Modern Theology 29:2 April 2013

ISSN 0266-7177 (Print)

ISSN 1468-0025 (Online)

CREATIO EX NIHILO RECOVERED

DAVID B. BURRELL, C.S.C.

Traditions need always to be recovered, it seems, as fresh perspectives

emerge to make traditional inquiries relevant, while critical reflection unveils
obstacles that have helped deny us access to those very resources. Modernity
found it necessary to render creatio ex nihilo obsolete. Kant’s strictures rein-
forced the predilections of scientific inquirers to relegate any discourse about
origins of the universe beyond the pale of responsible thought. We shall see,
moreover, that the very categories which philosophers of religion used to
characterize the relation between a putative creator and created things
proved unfit for the task, since they ipso facto presumed both creator and
creatures to be part of the universe. Let me offer a story to illustrate this
oxymoronic situation endemic to modern thought about these matters.

Philosophical Obstacles and Genealogy of Eclipses

Regularly teaching a course in ancient and medieval philosophy has led me
to identify the difference between these two periods quite clearly: the pres-
ence of a free creator is all important to medievals and almost entirely
neglected among the ancients. Jewish, Christian, and Muslim thinkers con-
verged in their efforts to find place for a free creator in the apparently
seamless Hellenic philosophy they inherited. (The observation of the distin-
guished interpreter of Aquinas, Josef Pieper, that “creation is the hidden
element in the philosophy of St. Thomas” should have alerted us decades ago
to this operative difference from Aristotle, yet many Thomists managed to
overlook it in their anxiety to demarcate philosophy from theology.1) Yet if we
can say, schematically, that the presence of a free creator divides medieval

David B. Burrell, C.S.C.

Hesburgh Professor emeritus of Philosophy and Theology, University of Notre Dame, Notre
Dame, IN 46556 USA
Email: [email protected]
1
Josef Pieper, The Silence of St. Thomas: Three Essays (New York, NY: Pantheon, 1957).
“Negative element in the Philosophy of St. Thomas,” pp. 47–67; Title re-issued: South Bend IN:
St. Augustine’s Press, 2002.

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6 David B. Burrell, C.S.C.

from ancient philosophy, what marks the subsequent transition to modern

philosophy? Many things, of course, but to continue speaking schematically,
modern philosophy wanted to distinguish itself by eliminating the theologi-
cal overtones of the “scholastics,” so proceeded by avoiding reference to a
creator. The creator, however, is a bit large to overlook, so the gradual
tendency was to deny its relevance. This was evidenced in Enlightenment
fascination with “the Greeks,” even though that phrase seemed more a con-
struct than an historical reference. Aristotle, after all, had managed quite well
without a creator. Now if that be the case—again, speaking quite schemati-
cally—we can characterize modern philosophy as “post-medieval,” where
the “post-” prefix carries a note of denial—in this case, of a creator, either
directly or implicitly. A cursory look at the strategies whereby modern phi-
losophers compensated for the absence of a creator, however, shows them to
lead inescapably to foundational grounds, be they “self-evident” proposi-
tions or “sense-data” or whatever. Once these proved illusory, we cannot but
enter a “post-modern” world. And if our presumptions regarding “philoso-
phy” itself (à la Rorty) are inherently linked to such strategies, then we will
inevitably regard a postmodern context as one in which “anything goes.” So
a singular result of this critique of the limitations endemic to the categories
presumed by modern philosophy will suggest a benign and fruitful under-
standing of the ways “postmodernity” liberates us from the vain search for
“foundations”. Then we may be pointed towards a more flexible and subtle
“foundation” in a free creator. But the very transcendence of a free creator
can make modern philosophers nervous, leading them to find ways of elimi-
nating “such an hypothesis”. How else explain the paucity of reflection
among current philosophers of religion regarding origination of the uni-
verse, even when these be Jews, Christians, or Muslims, whose traditions
avow a free creator?2
Ironically, a movement on the part of the Catholic Church to direct philo-
sophical fascination away from modern philosophy to Thomas Aquinas
helped to confirm the modern insouciance regarding free creation. For the
encyclical Aeternae Patris (1893) the unintended effect to present Aquinas as
an alternative to Descartes focused on his philosophical acumen, effectively
separating philosophical from theological reflection. Such an ethos was
utterly foreign to the world of Aquinas, where a dialectical exchange between
faith and reason spiced inquiry at all levels. In this new climate, however,
philosophical argument had to “ground” the universe in a creator, thereby
sidestepping the inherently theological cast of Aquinas’ own treatment of
creation in the Summa Theologiae, following directly upon his treatment of the
triune God. Moreover, if philosophical argument will suffice to “ground” the

2
For current reflections from these traditions, see Carlo Cogliati, Janet M. Soskice, and
William R. Stoeger, eds., Creation and the God of Abraham (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2010).

