9.6 Creation Is Not aMotion or aChange (SCG 2,17–19)
9.6 Creation Is Not a Motion or a Change (SCG 2,17–19)
If for God to create is for God to make things to be, period, and if God’s act of creating is not an operation on what preexists it, then, Aquinas reasons, coming to be created is not to undergo a change of any kind.
Here, his argument is that all motion or change depends on things having potentiality of some kind while to be created is not to be changed from being in one state or from being a thing of some kind. It is to be caused to exist, but not out of anything. “In the action which is creation,” Aquinas says, “nothing potential pre-exists to receive the action. … Therefore, creation is not a motion or a change.”21 Or, as he goes on to observe in SCG 2,18: “Creation is not a change, but the very dependency of the created act of being upon the principle from which it is produced. And thus, creation is a kind of relation.”22
Aquinas admits that we inevitably tend to think of creation as a kind of change since we conceive of one and the same thing as first not existing and then as existing. But that, he adds, only reflects our way of understanding; it does not correspond to what actually goes on as God makes things exist. For a thing to be made to exist by God is not for it to undergo a change. And this, Aquinas adds in SCG 2,19, means that there is no successiveness when it comes to being created. Here he says that something undergoes successiveness by going through motus; but to be created is not to undergo motus, nor is God’s act of creating to be construed as producing a change in anything.