61. ciu. Dei 11.4; Bettenson, City of God, 432.
Creation as the Unifying Prologue 19
Word bestows form and thus bestows particular natures. In fact, there is no creature that escapes this formative process: all levels of creation must be open to the activity of the Son and thus become like him in receptively turning toward the Father. But why is this discussion important when we examine Augustine's understanding of creation's unity with the divine? It is significant because it prepares us to see how all of creation (even at its most formless) both comes from God and is constantly being formed by adhering to God. From this indeterminate formability to the highest of angels, all creatures are instantaneously good, are inseparably united with and in the Word, and are thus simultaneously deiform.
Augustinian cosmology is an existential dia-logue between creator and creation, a formative con-vers(at)ion carried on through the Word which makes creatures what they are to be. Such a cosmology allowed Augustine to see how contingent creation bears a kind of "silent testimony" to both its original nothingness as well as to its gracious maker who "could have been none other than God, the ineffably and invisibly great, the ineffably and invisibly beautiful."61 Creation for Augustine is wonderfully dramatic because it bespeaks both God and nothingness: it tells of God insofar as it shares in the good and the beautiful, but it points to nothingness insofar as it suffers change and the tendency toward non-being. Augustine explains, "Heaven and earth plainly exist, and by the very fact that they undergo change and variation they cry out that they were made. . . . Heaven and earth proclaim that they did not make themselves."62 Brought out of nothing [ex nihil] in the Word, creation receives its existence, form, unity, and beauty from the Word by imitating him in adhering to the Father and thus receiving these otherwise unattainable attributes. In the
61. ciu. Dei 11.4; Bettenson, City of God, 432. 62. conf. 11.4.6; Boulding, Confessions, 288.