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 Creatio Ex Nihilo Recovered 7

universe in a creator, that creator can hardly be free. The argument will have
to assume some form of emanation modelled on logical deduction, whereby
the initial premise cannot adequately be distinguished from what emanates
from it. So the source cannot be the free creator espoused by Jews, Christians,
and Muslims for their respective revelations. Fortunately, Josef Pieper’s insis-
tence that “the hidden element in the philosophy of St. Thomas is creation,” by
which he meant free creation as offered in revelation, leads us away from
preoccupation with purely “philosophical” approaches to a dialectical inter-
change between faith and reason. This directs us to realize the centrality of
revelation to Aquinas as well as to his Muslim and Jewish interlocutors,
Avicenna and Moses Maimonides.3

Paths to Recovering Creatio Ex Nihilo with Its Implications

Aquinas’ capacity to integrate philosophical with theological demands is
displayed in the initial article in the Summa Theologiae on creation: “Must
everything that is have been caused by God?”4 Relying on his identification of
God as that One whose very essence is to exist, Aquinas shows why one must
“necessarily say that whatever in any way is is from God”. For if “God is sheer
existence subsisting of its very nature (ipsum esse per se subsistens), [and so]
must be unique, . . . then it follows that all things other than God are not their
own existence but share in existence”.5 So the Neoplatonic distinction
between essential and participated being is invoked to give everything but the
creator the stamp of created. Very little, if anything, is said here about causa-
tion, but the elements are in place to press for a unique form of it, even
though another way of posing the initial question employs Aristotle explic-
itly: “whether God is the efficient cause of all beings?”
An objection asks about those “natural necessities” which Aristotle pre-
sumed simply to be, or always to have been: “since there are many such in
reality [—spiritual substances and heavenly bodies which carry no principle
of dissolution within themselves—], all beings are not from God.” Aquinas
deftly diverts this objection by recalling the primacy of existing: “an active
cause is required not simply because the effect could not be [i.e., is contin-
gent], but because the effect would not be if the cause were not [existing].”6
So even “necessary things” will require a cause for their very being. This is a
radical revision of Aristotle, depending on the Avicennian distinction of
essence from existing. What it suggests is that Aquinas was seeking a way

3
For a narrative sketch of the interaction among these signal medieval protagonists, see my
Knowing the Unknowable God: Ibn-Sina, Maimonides, Aquinas (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre
Dame Press, 1986), as well as Freedom and Creation in Three Traditions (Notre Dame, IN: University
of Notre Dame Press, 1993).
4
ST, I, 44,1.
5
ST, I, 3, 4.
6
ST, I, 44, 1, ad. 2.

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8 David B. Burrell, C.S.C.

of understanding created being using Aristotelian metaphysics, yet the

“givens” of that philosophy will have to be transformed to meet the exigency
of a free creator. Put another way, which anticipates our elucidation, the being
which Aristotle took to characterize substance must become (for Aquinas) an
esse ad creatorem (an existing in relation to the creator). This is another way of
saying that “all things other than God are not their own existence”, either in
the radical sense of distinguishing creatures from the creator, or even in a
more attenuated sense in which the being which they have cannot be “their
own” in the sense of belonging to them “by right” or by virtue of their being
the kind of things they are (which was Aristotle’s view).
So everything other than God receives its being from the creator as a gift.
Nonetheless such derived or participated things are no less real than Aristo-
tle’s substances, since for Aquinas there is no other way to be except to
participate in the ipsum esse of the creator. Indeed, the nature of the creating
act depends crucially on our conception of the One from whom all that is
comes while the philosophical analogue of the creating act is expressed in the
distinction between essence and existing. Wrangling among philosophical
schools regarding the valence of this celebrated distinction is attenuated
once we appreciate its effective origin in the interaction between reason and
revelation, operative in each of the Abrahamic traditions.
We have suggested how the dialectic internal to faith and reason, evident
as they operate together to negotiate an issue so elusive as free creation, can
offer some illumination of the ineffable relation of creatures to creator, that
must elude causal categories developed to display relations among things in
the world. As with creation itself, where the three Abrahamic traditions
sought illumination from Hellenic philosophy to articulate an activity at the
margin of that philosophy, the ensuing relation of creatures to creator will
duly tax our philosophical skills. I have found Sara Grant a fruitful guide into
this recondite domain, in the slim volume of Teape lectures: Towards an
Alternative Theology: Confessions of a Non-dualist Christian.7 From the perspec-
tive of a student of Shankara and animator of an ashram in Pune, India, she
reminds us:

In India as in Greece, the ultimate question must always be that of the

relation between the supreme unchanging Reality and the world of
coming-to-be and passing away, the eternal Self and what appears as
non-Self, and no epistemology can stand secure as long as this question
remains unanswered. [It is indeed this startling contention which this
essay has been exploring.] . . . A systematic study of Sankara’s use of
relational terms made it quite clear to me that he agrees with St. Thomas
Aquinas in regarding the relation between creation and the ultimate

7
Sara Grant, Towards an Alternative Theology: Confessions of a Non-dualist Christian (Notre
Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2001).

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 Creatio Ex Nihilo Recovered 9

Source of all being as a non-reciprocal dependence relation; i.e., a relation in

which subsistent effect or ‘relative absolute’ is dependent on its cause for its
very existence as a subsistent entity, whereas the cause is in no way dependent
on the effect for its subsistence.

