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CHAPTER 3
CREATION
In the previous chapter I began to present in broad strokes the fundamental concepts that constitute the content of Christianity. First and foremost I began with the very concept of God, i.e., the Trinitarian life of God. I tried to demonstrate that God is intrinsically and formally constituted in a proceeding and processing way, i.e., proceeds to the constitution of his-ownnesses (let us not refer to persons in order to avoid a painful equivocation). God is not only three times his-own, but has three really different ways of being his-own. And these three really different ways co-exist in a unity of respectivity. In that unity of respectivity the very essence is constituted, that which the divine reality is, precisely in an intrinsic and formal unity.
Of this essence and this Trinitarian life I must review two ideas.
a) In the first place something quite obvious. The Father produces a second person, a second his-ownness, the Son, starting precisely from the fact that He has an intelligence and a will in which he has realized Himself as person. The priority of person over essence involves that, in this case, it necessarily has to be an intrinsically and constitutively open essence. {150} Open, in the first place and above all, to His own reality. It is important to underline this. Something similar to what happens in the case of man. That to which he is open as open essence is primarily and formally to his own reality. And man is open to the rest of the other things in the measure in which he is open to his own reality. This open essence is the one, which in its own aperture is constituting (sit venia verbo) the personal procession of the Son and the Holy Spirit. These processions constitute a Trinitarian life with a unity of respectivity purely personal, which is not a numerical unity, because that would be to admit in God four persons or to perforate the Trinity of the previous ones.
b) The personal life of God is a Trinitarian life. And that Trinitarian life has a formal characteristic, which is important I emphasize now, namely, eternity. It is said eternity is something, which has no beginning or end, which is doubtlessly true. Eternity has no beginning or end. However, in order that this lack of beginning or end truly be eternity, it has to emerge and be constituted by the characteristics that constitute the manner of being of the reality which is eternal. Eternity is a modal concept, it is not a temporal concept, not even of an infinity of time. That would be quite absurd. Because of this I have always insisted in my seminars that God, instead of calling Him eternal (Sp. eterno), He should be called the eternal (Sp. eternal). Something essential, as we shall presently see. It is a modal concept of the life of God, of His manner of being. It is the eternity, something completely different from eternity understood as something with a very long duration with no termination at all.
Nevertheless, this Trinitarian concept of God is not made for only speculating. It is a question of seeing in this Trinitarian structure (sit venia verbo) of God the formal anchor for the reality of the world, the reality of man, and the reality {151} of the entire religious life of man. Therefore, we have to move from what the concept God is in Christianity to what the concept of the world is, to whatever is not God. With a not too felicitous Spanish expression I called this mundology, in contradistinction to what the other was, strictly and formally speaking, a theology. And the first thing we have to say about this mundology is that the world is founded in God, i.e., that God is creator of the world. This is what has to be explained in some detail.
Man really and intellectively accesses God, as I have shown elsewhere, not the Triune God, but God in general, as the one God by a way I call the way of transcendence. It starts from the world and from that world it departs to reach a transcendent terminus, which is God1. Now we have to traverse the way of transcendence not only in a different direction (which is obvious), but also with a characteristic all its own. In the same manner that the way of transcendence leads to a God transcendent to the world, analogously, the concept of creation is a concept that opens a way where the terminus is a world transcendent to God. Not only is God transcendent to the world, but the world is transcendent to God. This is what, in a somewhat vague fashion needing explanation, we call creation.
Therefore, we must ask the following.
§ 1. What do we mean by creation?
§ 2. Is creation a univocal concept or are there different modes of creation from the part of God? It would seem fitting that theology should have taken account of this.
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§ 1
WHAT IS CREATION?
In the previous chapter I pointed out that every reality, by the mere fact of being real and by its own characteristic of reality is active not only in itself, which is quite evident, but in addition by itself. Ostensibly the activity is not different from reality. Reality is formally, and qua reality, active by itself. Therefore, reality is formally and constitutively a “giving of itself”. In the case of God this giving of itself is eminent, mysterious, and supreme. It is the giving of Himself in the form of the Trinitarian processions. Of course, this is not what occurs in creation. But in creation there is a strict giving of itself. God gives of Himself the reality of what is not He, and that is precisely the world.
What is to give of itself? At first glance it would appear that to give of itself consists in what ordinary people say (not only ordinary people, but also even the Old Testament) that God “makes” the world. Is this concept of God as maker of the world sufficient? Certainly not. God is more than the maker of the world. Because the world can be made in many ways. At any rate, the question clearly involves making the world. We shall immediately see that the Yahwist account of creation (Gn 2:4b ff.) is based precisely on the idea of making (Hb. ‘asah), “God Yahweh made” (Gn 2:4). Quite different and apparently more profound, but in the end purely chimerical, is the concept of creation held by the gnosis and all the emanations of antiquity. For them creation, the making, would be probolé, that God throws out of Himself {153} a portion of His own reality so that with it the world may be constituted. Needless to say the Church reacted vigorously against this idea of probolé, which has not survived outside Gnosticism except in certain forms more or less vague of metaphysical pantheism. Creation is not a mere making, but also it is not a probolé, an emanation.
