{174} (cont’d)

A) What is creation from the part of God?

What creation may be from the part of God is reduced, from my point of view, to three fundamental concepts each one founded on the previous.

{175} In the first place, creation has a formally processional characteristic; it is a vital act of God. Theology has denied many times the vital characteristic of the creative act. The creative act is a formally vital act, which belongs to that activity in which the reality of God as a giving of Himself consists, the processionality, the ekpóreusis.

In the second place, the creative action is an ecstatic action; it places outside of God something that is not God.

And in third place, it is not only ecstatic, but in that ecstasy it is possible to express an internal characteristic of the reality that God is, His own infinitude.

Processionality, ecstasy, and infinitude are the three concepts, which from my point of view define the type of creative act from the part of God. What are these three moments? That is the question.


I. In the first place, the vital characteristic of the creative act. It is an act that in one form or another belongs to the activity in which God consists. This activity insofar as plenary and absolute reality is formally processional. The creative act is processio, a procession. However, it is not a Trinitarian procession. That is where the question begins.

1) We considered while discussing the Trinity that the Father is the fountain, the arché, and the principle of the whole Trinitarian reality. In the end what monotheism has of mónos, in the sense of an arch-mónos or first principle, comes from the Father and not from the divine essence as Latin theology thought. But, actually, we have to take into account the personal reality; the unity of the Trinity comes precisely from the Father. In the Son we have a second his-ownness that is the real truth of what the Father is. And in the Holy Spirit we have the ratification, by way of identity, between what that truth is and what reality is. It is the Spirit of Truth.

{176} This has supreme importance in our endeavor. It is true that creation proceeds from the ecstatic characteristic of the reality that God is, and from some internal qualities of infinitude that God has. However, in a certain way, what mobilizes (sit venia verbo) the divine essence to be creative is the very characteristic that this essence has, insofar as actual, in the three divine persons. That is what is distinctive. God does not create as if he were not Triune. That is absurd. The Father as principle of the Trinity is also radical and personal principle of everything that is not God himself. And in this sense the divine essence, insofar as belonging to the Father as his very his-ownness, is that to which creation has to be referred in the last instance.

But only in the last instance. One friend of mine, Abbot of Silos, used to say that after his death he would present “amiable objections” to the eternal Father. I would present “amiable questions”. Because, What is it actually that an infinite essence (God) can create? The answer is that it can create an infinity of possible things, which can in one form or another emerge from what is the unfathomable richness of the divine esence. And so, the veritative actuality of all these dimensions is precisely the real truth of the Father, i.e., the person of the Son. Consequently the Father creates, but formally through the Son. It is precisely the expression of St. Paul and St. John, everything has been created by Him, by the Word (cf. 1 Co 8:6; Jn 1:3). Creation is the work of the Father through the Word.

The Father has created through the Word, but that creation has to be put into action. And the action of that creation is rooted precisely in that which constitutes the pure act in which the divine reality consists, namely, the Holy Spirit itself.

Creation is a kind of mobilization of the divine essence for the procession of creatures ad extra of the Father through the {177} Son in the Holy Spirit. Creation has a formally Trinitarian structure. This procession ad extra has a profound homology with what the Trinitarian processions are. When dealing with the Trinity I insisted that the constitution of the divine essence itself as a pure act is the precipitate (sit venia verbo) of the personal processions in which the Trinity as such consists. It is not a point of departure, but the precipitate of the very processional and personal life of God. In the end, God as reality, as pure act, that which answers to the question of “what” is God, is constituted as precipitate of the three “who’s”, which in a respective unity constitute the Trinitarian life of God.

However, that is not the case of the world. But the world is certainly the transcendent precipitate of an immanent vital process from the part of God. Inasmuch as the Trinitarian processions are processions within the depths of God, they decant this reality, which the reality of God is. Inasmuch as there is a procession, which produces things ad extra, this Trinitarian procession decants in one form or the other the reality of things, the essence of all of them outside God. Just as in the Trinitarian processions the infinite essence of God is constituted, also that way in the creative procession the finite essence of things is constituted. In the end, it is the case that the divine essence is not what things are, but rather that the very finite essence of created things realizes ad extra, in one form or another, a procession in God.

