Creation
44. God as First Cause of All Things
1. Every actual reality, every existing thing, has its being either by necessity (and hence is necessary being, that is, God) or by participation, that is, by having its being given, imparted, or shared unto it. And that which has its being by participation must come, ultimately, from that which has its being by necessity. In other words, all creatures have their being, in ultimate analysis, from a direct act of God. God imparts or shares out being to creatures. God does not share or divide himself, for he is infinite and indivisible. God gives being directly by the act of creating. To create is to produce a thing in entirety out of nothing. All creatures have their first origin in creation.
2. Bodies are made up of two substantial elements, primal matter and substantial form. Primal matter has no proper existence of its own, but exists only in existing bodies; it cannot exist separately by itself, but only as in-formed by the substantial principle which makes a body an existing body of an essential kind; this constituting substantial principle is called substantial form. Primal matter is the common substrate of all existing bodies; it is that by which a body is bodily. Primal matter, though in all kinds of bodies and in each of every kind, has nothing in itself by which body is distinguished from body; for all bodies (mineral, vegetal, animal, human) are equally bodily things. Substantial form gives a body its existence in a specific or essential kind. Primal matter is the most imperfect of things, and yet it is a thing, it is a being, and, like all creatural things, it has being by participation. Hence primal matter has its first beginning in the act of God's creation. Primal matter is created by God. In creating bodies God creates their primal matter.
3. Things are of definite kinds; they are constituted according to some plan, model, or exemplar. As we have seen, all the exemplar ideas of creatable things are in God. Thus (since God's ideas or knowledge is identified with the divine essence) God himself is the exemplar of all things that have being by participation.
4. In creating things God does not act to acquire anything, for he is infinite and needs nothing, nor can he be in any way increased or made more excellent by acquiring anything. God creates to communicate his goodness. And creatures are made to manifest or acquire perfection in the likeness of God's goodness. Therefore the goodness of God is both the first effecting cause of things and the ultimate final cause (the end or goal) for which things are created.
45. How Things Come From God
1. The first beginning of things must be by total production out of nothing. All things, in final analysis, are created.
2. Things are coming into existence all the time; some, such as living things, come as the product of natural forces; some come as the products of man's activity and skill, that is, as products of art. But nature and art must have something to work upon; neither can give a completely first beginning. A living thing has something of itself, in germ or seed, derived from parent beings; nature develops this into the new living body. And a thing made by art (that is an artificial, as contrasted with a natural thing) is made of materials; thus a house is made of building materials; such materials are called the subject out of which the artificial thing is made. Thus nature and art require, for producing a new thing, either something of the thing itself, or some subject out of which the thing is to be made. But first beginning is absolute beginning; nothing of the thing to be produced exists; there is nothing either of itself or of a subject. Such first beginning is creation, which is defined as the producing of a thing out of nothing.
3. Creation, in God, is an act of infinite power. Creation, in the thing created, is a real relation to the Creator as the principle of creatural being.
4. God creates substances, and with them their accidentals. When God created the first man, Adam had a definite size, weight, shape, color, and so forth. These accidentals are said to have in-being rather than being, and they are cocreated with the substance in which they inhere. This explains their first beginning. Accidentals change according to what substances do or undergo, but their first origin must be in their coming along with the substance created.
5. Only absolute power can create; only the universal cause can produce the universal effect of being. Only infinite perfection can summon reality out of nothingness. Hence, only God can create. A creature cannot even serve as an instrument or ministering cause in the act of creating; for there is nothing, either of the creature to be produced or of any subject, upon which an instrument could be employed; there is nothing that a ministering cause could arrange or prepare or have at hand. Thus creation is an act proper to God alone.
6. Creation is not, strictly speaking, proper to any one Person of the Trinity; it is proper to the Trinity itself. Yet we may say that the creative act proceeds from the Father through his Word and through his Love, that is, from the Father through the Son and the Holy Ghost.
7. It is true that every maker leaves some sort of image of himself in what he makes, and in creatures there is a trace of the Trinity. In rational creatures (men and angels) there is the subsisting principle, the word of understanding, and the act of love proceeding from the will. In nonrational creatures as well as in rational creatures, there is that which exists, its kind by which it is distinct from other things, and its relationship to other things that sets and fits it in its order and place in the created world. Hence in every creature there is a trace, however imperfect and faint, of the Trinity.
8. Nature and art produce effects by using existing things. Creation is not mingled with nature and art, but is presupposed to them and to their activity. Creation gives first beginnings.
46. The Beginning of Creatures
1. Only God is necessarily eternal. Now, absolutely speaking, God could create from eternity, so that creatures should exist without a beginning. But God does not need to create from eternity, nor, for that matter, does God need to create at all. And in creatures we discover no reason for supposing that God has created from eternity.
2. By revelation (Gen. 1:1) we know that God's eternal will and decree to create are a will and decree to create in time. For, "In the beginning, God created heaven and earth. . . ." But apart from revelation and our faith, we cannot prove that the world did not always exist; that is, that God did not create from eternity. But we can prove that even a beginningless world is a created world, a caused world. For eternal matter, if it existed, would not be causeless matter; it would still have being by participation and not by necessity.
