The One Christ: St. Augustine's Theology of Deification
Creation as the Unifying Prologue 17 formability enjoys a certain priority amongst creation because it precedes the formation of all else: it is not any definable creature, but it is "that from which all else" can be formed by God's Word. Formability is conceptually prior to any determinate creature because it comes into existence along with time. To express this difficult topic, Augustine writes: "This therefore is the book of created heaven and earth: That in the beginning God created heaven and earth, according to a certain formability of matter, if I may put it so, which consequently had to have been formed by his Word, preceding its own formation, not in time, but in origin."52 Immediately after introducing this novel concept, Augustine moves right on to Genesis 2:5, unfortunately leaving what he means by formabilitas undeveloped.
However, by turning to Confessions 12 we detect two important characteristics of this formability. Although he was not in possession of this precise term formabilitas in his earlier writings, Augustine had come to the realization that there must be some primal creature, a nihil aliquid or an est non est as he then called it.53 It seems that such formabilitas is "almost nothing" because it is "almost anything." So what can we learn about formability from this section of the Confessions?
First, formability is the pure capacity to receive every other kind of form and definition. This is why Augustine can also name this initial creature a quaedam informitas sine ulla specie,54 or a capax formarum omnium.55 This initial creature is
Short, A Latin Dictionary, is Augustine's Gn. Ad Lit. 5,4 (London: Clarendon Press, [1879] 1958), 768, due to the difference in textual divisions between the PL as found in Lewis and Short and the CSEL where this term appears at 5.5, CSEL 28.147.
52. Gn. litt. 5.5; Hill, Genesis, 284: "Hic est ergo liber creaturae caeli et terrae, quia in principio fecit deus caelum et terram, secundum materiae quandam, ut ita dicam, formabilitatem, quae consequenter uerbo eius formanda fuerat, praecedens formationem suam, non tempore, sed origine"; CSEL 28.147.
53. conf. 12.6.6; CCL 27.218. 54. conf. 12.3.3; CCL 27.218. 55. conf. 12.6.6; CCL 27.219; cf. s. 214.2 where creatio ex nihil and formability are discussed together.