I’ve recently begun reinvestigating the divide between Creatio Ex Nihilo (creation from nothing) and Creatio Ex Deo (creation from God), initially, I had taken Creatio Ex Deo to be obvious. In response to the suggestion of something from nothing, I would say Ex Nihilo Nihil Fit; from nothing, nothing comes. In light of personal considerations, I aim to subject the two to a dialectical exercise and resolve the contention precisely.
The first consideration in question is as follows: ex nihilo nihil fit is only a relevant response to creatio ex nihilo if indeed the creation is taken to be something, more precisely, something-in-itself — if creation isn’t something-in-itself, then the apparent substance of creation out of which it is formed need not be anything concrete either. My use of apparent here is important, it will be elaborated later but for now take it to contrast concrete.
The second consideration is regarding creatio ex deo, more specifically, a way the words can be interpreted. Creation out of God can be taken to mean that creation is contained by God; needs to be situated in the context of God (which we can, for clarity, substitute with Primary Reality Principle); and is caused by God, though the latter is admitted by ex nihilo as well. However, it can also be taken to imply that creation, which we can clarify as an object-condition (as opposed to the subject) — is literally formed out of the substance of God, as though God were, for one, a substance, and further, a substance that transmutes itself into all creation — all distinction and definition included. There are problems with this interpretation, the first being the reduction of God to substance and ultimately objects and materiality, since it would be implied that materiality would then just be the primary nature transformed into an object — somehow. This fails to account for definition, that is, the distinction between things — if all things were the literal transformation of God thereinto, it pluralizes the essential and singular nature of God and distributes it into a manifold in which every part is God-in-Himself, or the Godhead. The second problem is that it fails to account for immaterial natures, which are in a sense unsubstantial (if we use the denotation of substance as real tangible physical matter in which something consists), by equalizing mind and matter, we cannot situate one in the context of the other and are ultimately left with an inherent contradiction.
However, there seems to be something to these potential implications of ex deo, doesn’t there? After all, materiality cannot be a privation of God, and must therefore be accounted for by the essential nature of God, right? Quite right, however, there is a potent logic trap to be wary of around this corner, and that trap is concept reification. When something is — we must acknowledge that we may not yet understand the actual nature of the thing in question, if we take it for what it appears to be — then elevate our concept of the appearance to something principally true in itself, then we’ve effectively reified the concept, that is, we’ve made it into more than it actually is. Thereafter we seek to situate the thing in question according to our reified concept of it, hence the mistake of seeking to equalize materiality with God-in-Himself rather than situate materiality according to the actual extent of its existence.
The similarly literal interpretation of ex nihilo would be that it is predicated that creation (as something) spawns out of nothingness. As hinted at earlier, we could say that creation isn’t something, or at least, that creation isn’t something-in-itself. However, creation is apparent — and even the appearance of something, even if it isn’t in itself (isn’t ontologically concrete), still needs to be explained in terms of something that isn’t only apparent. In other words, if creation were only apparently real, it must be the appearance of something ultimately real. Negating something as only apparently real, and therefore not needing to be accounted for, only asks the same question it sets out to answer — the appearance of what? Ultimately, mere apparitions must be that of increasingly “more real” principles until you’ve reached God, and of course, by “more real” it should be clarified to mean that we are more and more correctly identifying the actual nature of the matter and situating our conceptions and perceptions according thereto.
This does seem to credit ex deo, although it remains true that creation, materiality and objects are not ontic just because they must be situated according to something that is (after all, that is necessary because they aren’t ontologically concrete). So, if we take ex nihilo to simply imply that the creation itself isn’t literally ontologically formed out of something concrete — then we can merit ex nihilo to some extent and proffer something wise. Ultimately, any kind of idealism that truly situates materiality wholly in the context of the ideal would fall under such an interpretation of ex nihilo, given it would be admitted that a material object isn’t actually real as a material object itself.
