The One Christ: St. Augustine's Theology of Deification
28 Creation as the Unifying Prologue simplest answer Augustine gives is that God created because God is good, and as good, God is generous. It is in this way that Augustine can argue that creation's "quare fecerit?" is a sanctified body of praise convoked for divine communion.
Augustine is willing to venture that the only answer to the question of why God created is found in God's own good will. In fact, since there is nothing greater than God's will, one necessarily errs in seeking its motivations. Augustine accordingly praises God for creating not out of exigency but out of the fullness of his goodness—ex plenitudine bonitatis tuae.80 God creates purely out of his generosity and this divine bonitas is the key to Augustine's theology of creation because it is how he puts to rest the Manichaean claim that the material order is the result of an unwanted attack upon the summum bonum and thus the product of an unwanted mixture of good and evil: "And the statement, 'God saw that it was good' makes it quite plain that God did not create under stress of any compulsion, or because he lacked something for his own needs; his only motive was goodness."81 God's goodness is neither under attack nor does it lack anything. The Trinity simply wants to share its divine goodness with existents of a different order of being. Without violating the ineffability of the divine will, Augustine nonetheless discerns a fittingness to God's bringing about a good creation and, as such, there can be no better reason [nec causa melior] given for creation than that the author of all goodness wanted to share that which is good.82 Again,
80. conf. 13.2.2; CCL 27.242. Augustine asks about the goodness of all creation because God is supreme goodness, cf. Trin. 11.5.8: "deus fecit omnia bona ualde non ob aliud nisi quia ipse summe bonus est?"; CCL 50.344. A list of primary texts in which Augustine argues for creation's existence from divine goodness can be found at Fritz von Rintelen, "Bonitas Creationis—Bonitas Dei," Giornale di metafisica 9 (1954): 523–41.
81. ciu. Dei 11.24; Bettenson, City of God, 457; "Vidit Deus, quia bonum est, satis significatur Deum nulla necessitate, nulla suae cuiusquam utilitatis indigentia, sed sola bonitate fecisse quod factum est, id est, quia bonum est"; CCL 47.343–44.
82. ciu. Dei 11.21: "Nec auctor est excellentior Deo, nec ars efficacior Dei uerbo, nec causa melior quam ut bonum crearetur a Deo bono"; CCL 47.340.