Conclusion
CREATION: THE NOTHING
THAT IS EVERYTHING
Meister Eckhart, the fourteenth-century Rhineland mystic, argued that all things in the universe exist in God. So intimate is this connectedness between the divine and the creaturely that the best way to reach God, he says, is to sink into him, to find him at the root and core of one’s own being. So complete is the dependency of the creature upon the divine power in which he swims, that the creature is not so much a thing as a relationship. The mystical “breaking-through” of which Meister Eckhart speaks is not a leaping out of this world to a contact with a supernatural supreme being, but is rather none other than an awareness of one’s own divine root and heritage, one’s inescapable participation in the divine fire.1 Now, some of this language strikes us as questionable, vaguely pantheistic, even heretical. However, we recall from the introduction that Meister Eckhart was a Dominican brother of Thomas Aquinas, indeed one of Thomas’ successors in the chair of theology at the University of Paris. It is my conviction that in his mystical writings Eckhart simply draws out the implications of Friar Thomas’ doctrine of creation. To be sure, Eckhart does so in language that is far more poetic and evocative than Thomas’, but the ideas that animate Eckhart’s sermons and mystical writings come, remarkably often, from the seemingly arid metaphysics of Aquinas.
It is so easy to miss the spiritual power in the doctrine of creation. We all rather naturally accept the fact that God, at the beginning of time, brought forth the universe of finite things that now exists in separation from him. For most of us such a view is innocuous enough and calls for no great spiritual transformation on our part. What I hope to show in this chapter is that such an understanding is altogether alien to the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas. For Aquinas, the doctrine of creation is of decisive spiritual power inasmuch as it calls the believer to an act of radical self-emptying and to an acknowledgment that one finds oneself precisely in total dependency.
As we have come to expect, Thomas interprets creation—the fundamental rapport between God and the world—in light of the experience of Jesus Christ. This means, basically, that the world—in all of its particularity and peculiarity, in each of its nooks and crannies—is filled, every moment and in the most intimate way possible, with the sustaining presence of God. The universe is constantly held up by, and suffused with, the creating power of the ground of being. At every instant, God brings the world from nonbeing into being, illumining it as the sun illumines the sky. This divine “shining” is creation, and allowing oneself to be “shone through” is to be a creature.
And all of this implies that the doctrine of creation is a complex and vitally important instance of spiritual direction. In articulating the nature of creation, Thomas Aquinas, I will argue, does much more than make some metaphysical clarifications. Instead, he attempts to move his reader into a stance of sheer receptivity and total openness vis-à-vis the gift of being that pours continually forth from the divine source. In the course of this chapter, we will follow Thomas’ analysis of creation as it is found in two major texts, the Summa theologiae and the disputed question De potentia Dei (on the power of God). Through an examination of his texts dealing with the creative power of God, the bringing forth of the world ex nihilo (from nothing), and continual creation, I will try to show that Thomas Aquinas is the great theological inspiration for a healthy “creation” spirituality.
In order to speak of creation at all, we must first address the problem of the divine power—that is to say, God’s capacity to produce something outside of himself. We saw in the previous chapter that God, precisely as characterized by love, is “diffusive of himself.” He tends to overflow in an ecstatic sharing of his existence. But how and under what conditions does this self-offering take place and what are its limits? It is to these questions that Thomas turns in his examination of the power of God.
In the first article of the opening question of the De potentia, Thomas wonders whether it is correct to say that God has power.2 In the Sed contra, Aquinas cites the mysterious saying of Jesus in Matthew’s Gospel: “God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham” (Matt. 3:9). This quotation indicates something that we must never forget in this exploration of Thomas’ understanding of creation—namely, the intimate link between God’s power and the act of salvation. Never an arbitrary expression of might, the divine potentia is exercised for the sake of raising up children to Abraham, for the sake of inviting the world into communion with its Creator. We recall that when speaking of the Incarnation, Thomas argued that God’s power is fully revealed in Christ because there is nothing greater than that God becomes human. This means that the might of God is no more blazingly evident than in the act of self-forgetting love in which God joined his creation in order to raise it up again.
In the Respondeo, Aquinas affirms that God’s potentia (power) is absolute and unlimited precisely because God, as simple, is the fullness of reality. Since there is no restriction to the divine existence, there is no action that God cannot perform; there is no limit to the divine expressiveness and outreach. From a spiritual standpoint, this assertion of God’s power is obviously of great moment. Wherever the sinner finds himself, he is within the “range” of God’s press, God’s touch. There is, as we have seen in other contexts, no neutral ground upon which a creature could stand in opposition to God. Indeed, God’s power holds us up, surrounds us, envelops us—whether we like it or not.
However, in the ensuing articles, Thomas poses several rather interesting questions concerning what seems to be God’s inability to do certain things. For example, in article 3, Thomas wonders whether God can do those things that are impossible to nature?3 The biblical citation in the Sed contra is once more quite striking: “With God nothing is impossible” (Luke 1:37). These are, of course, the words of the angel to Mary at the time of the Annunciation, assuring her that what seems impossible to her is in fact possible to God. What this passage reveals, according to Thomas, is that God’s power can accomplish more in us than we ever dreamed possible, that God can break through the barriers of our complacency and cynicism and bring forth life where we thought only death could reign. What the angel discloses to all believers is that we ought never to set limits to the expressiveness of God’s graciousness and the wonderful, playful surprise of God’s intervention. In this sense, God can do what seems “impossible,” unthinkable, unimaginable according to the natural assumptions of the mind.
However, as he explains in the Respondeo to this article, there are certain things that are impossible to natural agents and even to God: those that involve a logical contradiction or some undermining of the structures of being.
His action cannot terminate otherwise than principally in being and secondarily in nonbeing. Consequently he cannot make yes and no to be true at the same time, nor any of those things which involve such an impossibility. Nor is he said to be unable to do these things through lack of power, but through a lack of possibility, such things being intrinsically impossible.4
What Thomas means here really is quite simple: God can do everything. What he cannot do is produce nonbeing; what he cannot bring about is what cannot possibly exist. He cannot, in a word, make what is not a thing. Hence, as Thomas indicates, God cannot square a circle or make 2+2 equal anything but 4, precisely because such eventualities cannot be. These clarifications are, once more, of enormous spiritual importance. God is not a supreme being squatting outside the world and arbitrarily “playing” with it, undermining it, turning it upside down. The French philosopher René Descartes imagined that God in his sovereign greatness could change the laws of mathematics or even the laws of morality if he so desired. For Descartes, 2+2=4 only because God arbitrarily decided that it should be; and adultery is morally objectionable only because God determined as much.5 If the fancy caught him, God could deign that those laws be reversed.