The whole problem now is to indicate what this procession is. Here is where the difficulties begin.

a) In the first place, this procession is the procession of an otherness. It consists in producing a thing other than God, something that does not occur in the Trinitarian processions. If that were so, it would be {178} an absurd tritheism. The case here is that it may produce something that is not God. It is a procession of otherness, and therefore, it cannot be the very generating procession by which the Father engenders the Son, or the spiring procession by which the Holy Spirit is spired by the Father and the Son in a reversion of identity to the very reality of God. If it were so it would be an enormous pantheism. This is what Hegel thought with all his dialectic power, which also incorporated its extreme weakness and greatest error. The procession of otherness is not generating or spiring. It is something that can be called an initiating procession. A procession in which nothing is generated and nothing is spired, but a reality is initiated. In other words, creation is an initiative of God. The Biblical text itself gives us the ground to think this way. It says, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness” (Gn 1:26). It is precisely the very expression of the act of initiation by God. In God, besides the two immanent processions, the generating and the spiring, there is a transcending procession, the initiating one.

b) This procession is absolutely essential. It is not the case that God essentially had to create the world. What is true is that it is absolutely essential for God to have been able to create it even if He had not created it. Otherwise, He would not be God. With the same necessity or at least with the same unquestionableness that God has Trinitarian processions He also has creative capacity, with or without activating it. Creation is not only an essential procession in God, but this essential procession has a special characteristic. Clearly, God might have not created, but even if He does not it is essential to God because it is founded on the Trinitarian processions. It is a procession that is transcendent, but as act it is certainly immanent. It is an act proper to the divine life, which is founded precisely in what He is as constituted {179) by the Trinitarian processions. In other words, the procession of otherness, insofar as it is initiating is, not constitutively, but intrinsically and essentially a consequence of the very reality of God.

2) Of course, now we immediately have a second question. Creation is a procession of otherness insofar as initiating, as long as we are told in what that divine initiation consists. We should have thought of this. It is not the case that theology has not thought of many of the things I am going to mention. But one thing is to think the theology in terms of causality, and another to think it in terms of initiative. The question is more than nominal.

a) In the first place, it would be absurd to think that God takes initiatives. That is absurd. God does not take initiatives at all. Neither in the order of redemption, nor in the order of justification, nor in any other order of action at all. God does not take anything, how would He? If God were to take, where would He take from? From what was not? Then, where is the divine simplicity? It is useless to follow this line of thought. Clearly, God does not take divine initiatives. God does not take initiatives. However, He does have initiatives, which is a different matter. God has initiatives; He is initiator and initiating without His initiative being taken by Him. If we eliminate what a human action has of performed action, and pay attention only to the activity by virtue of which something is initiated, this would be what in an analogous manner we would have to say about God. It is the only way we can think about God, i.e., by starting from ourselves and creation. Therefore, it is the case of an authentic divine initiative. An initiative that is initiating through that in which it consists, i.e., in being activity, in the giving of itself. God insofar as giving of Himself in this procession ad extra is precisely initiator and initiating. The divine initiative is not a taken initiative, {180} but an initiative that consists precisely in the active characteristic, which as absolutely plenary reality fits God, i.e., in His intrinsic, total, and plenary giving of Himself. God, therefore, does not take initiatives, but has initiatives in this sense, where having initiatives means to be initiator and initiating. This does nothing but constitute the first difficulty we have in this problem.

b) The second and internal difficulty is much more important. Because, certainly it is essential for God to be able to create, but it is not essential at all that He create. It was absolutely possible for God not to have created the world, which means that the divine initiative is a free initiative. Then the question is what is the freedom of God?

It is usual for us to see an election in liberty. Among several things that can be done I choose one. If God does not have to create necessarily, but in order to create He necessarily has to choose, the creative act would be a kind of second act in addition to those acts or that act in which the divine processions and the very reality of God consist. There never is a lack of dialectical subtleties to defend the apparently most untenable positions. Actually there have been theologians, with Cajetan at their head, that have held this opinion. Nevertheless, this is all quite chimerical from my point of view, as it is to the majority of theologians. How can it be proposed that the creative act is a second act with respect to what God is as pure act, and as primary and radical activity? It is not a second act. However, if it is not a second act the question remains that God might not have created. The question is not resolved, but now it has become more acute. Because, What does it mean that not being a second act, but being the very act in which God consists, and being the Trinitarian processions in which He subsists, God may be able not to create? It means, on the one hand, that creation {181} is not something necessary, and that since it was possible for it not to have existed, it is contingent.