So the very existence (esse) of a creature is an esse-ad, an existing which is

itself a relation to its source. Nothing could better express the way in which
Aquinas’ formulation of the essence/existing distinction transforms Aristotle
than to point out that what for Aristotle “exists in itself” (substance) is for
Aquinas derived from an Other in its very in-itselfness, or substantiality. Yet
since the Other is the cause of being, each thing which exists-to the creator
also exists in itself. Derived existence is no less substantial when it is derived
from the One-who-is, so it would appear that one could succeed in talking of
existing things without explicitly referring them to their source. “The distinc-
tion”, in other words, need not appear. But that simply reminds us how
unique a non-reciprocal relation of dependence must be: it characterizes one
relation only, that of creatures to creator.
If creator and creature were distinct from each other in an ordinary way, the
relation—even one of dependence—could not be non-reciprocal. Ordinarily
the fact that something depends from an originating agent, as a child from a
parent, must mark a difference in that agent itself. Yet the fact that a cause of
being, properly speaking, is not affected by causing all-that-is does not imply
remoteness or uncaring; indeed, quite the opposite. For such a One must
cause in such a way as to be present in each creature as that to which it is
oriented in its very existing. In that sense, this One cannot be considered as
other than what it creates, in an ordinary sense of that term; just as the
creature’s esse-ad assures that it cannot be separately from its source. So it will
not work simply to contrast creation to emanation, or to picture the creator
distinct (in the ordinary sense) from creation by contrast with a more pan-
theistic image. Indeed, it is to avoid such infelicities of imagination that Sara
Grant has recourse to Sankara’s sophisticated notion of “non-duality” to call
our attention in an arresting way to the utter uniqueness of “the distinction”,
which Robert Sokolowski shows must hold between creator and creation, yet
cannot be pictured in a contrastive manner.8 Nor does Aquinas feel any
compunction at defining creation as the “emanation of all of being from its
universal cause (emanatio totius entis a cause universali)”.9 Indeed, once he had
emptied the emanation scheme of any mediating role, he could find no better
way of marking the uniqueness of the causal relation of creation than using

8
See Robert Sokolowski, God of Faith and Reason (Washington, DC: Catholic University of
America Press, 1995); from a cognate perspective, Kathryn Tanner develops a sense of transcen-
dence that is expressly “non-contrastive”, illustrating that suggestive category though the
history of some key questions in philosophical theology, in her God and Creation in Christian
Theology (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988).
9
ST, I, 45, 1.

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10 David B. Burrell, C.S.C.

the term “emanation” to articulate it. For once the scheme has been gutted,
that sui generis descriptor should serve to divert us from imaging the creator
over-against the universe, as an entity exercising causal efficacy on anything-
that-is in a manner parallel to causation within the universe. While the all-
important “distinction” preserves God’s freedom in creating, which the
emanation scheme invariably finesses, we must nevertheless be wary of pic-
turing that distinction in a fashion which assimilates the creator to another
item within the universe. Harm Goris has shown how close attention to the
uniqueness of the creator/creature relation, with its attendant corollary of
participation as a way of articulating this sui generis causal relation, can
neutralize many of the conundrums which can continue to fascinate philoso-
phers of religion.10

Faith and Reason in Dialectical Interchange

While invoking Shakara’s hybrid term of “non-duality,” might seem to have
distanced us from Aquinas, we should have realized by now how Aquinas
helps himself to various ways of expressing the inexpressible: the “distinc-
tion” as well as the “relation” between creatures and their creator. Both
prove to be foundational to any attempt to grasp our transcendent origins
as gift. Bible and Qur’an conspire to highlight the creator’s freedom; phi-
losophy proves helpful in finding ways to think both creature and creator
together.
Another mutually illuminating perspective on “the distinction,” as well as
the “ineffable relation” between creatures and creator, can be found in com-
paring Meister Eckhart with Ibn ‘Arabi, after the penetrating study of Robert
Dobie.11 This inquiry proposes and sustains the thesis that both Ibn ‘Arabi
and Eckhart were steeped in their respective revelational traditions, and from
that vantage point engaged in a mode of philosophical theology using reason
to order and clarify the revelational sources. They also used those sources
to expand standard philosophical categories to negotiate the known perils
of discourse regarding divinity. Each of these thinkers, moreover, while
working in disparate traditions, proceeded dialectically to allow reason and
revelation to illuminate each other fruitfully. They accomplished this in four
areas: revelation itself, existence, intellect, and the ideal human paradigm, in
a way that allows each tradition to illuminate the other, yet never eliding
difference, especially where difference itself may further illuminate the com-
parative inquiry.
But let us first position the respective authors. Ibn ‘Arabi represents what
I like to call the “second phase” of Islamic philosophy, whereby the center of

10
Harm Goris, Free Creatures of an Eternal God (Leuven: Peeters, 1996).
11
Robert J. Dobie, Logos and Revelation: Ibn Arabi, Meister Eckhart, and Mystical Hermeneutics
(Washington DC: Catholic University America Press, 2010).

