The Creation of the World

The Old Testament is the ‘Book’ common to Jews, Christians, and Muslims, and for all three the idea that the world has been created from nothing by a transcendent God (whatever name be attributed to Him) is a doctrine of faith, and thus it is not without difficulty that Greek philosophy is integrated into such a world view. The possibility of finding a philosophical interpretation of the Hexaemeron (the six days’ work of creation) had been tried both by the Greek and the Latin fathers, who were mainly influenced by the Platonic tradition. The problem was, however, that the Demiurge, who in Plato’s Timaeus formed the matter of the world by imitating archetypal ideas, could not be identified with the Biblical God who had created everything ‘from nothing,’ and the process of emanation and return in the various forms developed by the Neoplatonics, in particular Plotinus and Proclus, could not explain the absolute transcendence of the creator with respect to the creature. Therefore, the use of Greek philosophy had to be accompanied by a detailed clarification of God’s transcendental status (the solution of the Islamic philosophers al-Kindi, al-Farabi, and Avicenna), or it ran the risk of being accused of pantheism, as happened to the doctrines of John Scotus Eriugena. But what does it mean to create something from ‘nothing'? In the Carolingian period Fredegis of Tours had confronted the problem semantically with a literal interpretation of the Biblical text. Later writers would concentrate ever more closely on the meaning of ‘materia’ in philosophical texts. For example, the masters of Chartres and the authors of the 12th c. tried to interpret the creation using the model of the Timaeus, while Ibn Gabirol had already put together a notion of emanation grounded in Neoplatonism in which the matter of the universe was the first level of reality created by God. The discovery of the Physics and Metaphysics of Aristotle shifted the problem, since the idea of a reality structure conceived as a causal chain implied that there was no temporal distance between the effect (the world) and the first cause (or unmoved mover) on which the chain depends, or namely that the world was coeternal with God, as Averroes had already understood. Alongside the concern of protecting the absolute freedom of the creator’s choice to create, a new problem appears: that of determining the finiteness of the world. In the course of the 13th c., a broad debate on the impossibility of demonstrating philosophically the creation ensued, in which even St. Thomas upheld the position that the creation was not provable. Contrarily, many other thinkers, mainly among the Franciscans masters, maintained that it was possible, whilst the Latin Averroists claimed that philosophy (i.e. Aristotle) demonstrates that the world was eternal.