10. The Same Spirit Who Hovered over the Waters at the Beginning of Creation Hovers over the Mind of the Artist at Work.
10. The same Spirit who hovered over the waters at the beginning of creation hovers over the mind of the artist at work.10
Aquinas had a lot to say about God as artist—and by extension about us, born in God’s image and likeness—as artists. Regarding the former, he used the term “artist” about God perhaps more than any other single name. For example, he declares that “God is an artist and the universe is God’s work of art.” And again, “all natural things are produced by divine art and can rightly be called God’s work of art” (65). God is “the Artist of artists.”
How does it feel to be called “God’s work of art”? Compare it, for example, to being called a “sinner,” a “wretch,” a “worm,” or an object of judgment and wrath by a punitive father God in the sky.
Aquinas draws an important conclusion from his premise that nature is God’s work of art when he says: “All artists love what they give birth to—parents love their children; poets love their poems; craftspeople love their handiwork. How then could God hate a single thing since God is the artist of everything?” (66) God takes delight in us just as the artist takes delight in his or her paintings, poetry, writing, dance, pottery, filmmaking, and playwriting. There is a love relationship between God and nature (including humans, who are so integral to nature). This echoes, of course, Hildegard of Bingen’s erotic teaching that God and creation are related as lovers.
Aquinas says: “God’s spirit is said to move over the waters as the will of the artist moves over the material to be shaped by their art.” He further explains that “this means over the formlesss matter, signified by water, just as the love of artists moves over the materials of their art, in order that out of them artists might form their work.” He exegetes the biblical phrase “God saw that it was good” to signify that God is pleased with creation, “just as all artists take satisfaction in their art.”
Aquinas sees all creation carrying the mark of creativity, because “things were made like God not only in being but also in acting.” Furthermore, “the dignity of causality is imparted even to creatures” (255). Yes! To a special degree, the human creature has been blessed with this “dignity of causality.” Do we feel such dignity? Or do we take it for granted, wallowing instead in feelings of powerlessness or victimhood?
We humans are especially marked with the power of creativity. In my book Creativity: Where the Divine and the Human Meet, I propose that creativity is the very definition employed by anthropologists for our species. We are bipeds who make things. Those two attributes—walking on two legs and creating artifacts—distinguish our species. Our languages too are profoundly creative and diverse.
According to Aquinas, the human intellect is of such magnitude that we can “conceive an infinite number of things in order to make for ourselves an infinite number of instruments.” We make an “infinite variety” of weapons, clothing and other necessities of life because we are endowed “with both reason and our hands.” Our intellects are vast and open and free—they have “a form that is not determined to one thing alone, as is the case with a stone, but have a capacity for all forms” (259f). It is amazing that he repeats the word infinite so readily when he is describing who we are. We are almost infinite in our creative capacities.
Unfortunately, we must be on our guard, for our powers of choice and creativity can also bring evil into the world. We are not pre-programmed to do the good. We must work at that. “The unjust person is worse than injustice and the evil person worse than a brute, because an evil person can do ten thousand times more harm than a beast, because we can use our reason to devise many diverse evils” (261).
Thus our creativity is a double-edged sword. We can do wonderful and awesome things with it—and we can do evil and awful things. The choice is ours to make. That choice is the very meaning of morality.
We ought to
cherish the body
[and] celebrate
the “wonderful communion”
of body and soul.