Thomas Aquinas couldn’t be in stronger disagreement with this voluntarism of Descartes. For Thomas, God is not a distant supreme being existing outside the world, but rather the act of Being itself, the creative ground of the universe. Hence, to undermine the basic structures of nature is to undermine himself; to contradict the world is to contradict himself. For Aquinas, an arbitrary Cartesian God would be a source not of comfort but of unbearable anxiety: How would I ever be able to root my life if the ground could shift fundamentally at any moment? How could I find ultimate security if God himself were capable of changing on a whim? For Thomas Aquinas, the God of covenant fidelity, the God of unchanging love, is this firm ground of existence that cannot be untrue to himself or to what he has made. God’s power is, as St. Anselm has it, the capacity, not to say yes or no, but rather the capacity to say only yes. Once more we see that the sinner can rest comfortably in the divine presence and power, finding in it an unshakeable support. The God who “cannot” do the impossible is like a parent who “could not” turn on her own children.
When he was in the trenches during the First World War, watching his friends die and feeling the concussions of the exploding shells, young Paul Tillich would read from the letter to the Romans: “For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom. 8:38–39).6 This assurance of God’s unbreakable faithfulness would give him and his colleagues hope. Thomas finds the same hope in speaking of a God who cannot be untrue to himself or to what he has made through his power.
Having shown that God has power that is infinite in its outreach, salvific in its intent, and faithful to itself, Thomas next turns to the central question: whether God can create something from nothing.7 It is terribly important to understand the revolutionary quality of this question. Many myths and legends and philosophies speak of a God who forms or fashions some preexisting “stuff” into the universe as we know it. God makes the world out of either his own substance or out of earth, air, fire, or unformed matter. In this case, the Creator is like a potter or an artisan, fashioning the universe “out of something.” What Thomas is wondering in his famous question is whether God truly creates—that is to say, makes the universe ex nihilo, out of nothing, drawing it neither from his own being or from anything else but simply from nonbeing into being.
Thomas seeks to answer this question by referring to what we saw in the previous chapter to be the prime divine “attribute”—namely, simplicity. God is not any type of being but rather the act of Being itself. God does not exist in this way or that; God simply is. This means, of course, that if God decides to make something other than himself, he must be responsible for the entirety of that thing’s being, and not only for some aspect thereof. If God is the fullness of reality, then whatever exists other than God must derive the totality of its being from God and from no other source. Thus, there is no stuff from which or out of which God makes the world:
By his action, he produces the whole subsistent being, without anything having existed before (since he is the source of all being). . . . For this reason, he can make a thing from nothing, and this action of his is called creation.8
What is the spiritual import of this teaching? First, since God truly creates, there is absolutely no aspect of finite reality that does not flow from the divine source. There is nothing in the world, in nature, in the cosmos, or in us, that is not, in every detail, the result of God’s creative act. There is, consequently, nothing that is finally “secular” or “profane”; instead, everything is, in principle, at the root of its being, sacred. The great counterposition here would be that of the Gnostics who claim that God touches and is responsible for the spiritual realm while remaining opposed to the evil of the material dimension. In affirming creation from nothing, Thomas shows his radical disagreement with this sort of dualism. For him, as for the author of Genesis, all being is redolent of the divine and hence worthy of reverence and celebration: all ground is holy ground, all places are holy places, all times are sacred times.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin maintained in a well-known aphorism that “nothing here below is profane for those who know how to see.”9 In Teilhard’s theory, the entire cosmos is, from the beginning, touched and suffused with the divine energy, a power that pushes it, shapes it, and finally draws it to its fulfillment.10 The fire of God, he says, is the inescapable beginning, middle, and end of the evolutionary process. It is the divine spirit that compels primitive life forms to evolve in the direction of greater complexity and interiority until they reach the level of conscious awareness. And it is the same spirit that pushes the human heart upward and outward toward union with God. Everywhere, and at all times, and in every corner of the universe, God’s creative power is at work. Teilhard felt that the problem with the believers of his time (and I would argue of our time as well) is that they don’t know how to see this divine omnipresence. As a result, they divide the real into two sharply separated realms: the sacred and the secular, the supernatural and the natural, the holy and the profane. And thus they feel, in their very immersion in the world and its values, an alienation from God, a sense of God’s distance and absence. The point of the spiritual life for Teilhard is to wake up, to open our eyes, to learn once more how to see.
Teilhard’s reflections represent a contemporary and more “scientific” version of Thomas’ teaching on creation ex nihilo (from nothing). If God is responsible for every nook and cranny of the cosmos, then all things are burning with the divine fire, all things begin, endure, and reach their completion in God. Like Teilhard, Thomas is teaching the believer how to see this all-encompassing divine presence.
It is interesting to note that Teilhard de Chardin was only one of several theologians in the first half of the twentieth century who, in various ways, expressed uneasiness with the inherited understanding of the relationship between nature and grace. In the formal theology of pre-Vatican II Catholicism, there was, many of these theologians felt, an exaggerated emphasis on the distinction between the “divine” and the “created,” so much so that the natural realm was seen as basically self-sufficient, with its own goals and integrity.11
But this meant that “ordinary” experience remains fundamentally untouched by grace. As we saw in chapter 1, this sharp dichotomy couldn’t be further from the mind of Thomas Aquinas. From the beginning and at its deepest roots, human experience is open to graced transformation. The human heart is hunger and thirst for God, and God is that power that lifts us up and remakes us. In light of the Incarnation, we see that God moves comfortably within the confines of nature, mixing with it and inviting it to transformation. Perhaps most profoundly, in this teaching on creation ex nihilo, it becomes clear that literally nothing stands between the world and its divine source. There is thus no sharp delineation between the sacred and the secular, but rather all of “secularity” shines with the light of the sacred. All of the ordinary is filled with extraordinary grace.