3. God created in the beginning of time. Time itself came into existence with the creation of things.
47. The Distinction of Things
1. It is not true that God created the bodily world as a mass of matter which somehow has worked itself out into the many individual things and kinds of things which we find about us. Both distinction of things and multitude of things come from God. In creating, God communicates his goodness; creatures are to represent and manifest the divine goodness. And goodness, which in God is simple, in creatures is diversified; what phase of the divine goodness one creature fails to represent, may be represented by another. The whole multiple and varied universe manifests the divine goodness more perfectly than any single creature could do.
2. The variety of things in the created universe involves inequality in things. Mineral bodies, plant bodies, animal bodies, human bodies, are not on a level except in bodiliness. There is an arrangement in them, a series of degrees of excellence or perfection. The universe would not be so perfect if only one grade of being or goodness were found in creatures. Hence the inequality of things is from the Creator.
3. The world of creatures shows a marvelous unity and order. It is one world. A number of worlds, separate and wholly unrelated, would not be such a manifest work of divine Wisdom as one world, multiple and various, yet beautifully harmonious.
48. The Distinction of Good and Evil
1. One opposite is known through the other, as, for instance, darkness is known through light. Evil is known through goodness, for evil is the privation of good. Evil is not a thing, an essence, a nature in itself; it exists by way of defect or failure in natures. Being as such is good; it is where being breaks off, or fails to be, that evil appears.
2. Evil is found in things in the world, just as inequality is found there. Inequality means that more perfect things should not lose their existence and less perfect things should lose their existence, and loss of existence is an evil. In a world in which there are things that can be broken up and changed and things that can die, it is manifest that there is evil.
3. The subject of evil is the thing in which evil exists. Now, evil is found in things, and things as such are good. Hence, the subject of evil is good. Not every absence of good is an evil, but only the absence of that good which the perfection of a thing demands. Thus the absence of life is not an evil in a stone, for the nature of a stone does not require life; absence of life is an evil for plant, animal, or man. Thus also blindness, or absence of the power to see, is an evil for a man, but not for a plant. In a word, evil is an absence which deprives the thing in which it exists (its subject) of a perfection that ought to be there; evil is a privation of good. And its subject is good.
4. Evil which is failure, defect, or absence in the structure or processes of a thing, is called physical evil. Hunger, death, blindness, are examples of physical evil, as are lameness, deformity, injured members. Evil which is defect and failure of a free will to measure up to the standard of what its conduct should be, is moral evil; moral evil is sin and such imperfection as approximates to sin. Evil destroys good in the precise point in which it negates good, or deprives the subject of good, but otherwise it does not destroy good. The evil of sickness destroys health, but not the possibility of recovery by medical cure or by miracle. Mortal sin destroys the spiritual good of the soul, but does not destroy the aptitude of the soul for regaining grace.
5. In human experience evil takes the form of pain or fault. Evil is something that hampers and hurts, or it is a defection of the will by sin.
6. Man's greatest natural good is found in the proper use of his free will. Failure here is fault. Fault is failure in the greatest good; therefore, fault has more of the nature of evil than has pain or penalty.
49. The Cause of Evil
1. Only good can be a cause, for only good has the positive being which is necessary in a cause. Therefore, the cause of evil is good; not, indeed, by the essence of natural bent of good, but accidentally. When a cause of itself tends to produce an effect, it is called the direct or the per se cause of that effect. And when a cause, acting per se to produce its effect, incidentally (or, in the old term, accidentally) produces another effect, this other effect is produced per accidens or accidentally, and the cause is called the per accidens or accidental cause of that effect. Thus a cow cropping grass is acting per se to nourish its own life; incidentally or per accidens it destroys the grass. Even sin is the defect, rather than the effect, of free will, which is good in itself, and which acts for apparent good even in sinning. The sinner is like a hungry person who bites into a piece of wax fruit; what he is after is good, but he fails to find the good he is after. Unlike the man who bites wax fruit, the sinner is not merely the victim of a mistake, for the sinner knows better, if only he would consider; the sinner's judgment is perverse, and hence he is guilty of fault. But the point is that what he wants per se is good; he causes evil per accidens in his quest for good. Evil, therefore, has no direct or per se cause, but only an accidental cause, a cause per accidens. And it is good which, acting per accidens, is the cause of evil.
2. In willing the order of the universe, God wills the existence of some things that endure and of other things that pass away. The evil of passing away, of losing existence, is accidental to the order of the universe, which is good. Thus God wills physical evils per accidens inasmuch as these are incidental to the working of good. But God wills no evil per se. And God does not will moral evil either per se or per accidens.
3. There is no supreme evil principle which is the source of all evil things. The old oriental doctrine of two supreme principles, one good and the other evil, is absurd. For first of all, there cannot be more than one supreme being. Secondly, as we have seen, the subject of evil is good; we have also seen that the cause of evil is good in itself and only accidentally the producer of evil. Besides, as Aristotle says, if there were a supreme evil, it would destroy itself, for, having destroyed all good (which it must do to be supreme evil), it would have destroyed all being, including its own being.