2
Mediaeval Views of Creation: St. Albert, St. Bonaventure, and St. Thomas
Steven Baldner, St. Francis Xavier University
Given at Gonzaga University, 17 April 2007
Today I am going to compare the positions of three contemporaries who shared much in common. They were all members of the new mendicant orders, they shared a methodology that we today can call “scholastic”, they shared a philosophical outlook that was broadly Aristotelian (each would have considered Aristotle to have been the best of philosophers), they all received their intellectual formation from the same university and at about the same time, and they were friends. It is true, of course, that Bonaventure was a Franciscan, while Albert and Thomas were Dominicans, and it is also true that Bonaventure was more influenced by Augustine than were Albert and Thomas. Nevertheless, all three would have recognized that the fundamental terms and categories in philosophy have been given definitively by Aristotle, and on our topic today, creation and the temporal beginning of the world, they all thought that the supreme philosophical authority was Aristotle. Should I also mention that all three belong to two rather exclusive clubs? They were recognized by the Church to have lived lives of sanctity, and, even more exclusive, they were recognized to be Doctors of the Church.
In spite of these similarities, and of others that I shall have occasion to mention, my purpose in this lecture is to show how radically different was the position of Thomas Aquinas from that of his Dominican mentor or that of his Franciscan colleague. Standing apart from Albert and Bonaventure, and indeed apart from most scholastic thinkers, and from just about everyone in the history of philosophy, Thomas held that the creation of the world out of nothing was philosophically demonstrable and that in fact it had been philosophically demonstrated by none other than Aristotle himself.[1] By contrast, both Bonaventure and Albert, and most in the great traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, have regarded the doctrine of creation as exclusively theological.
Let us examine the teaching of Bonaventure, Albert, and Thomas by considering two topics: first, the problem of the temporal beginning of the world and, second, the problem of the very meaning of creation out of nothing.
The Temporal Beginning of the World
It is, of course, well known that the traditional meaning of the revealed doctrine of creation is that God’s act of creation brought about a radical beginning to all creatures, both material and spiritual. Time itself had a beginning “in the beginning”, and before the instant of the creative act of God, there was absolutely nothing in existence other than God Himself. Those of us who have grown up with Christian teaching tend to take this tenet of faith as though it were something obvious, but it does not reflect necessarily the way in which the mind would naturally think about the universe and its origins. The ancient Greek philosophers did not think about the origins of the universe in this way, and Aristotle famously, or infamously, argued that the entire universe was always in existence. There are only two possibilities: either the universe in some form always existed or it had a radical beginning. Both alternatives are, as Kant pointed out, unimaginable and an affront to the intellect, but it might be the case that thinking of an eternal past existence, rather than an absolute and abrupt beginning, is the mind’s default position.
The problem faced by the 13th century scholastic theologians was that of reconciling the forceful teaching of Aristotle, which insisted on this default position, with the recently defined Christian dogma, that the universe had a radical temporal beginning. On this topic, Bonaventure, Albert, and Thomas were in almost complete agreement: on the one hand, they rejected any claim that Aristotle or anybody had demonstrated the eternity of the world and, on the other, they did not think that philosophical reason could demonstrate the opposing position, that the world had a temporal beginning. Let us see why they all thought that philosophical reason was unable by itself to settle the question of the temporal origin of the universe.
Bonaventure, Albert, and Thomas all recognized that arguments that purport to prove the eternity of the world, and derive from Aristotle, are of three different kinds. A first kind of argument concerns the heavenly bodies or the existence of angels.[2] If there are now in existence some creatures that are incorruptible, so the argument goes, then these creatures have the potency to exist always. But, whatever has the potency to exist always in the future must always have had this potency, for what cannot be corrupted cannot also be generated. Hence, at least some creatures must exist eternally, in the past and in the future. Second, there are arguments from the nature of time or of motion. Time is a continuous, flowing reality. The present moment is a kind of connector, always connecting the past with the future. If time ever exists, then it must always exist, for any instant of time must connect the past with the future. There must always, therefore, have been a past to be connected to the future. Similarly, motion is only possible now because something has moved in the past. We are all in this room because we walked into the room, but we only did so because some prior event took place, such as our reading the notice advertising this lecture. But that notice could be read only because someone wrote it before we could read it, and so on. Hence every present motion implies a previous motion, and the existence of a previous motion always implies the eternal existence in the past. Third, there are arguments based on the nature of God as the first cause of creation. God Himself is eternally immutable: He does not change his mind, get new ideas, or go from a state of inactivity to a state of activity. If God causes anything, He must cause it eternally and unchangingly. Since God does cause the world in creating it, He must necessarily create it eternally.
Bonaventure, Albert, and Thomas reject these arguments, and for similar reasons. The argument about incorruptible creatures might at first strike us as quaint, because it seems to depend upon a cosmology that we reject, for we do not today regard any of the planets or stars as incorruptible beings, but we might think that matter itself – prime matter – is incorruptible, and Christians would accept the incorruptibility of angels or of the human soul. The point about this argument is that it depends upon the claim that some creature has an incorruptible nature. The response to this argument is that the power or potency for incorruptibility is a power or potency about the future. It does not tell us about the past existence of any creature, but only that it will continue to exist forever in the future. It is true that an incorruptible creature could not be generated by natural means, but that fact does not mean that it could not have been created to have had a temporal beginning. No creaturely, generative process could have brought them into being, but the act of creation by God is not such a process at all.