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 Creatio Ex Nihilo Recovered 11

gravity returned east from Andalusia, while a fresh set of protagonists sought
ways to relate revelation with reason rather than contrasting one to another.12
That would explain why students of philosophy in the west might not rec-
ognize Ibn ‘Arabi as a philosopher, habituated as they have become to the
story that al-Ghazali’s critique of Averroës effectively terminated any hope of
philosophical inquiry in Islam. That judgment reflects modernist assess-
ments of properly philosophical inquiry, however, rather than attending to
the contours of philosophical theology in the wider Muslim world, compris-
ing Shi’ite as well as Sunni perspectives. On a reading more sensitive to its
original context, al-Ghazali’s critique represents a dialectical moment in
Islamic philosophical inquiry rather than ending it, much as recent scholar-
ship finds Averroës to be less a “rationalist” than one seeking ways to recon-
cile faith with reason.13 A trio of eastern thinkers form the vanguard of this
“second phase” of Islamic philosophy, introducing a properly philosophical
theology: Suhrawardi, Ibn ‘Arabi, and Mulla Sadra.14 The secondary sources
cited converge to help readers discover the philosophical acumen of Ibn
‘Arabi. Often dubbed a “mystic” (or even a “pantheist”), his work is better
appreciated when read as a sustained attempt to articulate what Robert
Sokolowski has identified as the crucial “distinction” between creator and
creatures in a universe founded on free creation.
Now we begin to suspect why Dobie sought to compare Ibn ‘Arabi with
Meister Eckhart, who has been saddled with similar incomprehension. Yet
applying the Sokolowski test allows us to capture Eckhart’s intent as well: to
show how a focus on Aquinas’ masterful account of creation as “the emana-
tion of all of being from the universal cause of being”—existence itself [ipsum
esse]—culminates in a “distinction” which eludes proper articulation, since
creator and creatures can never be “two” as two creatures are. Let us take
their respective treatments of existence, which Aquinas introduces as the only
“feature” common to creatures and creator, precisely because it cannot prop-
erly be a feature: “only in so far as things are beings can they be similar to God,
as the first and universal principle of all existence [esse] (ST 1.4.3), yet ineradi-
cably dissimilar once we recognize that “God alone is being essentially, while
all other beings are so by participation” (1.4.3.3). In employing the Platonic

12
See my “Islamic Philosophical Theology and the West,” Islamochristiana, Vol.33 (2007), pp.
75–90, amplified in “Journey to Mulla Sadra: Islamic Philosophy II,” Journal of Islamic Studies,
Vol. 3 (2010), pp. 44–64.
13
Avital Wohlman: Al-Ghazali, Averroes and the Interpretation of the Qur’an: Common Sense and
Philosophy in Islam (London: Routledge, 2009).
14
For leads to them, see Oliver Leaman and Sayyed Hossain Nasr, eds., History of Islamic
Philosophy (New York, NY: Routledge, 1996). For Ibn ‘Arabi, the most comprehensive treatment
can be found William Chittick’s trilogy: The Sufi Path of Knowledge: Ibn al-‘Arabı̄’s Metaphysics of
Imagination (1989); The Self-Disclosure of God: Principles of Ibn al-‘Arabı̄’s Cosmology (1997); and
Imaginal Worlds: Ibn al-‘Arabı̄ and the Problem of Religious Diversity (1995); but see also Salman
Bashier, Ibn al-‘Arabi’s Barzakh: Concept of the Limit and the Relationship between God and the World
(2004)—all Albany NY: State University of New York Press.

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12 David B. Burrell, C.S.C.

scheme of essentially/by participation, Aquinas introduces what Sokolowski

will dub “the distinction.” As Dobie puts it, comparatively:

What is important to appreciate in Ibn ‘Arabi and Eckhart is the logical

rigor or necessity of this understanding of God’s nature as dialectical.
The absolute transcendence of God necessarily demands his immanence
in all things, for what makes God transcendent is God’s existence and
sustenance of all that is. Likewise, God’s true and utter immanence
implies transcendence because what is inmost in all things is precisely
that which escapes limitation and objectification into a “this” or a “that.”
Again the logic here is clear: as Ibn ‘Arabi puts it, to assert only the
transcendence of God without his immanence is, in effect, to limit him,
because you are marking him off from creatures. And to assert his imma-
nence without asserting his transcendence is to limit him to the sum of
finite creatures. Similarly for Eckhart, God’s distinction from creatures,
his transcendence, lies precisely in his indistinction from all things, i.e.,
in his immanence in all things as their existence, oneness, truth, and
goodness—in short, the transcendental properties that “run through” all
the categories of existence and that all creatures have insofar as they exist
(p. 95).

This shows why Sokolowski identifies “the distinction” as lying “at the
intersection of faith and reason.”
Let us explore another of Dobie’s four areas, that of revelation. Here
especially the very differences will prove illuminating. Ibn ‘Arabi’s great
commentator, Dawud al-Qaysari, notes how, in effect:

The meaning of revelation is found in the faculty of imagination, the

ability to strike similitudes for what transcends reason (p. 27) . . . Thus, in
a proper hermeneutics of the Qur’an, understanding is becoming what
one ultimately is in the real; . . . uncovering what the divine Word means
for me and my life, which is to say what it means for me insofar as I exist
only in and through God and am what I am in God. It follows that, for Ibn
‘Arabi, the imagery of the Qur’an is not a drawback for the rational
seeker but an advantage, for through the “imaginal world” (i.e., the
interlocking symbolic logic) of the Qur’an and the Prophet (in the hadith
traditions), the inner meaning of creation manifests itself in and through
a creative appropriation of that imaginal world by the believer (p. 28).
[Here lies a clear point of contrast between “first” and “second” phases
of Islamic philosophy.] To recognize creation as an act of divine imagi-
nation, then, is to recognize, to be sure, the ambiguity of creation. But it
is also to see all creation as rooted in the divine reality (p. 34). . . . . The
Qur’an provides the key: . . . creation as an act of imagination is crucial
to understanding the relation between the “book of nature” and the
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 Creatio Ex Nihilo Recovered 13

“divine book of revelation” (p. 40). . . . It is in the Qur’an that the voyage
is made that leads man back to his original status, to his divine similitude
(p. 54). . . . The goal is the complete assimilation of the self to the Word of
God as revealed in the Qur’an (p. 55).

