I have written on the topic of creation and various subtopics concerning creation a good number of times in this dispatch, both in its first life and in its more recent one. But as I find that questions about God inevitably lead to questions about the created world, I find it is helpful to have a touchstone piece available for how to think, metaphysically and cosmologically, about creation, in a single place, from the eclectic Christian perspective that I write from.
A brief recap: the Christian doctrine of God is that God is one ousia, “being” or “essence,” that subsists in three modes of consubstantial, coequal, and coeternal of concrete existence (tropoi hyparxeos) as the hypostases of Father, Son, and Spirit. For Christians, God by essence or nature (physis) is the One, Good, Beauty, Being, and Truth, Neoplatonically understood, the transcendent plenitude and union of these qualities, and is therefore logically simple, (qualitatively) infinite, and purely actual. And so, all three hypostases, all three modes of God’s concrete existence, interpenetrate and contain one another: the Father contains the Son and Spirit, and also infinitely empties himself into them in the generation of the Son and the spiration of the Spirit, such that to know the Father is to know him in and through the Son and by the Spirit; the Son contains Father and Spirit, and, eternally generated from the Father, receiving the Spirit from the Father, infinitely empties himself in returning the Spirit to the Father, such that to know the Son is to know the Father and the Spirit that they share; and the Spirit contains the Father and the Son, infinitely emptying himself into the giving and receiving between them, such that to know the Spirit is to know the Father and the Son. This is the only way to logically square the problem of having an infinite nature that is infinitely manifest in three distinct modalities, as otherwise there would be no logical distinction between them that we could name. And, as God knows God’s self, there is no such distinction, but only the one God declaring “I Am” or “I will be” (Exod 3:14) simultaneously in those three distinct modes. God is one infinite act of Being, one infinite act of Self-Knowing, and one infinite act of Self-Will, Yearning, and Love.
This doctrine of God, it seems to me, raises three related questions about creation. First, since the divine nature is infinite, how is creation able to exist? Second, since the divine nature is simple and purely actualized, and therefore susceptible to no change or deliberation (after all, God is an infinite act of Will corresponding to that which he Is and Knows), how is God able to create? And third, how does the created order relate to the divine hypostases—in what sense is it relevant that God as Father, Son, and Spirit is Creator?
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