c) Here is where the second level of the difficulty begins. How are necessity and contingency conjoined in God? Unless we think this is a problem presented in an exaggerated “Greek” way. Because we do say “the necessity of the Trinitarian processions in God”. Obviously, the Trinitarian processions are necessary. God could not have not engendered a Son and not spired a Holy Spirit. It goes without saying. However, is this something that is formally considered as part of the concept of what we metaphysically understand by necessity? The necessity of the immanent processions in God is something that is quite above all that we call physical and metaphysical necessity from the point of view of creatures. It is a necessity of a different order, without doubt something difficult to understand conceptually, like all things pertaining to God. Let us have the courage to say that the concept of metaphysical necessity coined by the Greek dialectics and metaphysics does not subsume the necessary characteristic with which God produces his Trinitarian processions. Let us suppose that actually God proceeds to determine his Trinitarian processions, not by that kind of internal fatality in which His being might consist through a kind of immanent law, but through the overflowing characteristic of that activity in which He actually consists. Obviously this concept of necessity has nothing to do with the Greek concept of necessity. From this follows that also, analogically, the concept of contingency cannot be applied to the creative act, except negatively. Indeed, God was able of not creating the world. But all things in the world resemble each other in “not being“. Elephants resemble pianos in not being able to climb trees. The metaphysical concept of the contingency of created reality is not applicable at all to the power of not creating residing in the divine creative act.

{182} The fact is that these two concepts lead us to something anterior to necessity and contingency. And for once, this most subtle commentator of St. Thomas, which Cajetan was, while dealing with a completely different matter, pointed to the notion that we needed to find an idea superior to necessity and contingency. He did not do it, but that is irrelevant because this is one of the great statements ever made in theology. Is there any doubt that we must decide to step (in the same manner we have stepped from being to the reality of God), from the necessity and contingency with which we conceive the realities of this world to something that is beyond necessity and contingency. Because actually the activity in which God consists, that internal activity of procession, is precisely effusion. It is an effusive activity.

In a certain way effusive love can be irremediable without ceasing to be love, and produces the Trinitarian processions. But it can have a different characteristic because the infinite love of God places its fruition on something that is much lower than Him. Liberty consists precisely on this. The same act that on one side is effusion towards the Trinitarian processions is, on the other, freedom to create. God is a giving of Himself that is effusive. And precisely because it is effusive the act of creation is not a second act added to the act with which God loves Himself. It is the very act with which God loves Himself insofar as He places that fruition in which love consists upon a reality that is inferior to the act of effusion. The reality of God is always above that which He loves. Naturally, theologians have also said that the freedom in which the creative act consists is terminatively unnecessary. But they have not positively explained in what that terminative characteristic consists, that it is the effusive characteristic of the very divine activity.

{183} The creative act is not a second act. It is purely and simply the same act of love in which He loves what He is effusively, as form of generation and spiration in the Son and the Holy Spirit. And in which He loves that which is not He in the form of an initiative quite superior to the love with which that initiative is initiating. This is precisely what we call gift, donation. The world, as creative terminus of God, is a donation in freedom, if you will, a liberal donation. This idea is going to be developed throughout the following chapters. And precisely because creation is an act of liberal donation, the attitude of man facing creation is univocally determined. It is precisely the human and anthropological correlate of donation, the oblation. The Genesis account itself tells us that God rested on the seventh day (cf. Gn 2:23). The idea of sabbatical rest is initiated, which is the first way to manifest the oblation. With this Christianity could face, for example, the second stage of the Brahmanic religion when the Brahmana say that the very essence of reality is sacrifice, sacrum facere. As a result they glanced on an essential point, but poorly understood. The oblational and oblatory characteristic reality has with man immersed in it.

As initiative the act of God is free because it deposits the effusion in which it formally consists on a reality that is infinitely inferior to His own. Or at least notoriously inferior to the divine reality itself. Metaphysicians easily say that there is an infinite distance between the created being and God. That is open to discussion. The distance between an ant and God is not infinite. It is the distance measured from an ant, something quite different. At any rate, the possibility that there may be a reality different from God in which God may deposit His effusion is precisely an effusion that is above the reality. God has not created the {184} world except for the most primary, ultimate and radical reason, which is precisely to give it reality, as we shall see. And inasmuch as this reality is finite the effusion of God that produces it is above what is created.

d) Many difficulties remain. It could be suggested that all this is fine, but that God was capable of not creating the world. That it may have been in an effusive manner or in any other, but that in God there is nothing but what is eternal. In that case, how is the initiating and initiatory characteristic of God conjoined with the eternal divine immutability?