Fascinating for both its similarity and its difference is the way “the birth of
the Son in the soul . . .” is central to Eckhart’s interpretation of scripture:

all interpretive activity aims at cracking the “outer shell” of the text to
reveal its “hidden marrow,” which is precisely the process of inner birth.
Eckhart thus argues that the Christian life is not one of mere rational
assent to the divine Word of Scripture but an actual giving birth to this
Word in the innermost ground of the soul, which then bears fruit in a life
of detached freedom and love (p. 59).

Yet “human reason is structurally unable to grasp God’s oneness or the

oneness of creation’s source,” so

the only way to overcome this alienating effect of reason is to present

reason’s truths under the cover of parables or myths, so that it will
stimulate the hearer to the activity of interpretation and thus to an
inward penetration of the divine mystery and the indwelling of transcen-
dent truth (p. 65).

This comparison leads Dobie to delineate “the difference in the ways in

which Ibn ‘Arabi and Eckhart interpret their respective scriptures,” which
follows the different contours of their respective religious traditions:

for Eckhart, it is to have the Word of Scripture reborn in the very ground
of a fallen and corrupted soul so that the soul may become a true Noble-
man [edele Mensch]; for Ibn ‘Arabi, it is to understand the inner meaning
of the Law or sharî’a that restores the Muslim to the state of perfect
vice-regency as the Universal Man [al-insân al-kâmîl], which is itself a
return to the pure, original nature of humanity [fitra] in which the human
being was a perfect mirror of God’s essential attributes (p. 88).

These quotations are offered to give a flavor of Dobie’s approach to and

mastery of each figure. He has a special way of combining interpretive skills
with stunning theological and philosophical sophistication, with remarkable
clarity of expression. Finally, his manner of comparing Islamic with Christian
philosophical theology highlights the crucial parallel between the Qur’an
and Jesus: where Christians believe that Jesus is the word of God made
human, Muslims believe the Qur’an is the Word of God made book [Arabic].
Since this strictly parallel presentation displays substantial differences as
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14 David B. Burrell, C.S.C.

well, it allows him to offer a sustained argument against context-less

approaches to “mystical” literature, which he counters in the work itself by
grounding each author’s substantive philosophical reflection in their respec-
tive revelational traditions.

More Specifically Theological and Spiritual Dimensions of Creatio Ex Nihilo

While our focus on the dialectical exchange between faith and reason, notably
in the Abrahamic traditions, has primarily featured its philosophical dimen-
sions, recent recovery of Aquinas also reveals a specifically Christian and
theological approach. Once we appreciate how radical is the act of faith in a
free creator, then it becomes clear that we cannot be separate from God.
Moreover, we will fail to understand that corollary of free creation—perhaps
even mistake it for “pantheism”—if we have not seen how the unique char-
acter of the relation called “creation” also demands that we learn how to think
the creator not as an item in the universe, but as its One free creator. Yet
engaging in that mode of thinking, which Kathryn Tanner dubs “non-
contrastive”, will also demand that we appreciate how to employ language
analogously. So proficiency in philosophical theology will require poetic
sensibility as well, since all analogous speech—whether used of divinity or
used to evaluate human situations, as in ethical discourse—will invariably
display a touch of metaphor.15 For employing and grasping metaphors elicits
an acute awareness of the tension between our perspective and the one we
are endeavoring to elucidate—a tension which God-talk should exacerbate
and which is ever in evidence in Aquinas, as Robert Barron’s Thomas Aquinas:
Spiritual Master shows so well, and as Olivier-Thomas Venard, O.P. shows by
comparing Aquinas’ lapidary forms of expression in the Summa Theologiae to
Rimbaud’s poetry (Litterature).16
All of this culminates in the realization that “relating to God”, as in
“praying to God”, should take no effort, as there can be no “gap” to be
bridged. For if our very being is a “being to the creator”, then the interior path
to one’s own self will lead us invariably to the One who sustains us in
existence. There will of course be many obstacles blocking the way to one’s
own self, as we know very well and as John of the Cross will abundantly
delineate, but there can be no “distance” from that created self to its creator.
At this point it may help to supplement the theorems we have seen Aquinas
employ with those of two distinctive followers of his: Meister Eckhart (1260–
1329) and John of the Cross (1542–91). For once Aquinas’ task had shown how
“sacred teaching” [sacra doctrina] could be a mode of knowing [scientia],
Meister Eckhart felt free to focus on the singularity of the relationship

15
See my Analogy and Philosophical Language (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1973).
16
Robert Barron, Thomas Aquinas: Spiritual Master (New York, NY: Crossroad, 1996); Olivier-
Thomas Venard, O.P., Littérature et Théologie: Une saison en enfer (Genève: Ad Solem, 2002).