This properly Thomistic view is not far from Paul Tillich’s understanding of the God-world relationship. Since God, for Tillich, is the ground of being itself, God is found at the heart of nature and at the heart of culture. The “world” and “secular society” are not obstacles to an experience of God; on the contrary, they are sacraments of the divine presence, bearers of God’s reality and life.12 God is found in the hushed forests, in the cry of the hawk, in the roiled ocean—and God is found in the machinations of the lawyer searching for justice, in the soaring tone of the opera singer’s voice, and in the serious playfulness of a game of baseball. We don’t rise above these various events and activities to find their divine source; rather, as Eckhart pointed out, we sink into them toward their divine ground. It is my contention that we can make these observations only in light of the strange and remarkable doctrine of creation from nothing.
As Thomas’ analysis of creation unfolds, we witness a sort of revolution in our understanding of ourselves in relation to God. If what Thomas says is true, then we are fundamentally different than we had imagined; if this understanding is correct, then we have been living under the influence of an illusion. Like a patient Zen master, Thomas, the spiritual director, is trying to move us out of the realm of illusion and misperception. But what is this mistaken view? How have we misconstrued ourselves in our rapport with God? Thomas’ basic answer is this: we have forgotten that God is the one who creates us from nothing, and hence we have tended to see ourselves as beings set apart from God, things that have a relationship with God. What Aquinas wants us to appreciate is that, as creatures, we are a relationship to the divine power. He wants us to see that we live and move and have our being in the very energy of God (cf. Acts 17:28). The tragedy of sin, from a Thomistic standpoint, is that we attempt to find ourselves by affirming our difference from God. At the heart of the creation teaching is what I call the metaphysics of the Gospel: the more we lose ourselves in God, the more we find our authentic selves, and the more we cling to our independence of the divine, the more we lose our souls.
Thomas explores this theme in article 3 of question 3 of the De potentia. He wonders “whether creation is something really in the creature.” More precisely, he wants to know the “locale” and the “nature” of the creative act whereby a finite thing comes into being: Is it “in” the creature or “in between” God and the creature or, perhaps, only at the moment when a particular thing comes to be? In light of what we have seen so far, it should first of all be clear that creation is not a change of some sort, not a transition from one state to another. For what changes already exists in some way and simply receives through the change some new way of existing. But creation is from nothing and hence there is no already-existing something out there that receives or accepts it. To be created is not, therefore, to take on a new way of being; rather, it is to come to be in the full sense of the term. Thus, creation is not “between” the Creator and the creature, not simply the vague influence of the former on the latter.
Once more, this cosmological clarification has personal and spiritual implications. It is the fantasy of the sinner that creation is merely a change, for such a view assumes that the creature has only an extrinsic relation to God. If God only moves or affects me, then I can find my substantial independence of God. If I relate to God primarily as to a mover, then I can find refuge from the press of God in the secret recesses of my own being, that part of me that is untouched by the divine:
Therefore, creation does not denote an approach to being, nor a change effected by the Creator, but merely a beginning of existence, and a relation to the Creator from whom the creature receives its being. Consequently, creation is really nothing but a relation of the creature to the Creator together with a beginning of existence.13
This is one of the most marvelous and uplifting passages in the writings of Thomas Aquinas if we can but probe beneath its scholastic surface. Creation is the breath of God breathed out in such a way as to constitute the whole reality of the world and all things in it. It is the beginning of the world not in a chronological sense but in a spiritual sense: God is the root and ground, the profoundest source of all being. Gerard Manley Hopkins, the Jesuit poet, says in one of his best-known poems that “there lives the dearest freshness deep down things.”14 This, it seems to me, is what Thomas Aquinas means by the act of creation. Despite the suffering that we face on a daily basis, despite the gloomy prospects of global politics, despite our fear of the unknown future, “there lives the dearest freshness deep down,” there exists a source of life and hope and love that is the divine power. And this power can never be exhausted because it is the very being of the creature, it is the presence of God’s love in us. Thus, the more we call upon it, the more we give it away, the more we draw from it, the more abundant it becomes.
And, once more, if creation is the act by which the whole of one’s being is constituted, then the creature is nothing but a relationship to God. In light of Thomas’ understanding of creation, relation, not substance, is the primary category of reality. It is not as though God makes things with which he then establishes a relationship; on the contrary, from the beginning, all “things” already are relations to the divine source. We are most ourselves precisely when we acknowledge that what we are, most fundamentally, is a rapport, a play, a dynamic relation to God.
Thus, creation is quaedam relatio (a certain relation) to God cum novitate essendi (with the newness of being). This last phrase is marvelous. When we realize what it means to be a creature, we know that we are never far from renewal, from freshness of life, from endless possibility. We are, after all, nothing but this ongoing outpouring from the divine love and hence there is always “a spring of water gushing up to eternal life” in us (John 4:14). The key to Thomas’ creation spirituality is to enter ever more intimately and profoundly into this mystery of who we are: at the root of ourselves, there is nothing but novitas essendi, newness of being. Again, it is my contention that this understanding of creation comes not from Aristotle’s philosophy (indeed it contradicts Aristotle), but rather from the stunning event of Jesus Christ. What did Thomas see in Christ? We recall from the first chapter that for him Jesus was a sheer transparency to the Father, an instrumentum (an instrument) completely responsive to the divine will. In Jesus, God’s power is perfectly able to flow because of the concordance in him between the divine and the human. In this sense, it is Christ himself who reveals what it means fully to be a creature. Christ is the one in whom the “freshness of being” was continually apparent, endlessly available. We recall from chapter 1 that for Thomas the humanity of Jesus was like a fountain filled to overflowing with the grace of God. And we also recall that in his humanity Jesus is one with us. Therefore, in his human nature, in his sheer obedience to the will of the divine, he is the model of what the created world should look like in relation to God: in a word, Christ is the “nothing” that becomes a conduit for the “everything” that is God. As such, he discloses the nature of the relationship that is the creature.
