study it philosophically.

But when you think about the ultimate origins of the thing and why it exists, you do need to think about God as the origin of the reality.

And so we can say it's related to God as its creator.

This is significant actually for our engagement with modern science because it means that the creatures around us have an essential intelligibility, whether or not we immediately refer to God.

We don't have to have, as it were, to sacral an idea of secondary causes or of the things in the world.

People who don't believe in God can study the world and learn a lot about it and communicate a lot of truth about it to us, even though they don't recognize that it exists indeed because God is creating it.

But we gain more purchase on reality by understanding it as created.

The way that Aquinas thinks about this is also important because it shows that things that God sustains in being are themselves true causes of other things.

St. Thomas calls them secondary causes.

The primary cause is God giving being to all things.

But it dignifies God more, St. Thomas says, to create things that are themselves causes of other things than to create things that are themselves never causes of other things.

So you might say, God, the supreme cause of all things in their very being, gives them to be true causes.

So the cosmos is a history of realities interacting according to various lines of secondary causality, with one thing interacting with another, causing it to be.

This is also true of the world of living things.

It's also true of human reality where we, as free causal agents sustained in being by God, freely cause things to happen and the events of history unfold in our own lives.

Medieval theologians talk about God as the efficient cause, the exemplary cause, and the final cause of creation.

God is the efficient cause insofar as all things derive from him.

They emanate forth from him because he creates them freely.

And so he's the source of all that is, not only in the past but at every moment.

He's the exemplary cause, you might say, because everything that is is modeled after God's idea of creation, God's wisdom is the supreme, you might say, form that gives rise to all the diverse natures of things in the world around us.

Even when things come to be through time in creation and gradually achieve their form, they do so after the model of God's supreme wisdom which governs creation.

God is the final cause of creation because all things ultimately exist for him.

Even if, in a certain way, the physical world and the world of plants and animals exists for human beings, all of that together exists for God.

Through human beings, creation rises back up to God in prayer and worship.

And so, in a certain way, all things were made for him.

God doesn't create through any need.

He doesn't need the creation to perfect himself.

He doesn't need our honor or worship in order to achieve some kind of measure of self-respect.

God creates out of love and an abundance of goodness.

He creates in freedom so that we might participate in the divine goodness.

God creates to express and communicate his own bountiful wisdom, beauty, and goodness in the things that he makes.

Notice how this view differs so greatly from that of deism.

That view claims that God created the world and then, in a certain way, leaves it to its own devices.

But in Aquinas' more realistic, much more profound view, God is present in all things, sustaining them, mysteriously more interior to them than they are to themselves, to quote St. Augustine.

It also follows from this that God governs all things in light of his uncreated wisdom.

We see this in the fact that things hold together in a certain order that allows the various parts to flourish or sustain one another.

The world of non-living things forms an environment where living things can come to be and live and grow.

The world of plants and animals sustains the life of human persons, who in turn live in an unfolding history sustained by God's providence.

So we rightly commend our cosmos and our human history to God as the author of creation and as the hidden source of the divine government of all things.

Aquinas' viewpoint in these matters shows us the deep symmetry or connection of creation and divinization.

God creates in view of the communication of divine life in the highest mode possible, which is that of the gift of grace to spiritual creatures.

This is of another higher order than the creation of nature, but it is the capstone and in a sense the purpose of the whole natural order.

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