The One Christ: St. Augustine's Theology of Deification
Creation as the Unifying Prologue 15
Per Quid Fecerit? The Mechanics
of Augustinian Creation
From "the beginning," creation has had a definite filial stamp. The Word's manner and way of being God is the foundation and pattern of all creation; the Son's eternal stance before the Father is the model which all creatures imitate. Although this next section focuses on the Word's forming of all creatures, we must first examine the significance of creatio ex nihil, a principle which serves as Augustine's way of protecting both the omnipotence and the otherness of God. Contingent being is not made out of some co-eternal principle set alongside God (thus preserving the divine omnipotence), nor is it made out of God's own substance (preserving the divine otherness). Neither coerced nor rewarded to create, God brings about other beings only out of his desire to share what he himself is.
Within Christianity's argument for God's sole dominion, the doctrine of creation out of nothing had to be clarified. Some earlier thinkers, like Justin Martyr, were content to see God's majesty as one which skillfully altered shapeless matter.47 However, later theologians argued that if God is God of all, it is unthinkable that something exists alongside of him or that he fashioned the world out of some primordial matter. A doctrine only implicit in scripture (cf. 2 Macc. 7:28; Rom. 4:17; Heb. 11:3), by Augustine's day, creatio ex nihil distinguished Christian cosmologies from those positions of thought which found it necessary to separate the good God of salvation from the evil god of matter and corporeality.48
Augustine's doctrine of creatio ex nihil involves other central theological principles as well. We see evidence, for example, of how creation out of nothing and the goodness of
47. Cf. 1 Apol. §59. 48. For the gradual emergence of this distinction, see Gerhard May, Creatio Ex Nihilo: The Doctrine of "Creation Out of Nothing" in Early Christian Thought, translated by A. S. Worrall (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1994).