Now, what does it mean to emphasize the relationality of the creature as much as Thomas has? It means, as I hinted above, that we must rid ourselves of the illusion that we are separate, self-contained “things” existing in a world of other things. It is much closer to the truth to say that we are processes, unfoldings, “flows of energy.” And thus the more we surrender to God in self-forgetting love, the more we find ourselves and the more we see with real metaphysical clarity who we are. When we cling to our independence, our separateness, we live stubbornly in a realm of illusion and thus, on a psychological and spiritual level, we fall into sadness and alienation.
In a word, it is only in ecstasy that we come fully to ourselves. The radical gift of self that Thomas Aquinas sees in the Incarnation—God surrendering himself out of love and Jesus offering himself in response—becomes the model for understanding the nature of creation. The more the world resembles the ecstatic nature of God and the more it mimics the transparency of Christ to the divine power, the more it finds itself. Thomas is no defender of pantheism; neither does he advocate some sort of absorption of the creature into God. Rather, inspired by the stunning poetry of Christian theology, he speaks of a creation that is most itself when it clings least to its independence. He sings of a finite realm that finds itself precisely in the self-abandonment of love. Once more, it is the icon of the Incarnation—divine and human ecstasy—that informs Thomas’ vision.
And this is why we are commanded to “love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind” (Matt. 22:37). This is not a merely ethical commandment, a recommendation for fostering the good life; it is a matter of life and death, of illusion or reality. The more we love God and let go of our awful seriousness and defensiveness, the more we discover correctly who we are. Christ’s command to love God does not simply urge us to adopt a new type of behavior; rather, it opens a window to the soul. What Thomas implicitly defends here is what contemporary theologians call “panentheism,” the existence of all things in God.
And is it not the case that so much of the struggle of human life flows from this failure to see properly who we are? Why do we engage in violence? Why are we crippled by hatred and envy? Why do we fall so often into a life-denying self-absorption? Because, I would argue, we don’t appreciate our creatureliness. When I realize that I am nothing but an outflow of the divine love, nothing but an ongoing gift, I realize that there is no “self” that requires defense. I am not one being among many fighting for primacy; on the contrary, I am a sheer dependency upon the divine grace. And thus my life need not be an awful struggle for dominance, a continual warfare against God, against nature, against my fellows, all those who threaten my “turf.” The doctrine of creation, as articulated by Thomas Aquinas, enables me to let go, to relax, to find myself in losing myself.
Furthermore, as Meister Eckhart pointed out so clearly, Thomas’ understanding of creation as relation means that all things in the universe, especially my fellow human beings, are related one to the other. All reality—from the simplest element to the farthest star, from a microbe to an archangel—flows, here and now, from the same source and exists in the same dependency. At the center, all things are family, in the most dramatic sense possible, siblings to one another. Before Thomas put it in more theoretical language, Francis of Assisi sang the same idea when he raised his voice to “Brother Sun” and “Sister Moon,” to “Brother Fire” and “Sister Bodily Death.”15
It is intriguing to me that violence and warfare require a suspension of belief in this basic doctrine. In order to harm or to kill a fellow human being, I must assume that he is basically foreign to me, an alien threat. Thus, for example, in wartime propaganda, there is an exaggerated emphasis on the racial and cultural difference of the enemy. During the Second World War, for example, British propagandists routinely referred to the Germans as the “Huns.” This sort of rewiring of the mind is, in the deepest sense, a negation of the doctrine of creation. In our bones we feel our commonality with all things in the energy of God, and we know that this relationship is more basic and more enduring than any of the differences that separate us. It takes an enormous effort of the will and a tremendous amount of sinful cultural conditioning to knock this “creation consciousness” out of our hearts.
When Jesus speaks in the Sermon on the Mount of radical nonviolence, of turning the other cheek, of going the extra mile, he is not simply giving ethical suggestions. Rather, as we hinted above, he is trying to root his listeners in a creation spirituality. I ought to offer the other cheek to my persecutor because I realize, despite the violence, a far more enduring and powerful bond between us. The turning of the cheek expresses my celebration of this commonality, and one can hope that it will shame my persecutor into a similar recognition. The “ethics” of the Sermon on the Mount is a dramatic expression of the creation mentality in and through provocative action; it is a playing out of the mind and heart that have risen above the corrupting influence of sin and have seen the truth of things. It is a holding up of the icon of creation to a world in forgetfulness.
I would like to draw out another implication of this creation doctrine for the life of prayer. It was Thomas Merton who wrote that the heart of contemplative prayer is the discovery of that center where one is here and now being created by God.16 By “center,” Merton means not some aspect of one’s person but that deepest place, that ground that underlies and encompasses all of one’s being. It is that “dearest freshness deep down” where God is continually pouring forth the newness of being. To pray, in the deepest and fullest sense, is to live out of that place, to immerse oneself in it habitually, to become at home there. It is neither an activity of the mind, nor a movement of the will, nor a play of the imagination. Indeed, all of those functions take place at relatively superficial levels of the soul. To pray is to find that deep and serene pool that underlies and informs all that we are and do. It is to rest in it, to “sink into it,” to affirm one’s identity with it. What Merton is describing is, in Thomistic terms, a discovery, at the deepest possible level, of one’s creatureliness.
Like all Christian theologians, like all celebrators of the encompassing power of the Creator God, Thomas Aquinas faces a grave problem: How does one explain the pervasive and devastating presence of evil in the world? If the gracious God is the one from whom being is continually flowing out into the universe, if the gentle God is the one found at the center of all things, why is there so much darkness, so much failure, so much tragedy? It is especially in our time, living in the aftermath of the bloodiest and most destructive of centuries, that this question takes on a particular pointedness. One can immediately see the spiritual danger that one faces even in posing this problem: the overwhelming force of evil can easily lead one to conclude that there are two basic principles at work in the world, a positive divine power and a malign demonic power. One’s spiritual life can then become a dreadful combat, a battle whose outcome is never sure. One can feel torn between the equally powerful forces of dark and light. It is just this sort of destructive dualism that Thomas endeavors to avoid in his discussion of evil. He does so by showing in various ways that the goodness of God, which is indeed the ground of all there is, can sometimes present a dark face. Evil, he says again and again, is not a counter-principle to God but rather one of the subtle devices that God uses to work his purpose out, one of the somber colors that he uses in painting his variegated canvas.