It is not an action, and it is not an emanation, but it is a rigorous creation, i.e., an action that establishes a reality transcendent to God, who is the one that performs the creative act. And as usual when someone produces something, that something did not exist previously. It is a creation ex nihilo sui, as the theologians would say. But in addition they would say ex nihilo subjecti. Because all actions, as sublime as they might be, which man performs with a creative characteristic are actions performed upon a previous subject; expressed in common language, upon previous materials. Hence, God not only performs the act of creation from Himself without probolé or without any alteration, but in addition produces something, which is not Him, an otherness, for which there is no prior reality outside the very action of God. An action, which constitutes an otherness without any alteration: that is the formal definition I would propose for creation. The creation of a world transcendent to God means that a reality (an otherness) is established without any alteration, neither from the part of the reality, which performs it (God is not a subject), nor from the part of the terminus brought forth.
[And creation has two moments. In the first place, the terminus of the creative act is precisely the real, insofar as it is real. That is to say reality qua reality. And we refer to this reality as a reality other than God. Because, in the second place, this otherness is an otherness, which is not made departing from any departing point. And this action, in addition, {154} does not involve any alteration on the part of God. Hence, this otherness of the real without alteration is what we actually call a production of the real insofar as real, and that is in what creation consists.]2
However, this is what we must analyze more concretely. Because, against all appearances, creation is not an abstraction made for metaphysicians, but something supremely concrete. We have to ask two questions.
I. In the first place, What is the formal characteristic, in itself, of what we call the creative act of God?
II. And, in second place, let us venture into what we might call, although the term is quite fashionable these days, the structure of the creative act.
I. The formal characteristic of the creative act
In the first place, In what does the creative act consist in itself? Of course, since God is an absolutely absolute reality, He is not only a real thing, but is the reality in the most intrinsic and fullest sense of the term. This means that the transcendence of His terminus, the otherness he has established, is the otherness of the real insofar as real. This is what formally constitutes creation. It is precisely the establishment of the otherness of the real insofar as real, without any alteration of the reality that establishes it.
This is what the common saying expresses by saying that God makes things “out of nothing”. A completely equivocal term or expression because nothing, by the fact of being nothing, does not {155} even have a “from”. What it wishes to expresses is simply that there is no prior subject, something generally well known.
With creation from nothing the horizon of thought has changed completely. Until now thinking had moved in a reality that first had one form and then had another; that can make new things, but makes them by changing what they previously were. Now, on the other hand, a completely new horizon suddenly appears. From this point of view the first thing a theologian will think is that whatever the world may actually be, what has to be recognized first is that it was possible for it not to have been brought into existence3. To the horizon of motion, which constitutes Greek reason is here juxtaposed (I use the term “juxtaposed” in an external, but important manner) the horizon of nihilism, the horizon of creation and nihilism. A most serious task and full of complications. Because from the moment in which this horizon of nihilism has been established and juxtaposed to the horizon of Greek reason, which looks at things from the point of view of motion, i.e., from what they are now and were not before, it then appears that nothingness is precisely not-being. That things are precisely entities. And then that God, who makes them, is the subsisting Being.
However, it seems to me that these three observations are completely false. This is what I have called the entification of reality. Reality is a reality that did not exist before, a reality {156} that is established by the reality of God, who is the absolute and full reality. This is all absolutely true. But it is a nihilum of reality, not a nihilum of being. And to have identified being with reality (the entification of reality) has been precisely the great task that has given birth (and in which it has been moving through successive stages) to the whole of western metaphysics. Reality cannot be entified neither from the part of the reality we see, finite reality, because prior to being there is reality (being is a subsequent act of the real4), nor from the part of God who is beyond being.
Creation, viewed from this point of view, is something supremely concrete. And precisely because it is something supremely concrete, we must not be distracted by what is said when we refer to God as creator. We can say that God is creator and expand on the ideas I have just presented in an apparently rough and unfinished way, or it can be done with perfectly adjusted metaphysical concepts. In both cases it is necessary to formally distinguish between what is said and what is ultimately meant to be said. And what is meant to be said is exactly the same, whether it is affirmed that God has formed man from the dust of the Earth or whether it is affirmed that creation is to establish the other without alteration of the creator. What I have just said is an allusion to the Biblical account of creation. And this Biblical account is full of concepts, images, and reflections that no one would accept today. No doubt. On the other hand, what it means to say is purely and simply what can be said, is wished to be said, and is actually said by the most expert theologian.
{157} The fact is that the Bible does not have one creation account, but two. That is the problem. These two Biblical accounts certainly come from two authors, and in addition they are written four or five centuries apart. The oldest one is the Yahwist account (Gn 2:4b ff.) written approximately during the time of Solomon, therefore towards the X century B.C. The first chapter of Genesis, better known, is written by the author of the so-called priestly code, written around the time of the captivity, approximately in the VI century B.C. They are evidently two sources, as it is well known. But the fact that a redactor has conflated the sources into a more or less continuous account involves, from my point of view, a more serious problem. Because the Yahwist account of creation presents God as a maker. But the source of the first chapter takes a further step, and presents God as creator. That is what we covered in the history of monotheism5. During the time of the monarchy Yahweh appears as the one only God because He is the one that has made the world facing all the astral religions, and all the gods of the surrounding empires. But only in the time of the Maccabees, as a consequence of a priestly reflection that stems from the exilic era there appears the expression oúk ex ónton epoíesen autá ho Theós (“God did not make them out of existing things”) (2 Mc 7:28). God is not simply maker, but maker in a concrete manner, from nothing. This internal evolution of the concept of God is essential to our problem.