Now, let’s apply ex deo to emanationism as contrasted by ex nihilo and creationism to continue the exercise. Reality unfolding out of God, emanating therefrom, can be considered a kind of atemporal procession — that is to say that the One doesn’t proceed to Nous then Soul in a time sequence, rather the latter two are ranks of the former and are logically posterior but not temporally. This is just the Plotinian hypostatic model, but the essence is that the ontic natures are a natural and necessary emanation from the First Principle, in this case the One, which is the Godhead. But how does emanationism more generally treat creation? In particular, how is materiality and the sense world treated? The immediate question here is whether emanationism maintains that materiality is the next phase of the ontological procession following soul. If this were so, it would fall subject to my earlier criticism against the ontic principle literally morphing itself into any and all given material objects. Emanationism as a situating of the ontological according to logically necessary priority (e.g. the One as a necessary unitary principle, Nous as posterior because it implies subject-object distinction [therefore duality], and Soul as further posterior because it assumes object conditions) is a sound model, but it should take care to not extend itself to reified materiality, which it would not need to do if materiality were simply our concept of something soul (or something else that is real) does.
Let us now turn our attention to ex nihilo nihil fit, the position that nothing comes from nothing — which is neither mutually exclusive with ex deo nor exactly the same. Ex nihilo nihil fit is generally said in response to the suggestion of a time when the world was not, it denies a first cause in the sense that implies a concrete temporal sequence (which is why going forward, we should treat first cause to be the first in priority amongst considerations, rather than first in a sequence — it is first amongst every variable therein, it is the primary cause), Aristotle in his Physics relays this from the mind of Parmenides:
“Yet why would it be created later rather than sooner, if it came from nothing; so, it must either be created altogether or not [created at all].”
Let’s assume by world, it is meant the phenomenal sense-world, though it is admitted that this may not be the case — this assumption will let us get to the essence of the matter at hand. If the world isn’t ontic, and has no principal of existence in itself, wouldn’t it make sense for there to have been a time when the world was naught, given it already isn’t ontic? Actually, not quite, given we have determined the sense-world — though not ontologically concrete, to be a consequence of what is, and further, that we maintained it must be situated within the context of what truly exists, the opposite must be true. Suppose for instance that object-conditions, materiality and the sensing of objects was something that occurred as due to some intrinsic operation of the soul (perhaps World Soul; psyche tou pantos; anima mundi), and that this occurrence was internal to the principle of soul rather than being brought on outside of it as though it were a continued ontological procession. If we situate the world within soul as we have, and we situate the emanation of soul from nous and the One as an emanation that doesn’t occur in time — then some form of eternalism must be maintained for the world, given that the ontic is eternal, and the phenomenal world arises naturally out of the involution of the ontic.
We can conclude our exercise with gleaning the understanding that creation may not be a something-in-itself from creatio ex nihilo, but ultimately favoring the interpretation of creatio ex deo that affirms that creation must be internal to God, i.e., the self-containment of phenomenal reality; and the situating of phenomenal reality in the context of what is determined to be the real nature of reality. Monistic idealism is best served in an interpretation of creatio ex deo that doesn’t necessarily reify materiality as existing as our concept of material, and rather understands it as according to an ideal operation, in doing so we can appreciate ex nihilo’s seeming negation of the ontological status of creation, in some way.
Glossary
Creatio ex deo: creation out of God
Creatio ex nihilo: creation out of nothing
Creationism: theory that holds God to be a creator external to his creation, and therefore the contents of creation to be unnecessary and arbitrary according to the will of God
Emanationism: theory that holds creation to be a necessary procession out of the first principle, as though consequenced by its intrinsic nature
Ex nihilio nihil fit: the position that “out of nothing, nothing comes”, position against ex nihilo which maintains that something cannot arise out of nothingness
Godhead; God-in-Himself: the essential nature or principle of God, zeroed in on without inclusion of proceeding natures, necessary consequences nor external creation
Nous: the intellect, in Platonism, it is essentially the self-thinking subject which thinks its own contents, i.e. its own object, in this way it is operative and dual in a sense
Ontic: relating to real as opposed to phenomenal existence
Reify: to make something abstract more concrete or real (than it actually is)
Something-in-itself: the true, essential nature of a given thing without reference to conception thereof
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