In article 6 of question 3 of the De potentia, Aquinas tackles this problem directly.17 In light of the fact of evil he wonders whether God can be seen as the sole principle of all that there is. The biblical icon of the Sed contra, which broods over the entire discussion, is one of the most deeply mysterious in all of Scripture. Thomas cites the prophet Isaiah: “I am the Lord and there is no other. I form light and create darkness, I make weal and create woe, it is I the Lord who do all this” (Isa. 45:5–7). Strangely, paradoxically, the all-good God is responsible for both weal and woe, for both triumph and calamity. What Isaiah implies, and what Thomas will make more conceptually precise, is that the goodness of God is far richer and much more complex than we customarily imagine. It is a fundamentally positive force that is great enough to encompass what appear to our limited vision as mutually exclusive principles.
Much misunderstanding comes, says Aquinas, from a failure to appreciate the nature of evil. Since evil weighs on us with such insistence and inspires such terror in us, it is easy to see it as a powerful force in its own right, as something that counterbalances the good. Without denying for a moment the psychological importance of evil, Thomas does deny emphatically that evil is metaphysically substantive:
Now we have said above that good is everything appetible; and thus, since every nature desires its own being and its own perfection, it must be said also that the being and the perfection of any nature is good. Hence it cannot be that evil signifies being, or any form or nature. Therefore it must be that by the name of evil is signified the absence of good. And this is what is meant by saying that evil is neither a being nor a good.18
Evil is, in one sense, altogether “real” because it strikes us psychologically and spiritually; but, in the strict sense, it does not exist at all. What Thomas means is that evil is a privation or deprivation of the good, the absence of some good that ought to be present. Thus, we say it is evil if a human being is blind, since sight belongs to the nature of a human being, but we would never describe a sightless rock as evil. For Aquinas, evil is not a thing or a power that confronts the good; rather, it is a cavity, a vacuum, a lack, a corruption.
It would therefore be absurd to say that there is a purely evil principle or agent that actively confronts and challenges the creative power of God. Pure evil cannot exist, since evil can exist only as a sort of parasite on the good, only as a “wound” on something positive. The good is always more basic, more enduring, more powerful than evil. It is interesting that in traditional theology the devil is in no sense a counter-principle to God, a coequal power of sheer evil. On the contrary, the devil is metaphysically good, a being endowed with tremendous powers and virtues, who has tragically fallen into corruption. In no sense threatened by the devil or forced into a life-and-death struggle with him, God uses the devil when he wants for the working out of his good purposes.
All of this rather arcane discussion is, as we hinted above, of spiritual significance. One of the gravest dangers—and serious temptations—for the sinner is to find refuge from God through the identification with evil itself. In my pastoral practice, I have encountered this tendency frequently. A person finds himself caught in the web of some evil—be it an addiction, a self-destructive lifestyle, an obsessive pattern, a cycle of jealousy and violence—and, despite his best intentions and most concerted efforts, almost despite himself, he remains caught, fascinated by the chains that bind him. His soul-sickness is this: he is seeking escape from the press and demand of God precisely in what seems most opposed to God, precisely in evil itself. He is looking for a counter-principle, a dark god, in whose kingdom he can rest; he is looking for an oasis where he can find relief from the bright sun of God’s presence.
Thomas’ clarification of the nature of evil is a deft bit of spiritual direction. By affirming that evil does not exist, Thomas is not denying the spiritual power of evil, but he is telling the sinner that there is no place to run. Even in a full and radical embrace of evil, the sinner is still—stubbornly and, for him, frustratingly—in the greater context of the good. There is no finally evil place, since all places are, as such, good; and there is no finally evil attitude, since all attitudes, as such, are good. There is no totally evil kingdom, since any kingdom, even the worst, is fundamentally good.
This bit of metaphysical clarification is, of course, maddening to the sinner who wants desperately to find a route of escape from God. It is also, at the same time, an invitation to salvation, since it convinces the sinner that in standing on evil he stands on shadows and mists. In hurling himself into the darkness of sin and corruption, he discovers not some great counter-principle to God but only a vacuum, from which God will ultimately summon him. Thomas’ doctrine of evil as nonbeing is a call to surrender to the good that cannot, in any final sense, be avoided.
Here I am reminded of Hans Urs von Balthasar’s discussion of the overwhelming salvific power of God. God’s outreach of love is so intense, his compassion so tireless and efficacious, says Balthasar, that he will eventually wear down even the most stubborn of sinners. Eventually, we can hope, God’s wily and indefatigable love will trick even the cleverest sinner out of his self-imposed prison of illusion.19 To be sure, we must believe that, given the fact of freedom, a human being could in a final sense say no to God, but we must at the same time reasonably hope that all people will eventually be outwitted by the benign trickery of divine love.
In sum, a healthy creation spirituality knows that good is the substance and evil the shadow or, in G.K. Chesterton’s words, “that this is a white world with black spots, not a black world with white spots.”20
If, therefore, evil is not a substance—not a thing but only a lack—it follows that neither God nor any other principle creates evil. It is more accurate to say, according to Thomas, that God permits this darkness in creation. But this leads him, and us, inevitably to the question “Why?” Granted that God does not directly produce evil, why does he nevertheless allow it to have such free rein, such destructive power in the world? Can we finally reconcile the fact of devastating evil with a God who is filled with wisdom and benevolence? Does not the very presence of suffering and evil prove, as David Hume argued, that God cannot be all-knowing, all-loving, and all-powerful?21 For indeed, it seems that if God knew about evil (in his omniscience), if he wanted to rid the world of it (in his omnibenevolence), and if he could do something about it (in his omnipotence), there would be no evil. Does the existence of evil not demonstrate, in Woody Allen’s phrase, that God is, at best, an underachiever?22
As Thomas Aquinas works through his subtle response to this vexing question, we find a way to enter into the experience of evil as part of the drama of redemption. We discover how to accept suffering and negativity themselves, not as signs of God’s absence or weakness, but rather as indications of his ever-greater and ever-more-mysterious love.