The argument about time or motion, according to our three thinkers, is an argument that begs the question. It is true that the present moment connects the past to the future, but it is only true that the present moment always does this if one makes the assumption that the world is eternal in the past – the very thing, of course, that we are trying to prove. If one does not assume that the world is eternal in the past, then it simply is not true that every present moment connects a past with the future, for the very first instant of time would be the first instant of a future but not the last instant of any past. Similarly, the argument about motion also begs the question. Every motion is preceded by a prior motion, only if one makes the assumption that the world in which motions occur has always existed. If, however, one assumes that the world had an absolute temporal beginning, then some motions would exist that were not preceded by other motions.
The third argument is the most subtle of the three. It is, of course, impossible to imagine God’s creative act without imagining some sort of change in God. Bonaventure, Albert, and Thomas, however, point out two things about this argument. First, it presupposes a false conception of God as a necessarily acting being: whatever God does He must necessarily and eternally do. This is false, however, because God operates freely, from his will that is not bound by any necessity. Second, this argument confuses the way in which a material being brings about some new event with the way in which God operates. When we cause something that is new, we can only do so by changing in some way: we were not acting but have now begun to act. In us, this is necessarily a change. God, however, who is not a material being does not operate by going from some potential condition to an actual condition; He is pure act, and as such does not bring about any change in Himself whenever He acts. If He has determined from all eternity that He will cause something to begin to be, such a determination of his will does not imply any change in God Himself.
Aristotle’s philosophy was taken to be the best that human reason and science could do to understand the world in which we live. It came as a shock to theologians to learn that this authority regarded the world as necessarily eternal in the past. But it was a shock that Bonaventure, Albert, and Thomas thought could be easily withstood with some careful philosophical reasoning.
There were also seriously advanced arguments on the other side, arguments that derive ultimately from the Kalam theologians. These arguments purported to prove that an eternal past was impossible and that, therefore the world must have had a temporal beginning. Of course, if you can prove that the world had an absolute temporal beginning, you are also thereby proving that some cause must have produced the world. Since such a cause could only have been God, the arguments, if sound, would be powerful proofs for the existence of God. But, in fact, neither Bonaventure, nor Albert, nor Thomas regarded these arguments as very effective.
There are a number of different kinds of arguments given to show that the world must have had a temporal beginning, but let us look at only two of them, recognizing that the first of the two has an important variant.[3] The first argument is founded on the premise that an actual infinity in physical, material, or natural things is impossible. It may be a useful device to speak, mathematically, about sets containing an infinite number of members or of lines or planes that are infinite in extension, but in the real, physical world nothing is or can be infinite, either in number or in magnitude. If the universe had existed eternally in the past, so the argument goes, the past itself would be something that is actually infinite. There would be an infinite number of past days, an infinite number of generations of plant or animal species, and an infinite number of any series of physical events. But such a series could not be counted, added to, or traversed. Hence, the universe could not have existed eternally in the past.
There is, of course, an intuitive appeal to such an argument. We cannot imagine, count, or order an infinite series of anything, and if we suppose that the universe was always in existence in the past, we must grant that such a past could not be counted or ordered. Since we can only count or order that which is finite, an eternally existent universe would be one that in principle was not amenable to chronological analysis. But such a conclusion is hard to admit, for it means that the past was as a whole unknowable. The conclusion is hard to admit, but does it involve some sort of contradiction or philosophical impossibility? According to Bonaventure, Albert, and Thomas, the answer is “no”: there is nothing contradictory about admitting that the universe was always in existence. The reason for this has to do with the nature of time. Time is the number that we apply to motion, and motion is a peculiar sort of actuality, for it is the actuality of that which is in potency while it is in potency. This means that the only reality of motion, and hence of time, is what is presently occurring: the past is no longer actual and the future is not yet actual. This in turn means that neither the past as such nor the future as such can be said to be actually anything, and if neither is actually anything, then neither can be an actually infinite something. More simply put, the past, even if it has always existed, cannot be an actual infinity for the simple reason that the past is not an actual entity.
Versions of the argument we are examining are sometimes expressed with a graphic examples. If your were transported to a day infinitely in the past, for example, you could not traverse the infinite number of days in order to arrive in the present; or, if you were an eternally existing angel, you could not count all of the days that would have existed. But images such as these involve fallacies. If it is impossible to traverse an infinite series of days, then it is impossible to imagine going back to a day infinitely in the past in order to suppose that we could not arrive in the present! And, if it is true that no finite creature could count an infinite number of events, then it would be true that no angel could remember or count all of past time. But it is fallacious to suppose an uncountable series, and then to wonder why an angel cannot count it.
Bonaventure is often thought to have held that arguments of this first sort are sound. Let me say, without pausing more, that there is no evidence for this claim.[4] I would be happy, if you like, to discuss the matter further during the question period.