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 Creatio Ex Nihilo Recovered 15

between creatures and the creator. And if Aquinas exemplifies the dialectic
between faith and reason in appropriating Hellenic philosophy in a manner
informed by faith, John of the Cross will amplify Aquinas’ suggestive
remarks about faith itself to show how it alone can be the proper way by
which human beings can activate that sui generis relation which is their very
“being to the creator”.
First to John of the Cross, who is disarmingly forthright in enunciating the
goal of the dynamic of faith which activates that grounding relation as: “the
union and transformation of the [person] in God”.17 The power leading to
that goal is ″faith alone, which is the only proximate and proportionate means
to union with God″ (Ascent 2.9.1). He is at pains to distinguish this intentional
union from the “union between God and creatures [which] always exists [by
which] God sustains every soul and dwells in it substantially. . . . By it He
conserves their being so that if the union would end they would immediately
be annihilated and cease to exist” (Ascent 2.5.3). In this way, John will
presume the unique metaphysical relation of all creatures to their source,
which Meister Eckhart elaborates from Aquinas’ grounding “distinction”,
while identifying it as a union in persons of faith—indeed, an “essential or
substantial union”. This grounding fact attends all creatures, hence it is
natural and found in everything (though displayed differently in animate
from inanimate, and in animate, differing from animals to humans, though
among humans it can still be found in “the greatest sinner in the world”),
while the intentional union is supernatural and can only be found “where
there is a likeness of love [such that] God’s will and the [person’s] are in
conformity” (Ascent 2.5.3). What eliminates any prospect of “heteronomy”
between those two wills is precisely this “non-reciprocal relation of depen-
dence” (Sara Grant) as the very being of all creatures.
But let us attend first to the internal connection between faith and union
which John confidently asserts. What makes this sound so startling is our
propensity to confine such talk to “mystics” while reducing faith to belief:
holding certain propositions to be true. Yet John is simply elaborating some
key assertions of Aquinas to cut through the debates which by his time had
come to polarize intellect and will in the act of faith. His assertions in the
Living Flame of Love are bold:

This flame of love is the Spirit of the Bridegroom, which is the Holy Spirit.
. . . Such is the activity of the Holy Spirit in the soul transformed in love:
the interior acts He produces shoot up flames for they are acts of
inflamed love, in which the will of the soul united with that flame, made
one with it, loves most sublimely. . . . Thus in this state the soul cannot
make acts because the Holy Spirit makes them all and moves it towards

17
John of the Cross, Collected Works, translated by Kieran Kavanaugh and Otilio Rodriguez
(Washington DC: Institute for Carmelite Studies, 1991), Ascent of Mount Carmel, 2.5.3.

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16 David B. Burrell, C.S.C.

them. As a result all the acts of the soul are divine, since the movement
toward these acts and their execution stems from God. Hence it seems to
a person that every time this flame shoots up, making him love with
delight and divine quality, it is giving him eternal life, since it raises him
up to the activity of God in God (pp. 580–581).18

There is no hint of “heteronomy” here, because John presumes that unique

metaphysical relation of person (“soul”) to its source, which Meister Eckhart
had developed from Aquinas, and Sara Grant elaborated from Shankara.
A few texts will suggest how Meister Eckhart underscored the singularity
of that relation which Aquinas identifies as constituting creatures’ very exist-
ence: being related to their creator. These reflections of Meister Eckhart
amplify Aquinas’ characteristically lapidary expressions regarding the
creator/creature relation, the valence of which has often been overlooked by
commentators insufficiently sensitive to Aquinas’ transformations of Aristo-
tle to which we have called attention.

Every created being is analogically ordered to God in existence, truth,

and goodness. [But] analogates have nothing of the form, according to
which they are analogically rooted in positive fashion, in themselves.
Therefore every created being radically and positively possesses exist-
ence, life, and wisdom from and in God, not in itself as a created being.
And thus, [commenting on Sirach 24:29], it always ‘eats’ as something
produced and created, but it always hungers because it is always from
another and not from itself. . . . According to our understanding of the
truth of analogy, . . . the text “They that eat me shall yet hunger” is
perfectly fitted to signify the truth of the analogy of all things to God
himself. They eat because they are; they hunger because they are from
another. . . . So he is inside all things in that he is existence, and thus
every being feeds on him. He is also on the outside because he is above
all and thus outside all. Therefore all things feed on him because he is
totally within; they hunger for him because he is totally without.19

In a sermon on the Trinity he criticizes the

crude and false picture [which many have in thinking that] the maker,
the form, and the end in creatures along with God are two makers or
efficient causes, two forms, two ends. That is crude, first, because no
being can be counted alongside God. Existence and being, existence and
nothing, and also a form and what informs it make up no number.

18
John of the Cross, Collected Works: Living Flame of Love.
19
Meister Eckhart: Teacher and Preacher, edited Bernard McGinn, (New York, NY: Paulist Press,
1986) pp. 178–179.

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 Creatio Ex Nihilo Recovered 17

Existence is more intimate than any form [cf. ST 1a q8 a1] and is not a
source of number. Second, because every being, every maker, every
form, and every end that is conceived of outside or beyond existence, or
that is numbered along with existence, is nothing—it is neither a being,
nor a maker, nor a form, nor an end. This is because existence, that is,
God, is within every being, every form and end, and conversely every
being, form, and end is in existence itself. Indeed, every maker works
through its existence, form informs through its existence, and every end
moves through its existence—through nothing else (Teacher, p. 210).