It is in responding to the fourth objection to article 6 of question 3 of the De potentia that Thomas answers the kind of argument that Hume and others have formulated over the centuries. It is worth quoting Aquinas here at some length:
It is due to neither impotence nor ignorance on God’s part that evils occur in the world, but it is owing to the order of his wisdom and to the greatness of his goodness, whence come the many and diverse grades of goodness in things, many of which would be lacking were he to allow no evil to exist. Thus, there would be no good of patience without the evil of persecution, nor the good of the preservation of its life in a lion, without the evil of the destruction of the animals on which it lives.23
In the Summa, Thomas makes this same point more directly by saying that God “allows evils to happen in order to bring a greater good therefrom.”24
Admittedly, in light of the truly monstrous evils experienced in our time, this argument can seem on the face of it rather facile, even a little callous. Indeed, it seems hard to find the “greater good” that flowed from the Holocaust or that might come about as a result of the stockpiling of nuclear weapons, but let us attend carefully to Thomas’ examples, especially the last. The good of preserving life in the lion could not possibly exist were it not for the evil of destroying the lives of the hundreds of animals on which the lion lives. Given the limitations of its own biological structure and environment, the predator could not realize the good of its continuing existence without entering into conflict with, and finally devouring, other creatures, without causing enormous suffering and loss. What Thomas signals here is the essentially conflictual nature of finitude itself. A world of finite things is, necessarily, a world in tension. Thus, for example, to achieve the perfection of knowledge, I must choose not to pursue an infinity of other possible goods; to have the pleasure of being in a given place, I must choose not to be in a thousand other places; my having a particular job implies that dozens of others, who wanted the same job, are disappointed; in order that I might live, plants and animals must die; etc. The point is that evil seems to be a regrettable, but necessary, product of finitude, an unavoidable element of creatureliness. In the light of this clarification, we can better understand God’s “permission” of evil to bring about a greater good. It is not as though God arbitrarily decides to “allow” suffering and darkness (as if he could have avoided it); rather, in deciding to create, in deciding to make a finite world at all, God accepted the inevitability of conflict and evil. Thus, even with regard to the unspeakable horror of the Holocaust, one is obliged to say, however painfully, that God permits this monstrous abuse of free will in order to allow free will itself to exist.
An image that has helped me understand this great mystery—and one that is reverenced by our tradition—is that of the parent. When a mother decides to bring a child into the world, she must, if she is at all reflective, feel in advance the myriad pains that her son or daughter will inevitably suffer. She knows that her child will be frequently disappointed, will endure insults and barbed remarks, will become at various times terribly sick, will perhaps lose a beloved wife or friend, will, in short, face all of the enormities and calamities of a normal human life. Yet she decides to give birth. Why? Because she is convinced that the beauty and ecstasy of human life is worth all of this unavoidable suffering. She permits this evil in order that the greater good of life itself might be realized. The creator God is father and mother, author of life and being. Does God weep in the face of the pain of his creation? Undoubtedly yes. But like the good parent, God permits this negativity that the beauty of creation itself might emerge. With resignation and, we can imagine, a certain anguish, God accepts the evil that will inevitably follow from the decision to create.
Thomas’ example of the lion devouring its prey illustrates not only the conflictual nature of finitude but also the relativity of evil. The blessing for the lion—finding and consuming food to preserve its life—is an unspeakable curse for the poor antelope or wildebeest that it eats. It is easy to forget this principle, especially when it comes to evils that we human beings suffer. Thus, we speak, legitimately, of the terrible negativity that is cancer, but we overlook the fact that this evil appears so only for us and from our perspective. Though it sounds ludicrous, it is correct to say that, while the cancer cells are destroying a healthy human body, they are, from their point of view, flourishing. And the great goods (from our perspective) of cancer surgery or chemotherapy are (from the perspective of the tumor) unmitigated evils. Similarly, the earthquake, which levels a city and takes thousands of lives, is from the geological standpoint simply a release of pressure, an inevitable and in itself harmless process of nature.
Now, these observations are not meant to deny the power and horror of the evils we suffer, but they are intended to place evil itself in a broader, indeed cosmic, perspective. Thomas seems to be urging us to see good and evil not simply from our narrow human angle but, as far as we can, from God’s all-embracing perspective:
To those . . . who estimate things, not by the nature thereof, but by the good they themselves can derive therefrom, everything that is harmful to themselves seems simply evil. For they do not reflect [on the fact] that what is in some way injurious to one person, to another is beneficial, and that even to themselves the same thing may be evil in some respects but good in others.25
Interestingly, the spiritual strategy here is very similar to that employed by Yahweh in the book of Job. Overwhelmed, understandably, by his terrible personal sufferings, Job cries out to God to justify himself, to make sense of what appears to Job as meaningless and undeserved pain. Speaking out of the desert whirlwind, God does not address himself directly to Job’s suffering or his moral dilemma. Rather, he presents a magnificent catalogue of his strangest and most impressive natural creations, drawing special attention to the Leviathan, the monster that patrols the depths. In a word, Yahweh expands the consciousness of Job, forcing him out of his constrained and anthropocentric take on his suffering. He compels his servant to understand what is happening to him against the backdrop of the infinite and mysterious cosmos that is, as much as Job himself, part of God’s concern. To be sure, neither the author of the book of Job nor Thomas Aquinas is denying the intensity of personal suffering, but both, it seems to me, are inviting the sufferer to a more Godlike vision of suffering itself.
Toward the end of his early novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce presents a lively conversation between the protagonist, Stephen Dedalus, and his friend Lynch. What the two brilliant Irish students discuss is something we might not expect. They are engaged in a detailed analysis of Thomas Aquinas’ doctrine of beauty.26 This scholastic understanding of the beautiful was to have a lifelong influence on Joyce, expressing for him his deepest sense of vocation and purpose. The medieval theologian articulated for the twentieth-century novelist the ideal that would preoccupy and fascinate him for the whole of his life: noticing and describing epiphanies, moments when the beautiful shines forth in its peculiar clarity and power.
More often than not, Aquinas discusses the beautiful in the context of creation and God’s purpose in creating. One of his favorite descriptions of the Creator God—one that appears throughout his writings—is that of God as artist or craftsman, and one of his most consistent images for the created realm is that of artifact or beautiful object. As we saw above, Thomas is well aware of the corruption and ugliness that can invade God’s creation, but he was fully convinced that not even the greatest darkness could mar the underlying beauty, order, and harmony that he perceived and celebrated everywhere in the universe. I would like, then, to complete this study of Thomas’ creation doctrine by looking closely at the topic of beauty, a subject too often overlooked in more rationalist considerations of the Angelic Doctor.