A) It will suffice to review the successive steps of these two creation accounts. Let us begin with the oldest, the Yahwist account, which presents God as maker. Maker of what? Of everything. The account begins with a temporal phrase: {158} “when Yahweh ’Elohim made the heavens and the earth...”. It is an expression that means everything; it refers to the totality of the real as known by a man of that time. “The heavens and the earth” is the most common expression to refer to everything there is.
Here surfaces not only Yahweh, but Yahweh ’Elohim. This has always been a problem to exegetes. Why juxtapose here the name of ’Elohim, which is the God of the Patriarchs and later the name of God in the first chapter of the priestly code, with the name of Yahweh, which is the name of God installed by the religion of Moses, and the name par excellence of the whole Israelite religion? It has been said that it is probably a case of trying to identify the Yahwist with the Elohist traditions. Certainly, this is not the only place where this happens in the Old Testament, but it has always made me reflect. Sometimes, the idea has occurred to me, while thinking about the name of Jacob, that the case might be different. This name appears in its oldest form in cuneiform texts discovered in Mesopotamia a few years ago, as Ia-ah-qú-ub-’El, which probably means “God has protected me”. Here the term ’El appears, which has been omitted afterwards. One wonders if in Gn 2:4 we might have had originally the oldest version of the name of Yahweh, ’El-Yahweh, Yahweh is God or God is Yahweh, and that is what would have facilitated the conversion of ’El into ’Elohim, and the nominal identification of Yahweh with the ’Elohim of the Patriarchs and the priestly code.
We are told this Yahweh ’Elohim is maker, using the verb ’asah, which in Hebrew means “to make” in the most common sense of the term. God is maker of everything. However, what He makes has a second moment with which the priestly text will coincide. God makes a terminus, which is not too desirable and needs further {159} interventions by God. The world, as it has appeared in a first creative act from the hands of God, is simply something not viable. The very text tells us that when such a world was created there was no grass because there was no rain (Gn 2:5). A terrible history, total drought, it is the vision a man from the steppes has of creation. Not only is there no grass, but there is no man to cultivate the fields. This leads to the inexorable necessity that after the production of something totally not viable, several distinct acts of creation must follow to make it viable. And here these acts of creation are four, concretely and in succession.
1) The first thing He makes is man, provided not with a body and soul (as it is usually mentioned), but with body and life, something quite different. Let us not confuse the species, as the medieval logicians said.
2) Afterwards, in a second act, He creates an enclosed demarcated territory. The Septuagint called it parádeisos, ’edæn the Hebrew text says (cf. Gn 2:8). This is the paradisiac state. These men imagined that what comes out of the hand of God not only is good, but in addition is paradisiac. It is the case of a purely imaginative conception.
3) This paradise is full of those things that constitute the paradise of every nomad lost in the desert, trees and water. Four rivers difficult to identify by name spring out like fountains and trees, etc. God makes man give names to these realities. The name for a primitive man is precisely the possession of the nature of things. For man to give adequate names to all these realities means more or less that he exercises dominion over all of them.
4) But this man is alone. Then come the famous dream of Adam and the creation of Eve from one of his ribs, a {160} purely symbolic thing, which has had thousands of interpretations, which we do not need to remember at this moment.
In such fashion, creation is the production on the part of God of something that in the beginning is not viable, and through posterior interventions becomes viable thanks to the presence of man and thanks to the presence of humidity and the fertility of the land. Before commenting on this we need to turn to the priestly text.
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1 Zubiri refers here to the first part of the 1971 seminar, the fundamental contents of which correspond to what was published in Man and God (El hombre y Dios).
2 The text between square brackets comes from another section of the same 1971 seminar.
3 Of course, this is a completely alien idea to the Greek world. However, this idea was able to absorb a good portion of Greek thought thanks to the idea of Logos expressed in the New Testament, according to which (as we shall see) creation is made by one word. And in this Logos there was precisely the possibility to introduce Greek thought, with greater or lesser fortune, within the horizon of creation. This presented a great risk, which from my point of view has constituted one of the great limitations of western metaphysics, which is to interpret reality as if it were being, i.e., to entify the reality of things and God, who is called subsisting Being (Xavier Zubiri note).
4 Later on Zubiri will refer to being as “subsequent actuality” of the real, and not as subsequent act, cf. “La dimensión histórica del ser humano” (The historical dimension of the human being), in Realitas I, Madrid, 1974, p. 16.
5 Cf. X. Zubiri, The Philosophical Problem of the History of Religions, op. cit., pp. 222-224.