In the first place (I say this not for clarifying the question, but indeed to bring it into focus and aim it properly, which is the only thing we humans can do when referring to God) I would eliminate the term “eternal”. The term “eternal” means that from the whole of eternity, from the unfathomable night of time, God has wished or not wished to create the world. And if at a certain moment He has created it, He has introduced in His duration a moment to produce the creation of the world. This is completely false, as I indicated above. God is not formally eternal (Sp. eterno) in this sense. God is the eternal (Sp. eternal). Everything that takes place in Him takes place with an eternal modality. The eternity is a modal concept, humanly speaking, of what the reality of God is, and not that something has no beginning or end. If He has no beginning or end it is because He is the eternal. It is not the case that He is eternal because he has no beginning or end.

God is the eternal. And the most temporal and most contingent reality of creation is lived by God eternally, which is a different matter. Thus, the creative initiative is an initiative lived in the mode of what God is, namely, eternally. For this reason, when dealing with the eternity of God we must always reason, as in all things, a posteriori. Our thought is that here we have a contingent reality, and God has known it for all {185} eternity. It all depends on what we mean “for all eternity”. The only thing we can say is that God knows it “eternally”. And since the consequence of the eternal is not to have beginning or end, in an incomprehensible manner we must say that this was always present in one form or another in the divine mind. Understanding this as a consequence of His eternality, and not the reverse, as if the eternity of God would then abolish the temporal characteristic of creation. After all, the divine intelligence needs a real object, even finite, in order to know it in its physical and real being.

Nevertheless, God lives the creative initiative eternally. The creative initiative is (humanly speaking) eternally lived by God. One could ask if God, before creation is an initiative from the point of view that He might not have created the world, knew He was going to actually create it. Some eminent theologian thinks He did. My point is not that God did not know it, but that I would give a different answer, the question makes no sense. The question makes no sense because creation is not an initiative taken by God, but is merely His internal and intrinsic effusion, that in which His transcendent and eternal giving of Himself consists. Because of this the divine initiative is a true initiative, however, it is lived eternally by God.

Therefore, from the part of God, creation is an immanent procession by a liberal donation that constitutes precisely the finitude of an essence in which the Trinitarian life is molded. But this is just the first of the three characteristics I was concerned with to conceptively apprehend creation.


II. The second characteristic proceeds exactly from that which the divine persons mobilize in order to have creation. Putting it roughly, the divine essence that God is has to {186} mobilize His intelligence and will. Of course, from the point of view of what God is, the divine essence is already an essence open to His own characteristic of reality. And here resides that numerical identity on which the foundation of the Trinitarian life consists, the Trinitarian processions in God. It is an open essence. To be open is what we call ecstasy, to be outside oneself. The divine essence is ecstatic. That is the second characteristic, which I consider important.

The divine essence as ecstatic essence is an open essence. And the open essence (leaving aside for the moment that it is open to its own Trinitarian processions, which we have already covered) is open to the initiating procession, to the creative procession. It could be remarked that this is just another way of saying what most of the theologians have said. For me that would not be an objection, just the opposite. That is the idea of the divine essence being imitable. The divine essence would be imitable in an infinite number of ways outside God, and that would constitute the terminus of that ecstatic action, and of that ecstatic characteristic of the divine essence. Beg indulgence to put this idea of being imitable in parenthesis. It is an absolutely Platonic idea inserted into theology. Not that I consider it an objection, but where does the imitation and the being imitable come from? This would be true if God were a being, but what if He is not? If God is not being, but is reality essentially real, a reality absolutely absolute? Then we would have to say that what constitutes the ecstatic characteristic of the divine essence is much more radical than a formal imitation, it is His intrinsic, metaphysical and theological fecundity.

The ecstasy of the open essence of God formally consists in the fecundity of the divine essence. This open essence in which God consists is first and above all open to His own reality, the characteristic of the Trinitarian processions. But {187} in second place, in it He is open to the whole of reality, precisely because of His own fecundity. And inasmuch as this fecundity is founded on the Trinity the road is now open for what we are going to show further on, namely, that the terminus of creation consists in the molding ad extra of the very Trinitarian life.