What is it that compels us to call something “beautiful”? For Thomas, it is not simply a question of subjective impression or private opinion. There is, he thinks, an objectivity to beauty; there is something in an object or person that calls out to us and captivates us. He describes the nature of the beautiful in various ways in his writings, but the qualities that he most commonly specifies as essential to beauty are consonantia (harmony) and claritas (luminosity).
He shows in what the ratio of beauty consists, adding that God so hands on beauty, inasmuch as he is the cause of the consonance and clarity in all things: for thus we call a man beautiful, on account of seemly proportion in quantity and position and on account of the fact that he has a clear and shining color. Whence it must be received proportionally in the rest of things, that each is called beautiful according as it has clarity of its kind, whether spiritual or bodily, and according as it is constituted in due proportion.27
When the harmony of a thing becomes luminous, when its inner coherence and organization shine forth, the beautiful emerges. Thus, a natural scene—say a mountain view—is particularly beautiful when the arrangement of shapes and textures and the play of colors is strikingly harmonious and pleasant to contemplate. Some months ago, I was watching a football game on television, and the camera caught a burly lineman standing along the sidelines, having just come out of action. His jersey was ripped, there was mud and blood on his face, his hair was wildly unkempt, and his battered helmet was held jauntily under his arm. As he contemplated this figure, one of the announcers said, “Now, there’s a beauty!” At first, I was taken aback at this rather surprising comment, but then I realized that his reaction was perfectly understandable in light of Aquinas’ principles. For what he saw in that disheveled lineman was a luminous coming together of those qualities of courage, physical strength, and reckless abandon that for him define a football player. That announcer was held in what James Joyce, following Thomas Aquinas, called aesthetic “arrest,” a state of enraptured wonder.28 It is this condition of the soul that is produced by the light and harmony of the beautiful.
Thomas’ basic attitude in the presence of God’s creation is one of aesthetic arrest. He seems perpetually overwhelmed, entranced by the order and harmony, by the brilliant organization that surrounds him. Indeed, one of the surest signs of the divine presence is just this stunning beauty:
Suppose a person entering a house were to feel heat on the porch, and going further, were to feel the heat increasing, the more he penetrated within. Doubtless, he would believe there was a fire in the house, even though he did not see the fire that must be causing all this heat. A similar thing will happen to anyone who considers this world in detail: he will observe that all things are arranged according to their degrees of beauty and excellence, and that the nearer they are to God, the more beautiful and the better they are.29
What this charming quotation shows is Thomas’ appreciation of the dizzying display of beauty and light (as well as heat!) that appears when one simply opens one’s eyes and looks. The universe is, as John Calvin put it some centuries later, a theater for the glory of God.30 Though the full beauty of the producer is unavailable to us, increasingly intense signs of his artistic touch are visible everywhere on the stage and in the action of the play.
Though I will speak of it more thoroughly in the last chapter, it might be appropriate to say just a word at this point about contemplation. For Thomas Aquinas, the highest expression of the human soul, the greatest accomplishment of the human person, is contemplatio, a wonder-filled, ecstatic absorption in the beauty of God.31 It should be obvious that Aquinas’ attitude toward the created universe is contemplative. Unlike his modern successors, who will be concerned above all with the mastery of nature through knowledge, Thomas is a mystic, someone who gazes at the loveliness of the world in an attitude of prayer. For Thomas, the world in its totality is a sort of icon of the divine beauty, a mirror in which we see reflected some of the unbearable perfection of the divine being. Thus, the contemplation of the world constitutes a foretaste of the beatific vision, the blissful and unobstructed seeing of God, which is our fulfillment in heaven.
It is also through an appeal to beauty that Thomas endeavors to solve a problem that has vexed philosophers and theologians down through the ages—namely, why and how would the supremely one and simple God have given rise to a universe that is so wildly and richly pluralistic, so characterized by diversity and variety? Indeed, the ancient philosopher Plotinus maintains that the supremely unique God does not directly create the fantastically diverse world that we know. On the contrary, he does so through a hierarchy of intermediaries, which acts as a sort of buffer assuring that the splendid unity of the divine is not contaminated by contact with the grossly plural physical world.
Thomas Aquinas could not be in stronger disagreement with Plotinus on this score. As we have seen, the Creator God is intimately connected to each thing in the universe: he is the intimate source of the being of rocks as well as angels. God is not closer to any one creature than to another; rather, he is infinitely and equally close to them all. Thomas sees the plural universe not as something unworthy of God but rather as the explosive and creative expression of the wild fullness of the divine beauty:
Because his goodness could not be adequately represented by one creature alone, [God] produced many and diverse creatures, that what was wanting in one in the representation of the divine goodness might be supplied by another. For goodness, which in God is simple and uniform, in creatures is manifold and divided, and hence the whole universe together participates in the divine goodness more perfectly and represents it better than any single creature whatever.32
Why does God continually create the billions of stars, the eerie vastness of interstellar space, the myriad cratered moons, the thousands of species of fish, the infinitely varying winds, the stunning range of colors in the wings of birds, the countless single-celled organisms, the almost frightening complexity of a single human brain? And why did God once give rise to civilizations come and gone, to the ferocious and magnificent Tyrannosaurus Rex, to the beautiful plants now remembered only through fossils? Why does God make the sun to rise again and again? Because he is an extravagant child who never tires of play. Or to use Andrew Greeley’s even more apt metaphor, because he is a teenager caught up in the sheer exuberance of his creativity and sense of the possible.33 Why does a teenager dye her hair in outlandish colors and wear clothes that shock the members of polite society? For much the same reason, I imagine, as God creates toucans and giraffes: for the fun of it—and perhaps even for its shock value.