These sample texts can suggest why western theologians might be wary of
Meister Eckhart, since his rhetoric raises the spectre of “pantheism”. Yet we
can also see him underscoring the sui generis relation implicit in free creation
as Aquinas elaborates it metaphysically, and as Sara Grant helps us to appre-
ciate. A serendipitous corroboration of the intimate relation between the
processions in the triune God and the emanation of all things from that same
God—a final way of marking and celebrating the unique relation between
creatures and creator—can already be found in a 1957 study by Per Erik
Persson, published in English in 1970: Sacra doctrina: Reason and Revelation in
Aquinas.20 Building on the primacy of existing in Aquinas’ account of creation,
he links the ensuing special relation with the unprecedented presence of the
triune God in Christ to all of creation:

In Thomas’ view the sovereign freedom of the Creator’s act presupposes

God’s perfect life within the Trinity [which] is not only essential for a true
understanding of creation, but indispensable . . . for an understanding of
the redemption which is wrought through the incarnation of the Son and
the gift of the Spirit (pp. 150–151).

Anticipating by a half century more recent appropriation of Aquinas’ theo-

logical perspective on creation, this study is all the more remarkable for the
prescient way it synthesizes his use of transformed philosophical tools to
elucidate the interdependence of faith and reason in Aquinas.21

Exploring the Anthropological-Spiritual Fruit of Recovering the Dialectic of

Faith and Reason in Creation
We may celebrate the implications of this view of creation for human flour-
ishing by contrasting trust in creatures’ non-competitive relation to their

20
Per Erik Persson, Sacra doctrina: Reason and Revelation in Aquinas (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress
Press/Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1970).
21
For a prime example of such recovery, see Gilles Emery, O.P., The Trinity: An Introduction to
Catholic Doctrine on the Trinity, translated by Francesca Murphy (Washington DC: Catholic
University of America Press, 2011).

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18 David B. Burrell, C.S.C.

creator with characteristic enlightenment emphasis on autonomy, which we

have seen was introduced in a period in which creatio ex nihilo was nearly
totally eclipsed. Joseph Godfrey has extensively explored the central role
which trust plays in any inquiry, asking: if trust is ubiquitous, why is it so
little appreciated, often until too late in a person’s life? My own suspicion is
that we children of the enlightenment have been instructed early on to cut
our ties with an enveloping context which might lead us to trust, in order to
develop something called ‘self-reliance’, whatever that might be!22 And
linked with that ethos is a potentially competitive picture of the creator/
creature relation, exemplified in the touted “free will defence” dear to many
current philosophers of religion. Brian Davies contrasts their modernist
approach to that of Aquinas in his recent survey of “the problem of evil.”23
Underlying Aquinas’ entire system, as that “which matters most to him,” is
his belief that God is the Creator (pp. 39, 43–44). Aquinas will insist upon “the
total and absolute dependence of creatures on God” (p. 44), who is that which
“accounts for the existence of the universe as a whole and at all times” (p. 43).
The distinction Aquinas makes between God’s existing (esse) and our existing
(esse-ad) serves as the pivotal argument in his articulation of God as the
Creator, for it rests not on necessity and contingency, but God’s subsisting
being itself (ipsum esse subsistens) (p. 42). The classical argument for God’s
existence, based upon a necessary existent to whom creatures’ existence is
contingent, can be traced to Avicenna and later to Suarez’ revision of the
medieval synthesis. Aquinas, however, considers this relation-to the Creator
in a slightly different manner. For him, the distinction of necessary and
contingent lies in God’s created order of things, so the crucial distinction for
Aquinas resides in essence and existence. For creatures, our essence and exist-
ence differ, but God as ipsum esse subsistens is the subsisting being itself,
whose essence and existence are not distinct, but identical (p. 42). So God’s
creating ex nihilo will clarify Aquinas’ position here regarding the relation
between God and creatures. This alerts us to the relation between Creator and
creatures, which is unlike any causal relation we know since God’s causation
in creating produces no change or motion or succession in time; rather it is
instantaneous, like the burning of fire or the sun lighting up the atmosphere
(p. 44 [ST 1.8.1]). What results is a non-competitive (or “non-contrastive”)
way of speaking of creator with creatures.24
Interestingly enough, some current philosophers of religion have found
themselves drawn to such a picture, as Marilyn McCord Adams has, in
canvassing modes of theodicy in her Horrendous Evils. After exposing how a

22
See Joseph Godfrey, Trust of People, Words, and God: A Route for Philosophy of Religion (Notre
Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2012).
23
Brian Davies, Thomas Aquinas on God and Evil (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).
24
I am indebted to my longtime student and friend, Mary Budde Ragan, for this summary of
Davies.