In more Thomistic language, God engages in this explosive and irrepressible creativity because he is determined to show, as fully as possible, some of the intensity of his own beauty. No one creature could ever demonstrate the splendor of God; indeed, no million or trillion creatures could do so. But God never tires of trying. God is like a concentration of pure light that—in creation—passes through a prism and is then reflected and refracted in a fantastic array of hues. Each creature is a piece of a mosaic designed to depict the fullness of the divine glory, a thread woven into a tapestry reflective of God’s beauty.
It is my conviction that Thomas Aquinas’ teaching on creation is, at the same time, the most powerful and most overlooked dimension of his doctrine. When we attend to him carefully on this score, we discover something marvelous and wholly unexpected: the basic energy of the created realm is a relationship of love. God continually pours out the gift of being, and the world is at every moment a sheer receptivity, an openness toward that gift. Human beings are in a privileged position because they are able to perceive and to celebrate this relationship that they are. Indeed, at the heart of the spiritual life, for Aquinas, is this struggle to see authentically who we are in relation to the God who perpetually offers us “newness of being.” When we realize, in imitation of Christ, that we are “nothing” in the presence of the creating God, we become “everything,” a full reflection of the divine glory. Sin is thus a sort of illusion, a stubborn clinging to falsehood, an insistence that we stand over and against God, the supreme being. Let go of yourself, implies Thomas, in an ecstatic acceptance of creatureliness, and you will find the security that you so long for. In the face of your greatest fears, give yourself away.
When we grasp the reality of creation, we see that the divisions between the “sacred” and the “profane,” between the holy and the secular are, for the most part, arbitrary and misleading. All reality is sacred, from the angels to subatomic particles, because all things are equally close to the creator God who dwells in every aspect of being. The sacramental imagination, which sees the divine lurking in every corner of the real, is fed and strengthened by the Thomistic doctrine of creation.
As we saw, even the profoundest expressions of evil cannot shake our confidence in this intoxicating vision. Though psychologically overwhelming, evil should never be spiritually debilitating, since we appreciate it against the ever-greater background of God’s gift of being. With eyes cleansed and purified by the revelation contained in Christ Jesus, we can see the divine beauty everywhere in creation; we can appreciate the light and harmony that are sacraments of the perfect luminosity and orderliness of the Creator God.
1. “German Sermon 52,” in Meister Eckhart: The Essential Sermons, Commentaries, Treatises, and Defense, trans. Edmund Colledge and Bernard McGinn (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist, 1981), 203.
2. Thomas Aquinas, Disputed Questions on the Power of God (hereafter, The Power of God) 1.1.
For a more recent translation of De potentia Dei that modifies the disputed question format to improve readability, see Thomas Aquinas, The Power of God, trans. Richard J. Regan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).
3. Thomas Aquinas, The Power of God 1.3.
4. The Power of God 1.3.
5. See, for instance, René Descartes, “First Letter to Mersenne” and “Second Letter to Mersenne,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. 3, The Correspondence, trans. John Cottingham et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 23–24.
6. See Wilhelm and Marion Pauck, Paul Tillich: His Life and Thought (New York: Harper & Row, 1976), 1:49.
7. Thomas Aquinas, The Power of God 3.1.
8. The Power of God 3.1.
9. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Divine Milieu, ed. and trans. Bernard Wall (New York: Harper Perennial, 2001), 30.
10. For a collection of works that explore his theological evolutionary vision, see Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Writings in Time of War, trans. René Hague (London: Collins, 1968). For his most mature articulation of his evolutionary cosmology, see Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man, trans. Bernard Wall (New York: Harper Perennial, 1959).
11. For a classic expression of this critique, see Henri de Lubac, The Mystery of the Supernatural, trans. Rosemary Sheed (New York: Herder & Herder, 1967).
12. See, for instance, Paul Tillich, Theology of Culture, ed. Robert C. Kimball (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959), 41: “The universe is God’s sanctuary. Every work day is a day of the Lord, every supper a Lord’s supper, every work the fulfillment of a divine task, every joy a joy in God. In all preliminary concerns, ultimate concern is present, consecrating them. Essentially the religious and the secular are not separated realms. Rather they are within each other.”
13. Thomas Aquinas, The Power of God 3.3.
14. Gerard Manley Hopkins, “God’s Grandeur,” in Ignatian Collection, ed. Holly Ordway and Daniel Seseske (Park Ridge, IL: Word on Fire Classics, 2020), 179.
15. Francis of Assisi, “The Canticle of Brother Sun,” in Francis and Clare: The Complete Works, trans. Regis J. Armstrong and Ignatius C. Brady (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist, 1982), 37–39.
16. Thomas Merton, Contemplative Prayer (New York: Image Books, 1996), 5–6.
17. Thomas Aquinas, The Power of God 3.6.
18. Summa theologiae 1.48.1.
19. See Hans Urs von Balthasar, Dare We Hope “That All Men Be Saved”? 2nd ed., trans. David Kipp and Lothar Krauth (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2014), 163–168.
20. G.K. Chesterton, “Tolerating Other Religions,” in Collected Works, vol. 29, The Illustrated London News: 1911–1913, ed. Lawrence J. Clipper (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1990), 500–503.
21. David Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, ed. Dorothy Coleman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 74.
22. Love and Death, directed by Woody Allen (Beverly Hills, CA: United Artists, 1975).
23. Thomas Aquinas, The Power of God 3.6 ad. 4.
24. Summa theologiae 3.1.3 ad. 3.
25. Summa theologiae 1.65.1 ad. 2.
26. James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Mineola, NY: Dover, 1994), 134–163.
27. Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on Dionysius’ On the Divine Names 4.5.339.
28. James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 148–149.
29. Thomas Aquinas, The Apostles’ Creed, in The Three Greatest Prayers: Commentaries on the Lord’s Prayer, the Hail Mary, and the Apostles’ Creed, trans. Laurence Shapcote (Manchester, NH: Sophia Institute, 1990), 13–14.
30. John Calvin, A Commentary on the Psalms of David 135:13–14, (Oxford: D.A. Talboys, 1840), 3:396.
31. See Summa theologiae 1-2.3.7 ad. 3, 1-2.3.5, and 2-2.180.4: “contemplation is the end of the whole human life.”
32. Summa theologiae 1.47.1.
33. See, for instance, Andrew M. Greeley, Sacraments of Love: A Prayer Journal (New York: Crossroad, 1994), 68.