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 Creatio Ex Nihilo Recovered 19

set of strategies prevailing among current analytic philosophers of religion

fail to meet their goals, she endeavors to offer an alternative of her own.25 By
showing how purported “solutions” to “the problem” can neatly bypass the
fact of “horrendous evils,” she displays how inane is their way of proceeding
in the face of realities we can name. And once having rendered such discus-
sions irrelevant, she uses richly metaphysical language to articulate the
unique relation between the protagonists, creator and creatures, notably
intentional creatures. She must do so because her brand of interlocutors
invariably omit any such considerations, presuming “God” and “human
being” to be two items to be related, each quite intelligible in its own right,
rather than two which are already internally related as creator and creature.
Indeed, one might speculate whether that fundamental oversight might have
helped to spawn the enterprise of “theodicy,” marking it as “modern.” Yet
once we follow the invitation of the scriptures, Bible or Qur’an, to identify
God as creator, whatever we say about God will have to respect the distinc-
tiveness of the creator/creature relation. In particular, this means that when-
ever God acts, God acts as creator or conserver, where these two names
identify one mode of acting, differing from each other only notionally: the
action of conserving presupposes creation, while creating presupposes
nothing at all. Invoking this rule at once renders all talk of the creator
“intervening” inappropriate, as well as neutralizes debates over “compati-
bilism” or “determinism,” since the first term presumes two agents operating
within the same field of force, while the second presumes that the causality in
question is intramundane. Yet it must be emphasized that we are directed to
this rich metaphysical mode of reflection by the scriptures themselves,
thereby reminding all who would explore this domain that they cannot be
less than philosophical theologians. McCord Adams concludes her extended
essay by reminding us that her “strategy for dealing with horrendous evils
carries the corollary consequence of blurring the boundary between philoso-
phy and theology” (p. 206).26 We have noted how Josef Pieper did the same
for Thomists some fifty years ago, by identifying the “hidden element in the
philosophy of Aquinas as creation.” In the world of Catholic academe,
however, neo-Thomist institutional separation of philosophical from theo-
logical reflection was so firmly established and enforced that it has taken that
same period for studies in Aquinas to celebrate his instinctive and pervasive
indifference to the boundaries modernity later imposed. So we should no
longer be surprised to find scripture demanding philosophical clarifications
to display its own coherence, or philosophers turning to scripture to illumi-
nate their way of proceeding in these arcane arenas. Moreover, once they

25
Marilyn McCord Adams, Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God (Ithaca NY: Cornell
Unviersity Press, 1999).
26
See my “Theology and Philosophy” in Gareth Jones, ed., Blackwell Companion to Modern
Theology (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), pp. 34–46.

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20 David B. Burrell, C.S.C.

make that “scriptural turn,” they will also be led to deconstruct some other
ways of proceeding to which philosophers had become accustomed. That
represents the patent subtext of McCord Adams’ reflections, as well as the
avowed goal of our reflection here.
Paul Griffiths invokes participation to exhibit a growing tendency among
philosophers of religion, in his Intellectual Appetite, to acknowledge the
operative sense faith can give us of ourselves.27

A Christian understanding of creatures as imagines dei, especially inti-

mate participants in divine gift, is different in almost every interesting
respect from an understanding of humans as autonomous beings pos-
sessed of a rational will capable of universal species-wide legislation.
And each is equally though differently different from an understanding
of humans as desire-driven congeries of causally connected event-
continua (p. 116).

What marks the principal difference from a Kantian morality or a materialist

ideology, and the only thing that can, lies in realizing the implications of
avowing the universe to be freely created by a loving God. The difference
which Griffiths is intent on articulating finds primary expression in our
characteristic ways of knowing:

Thinking and speaking of creation as the gift of being from nothing, and
of creatures as recipients of and participants in that gift, suggest some
things to say about what it is for creatures to . . . perform the act of
knowing. By definition, this act must establish a relation between knower
and known, and this relation will inevitably be . . . a relation between one
participant in God and another [since] knower and known share a fun-
damental likeness and intimacy because each participates in God (p. 129).

He acknowledges that “participation” is not a category but a figure, the point

of which

is to indicate that it is part of the grammar of the Christian account of

things to say that no account of what it is for things to be can be given that
does not begin and end with God. This is exactly to reject ontological
system and to place ontology where it belongs, which is a part—and
always a derived and subsidiary part—of theology (p. 87).

He displays that he knows his “ontology” by showing how those who

propose to think

27
Paul J. Griffiths, Intellectual Appetite: A Theological Grammar (Washington DC: Catholic
University of America Press, 2009).

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 Creatio Ex Nihilo Recovered 21

about God in terms of existential quantification and necessity, . . . when

pressed tend exactly in the direction of participation, [maybe even
sensing] that [their] thinking does not suggest, and tends to contradict,
the intimacy between God and creatures intimated by talk of creaturely
participation in God, and along with it, an understanding of the intrinsic
goodness of creation (pp. 84, 85).

These illustrations are offered to help us taste how the prose this work
exhibits is itself an icon of the intimacy associated with a conception of
knowing which has deliberately replaced a modern fascination with represen-
tation with a classical predilection for participation. And that move is executed
by an exacting analysis of what it means to be gift, enabling us to approach
gingerly and modestly the daunting task of speaking of the universe as gift.
For that is what creatio ex nihilo challenges us to learn how to do.

Thinking analogously about God’s being is more difficult than any other
intellectual enterprise: we grope, we fail, and our failures are magnified
by our unwillingness to recognize the depth and scope of what we do not
know and of the errors in whose truth we have confidence (p. 69)

Philosophers of religion, take note: this extended essay reads like a medita-
tion of one who has come to appreciate the limits of academic study of
religion, and would initiate others into the set of attitudes and practices
which can nurture wonder and even intimacy with God. What more fitting
summary of the way attention to creatio ex nihilo can invite transformations in
philosophical approaches to God and to the cosmos?

© 2013 Blackwell Publishing Ltd