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Chapter 6 CAN 'CREATION' BE a METAPHYSICAL CONCEPT? Chapter 6 CAN ‘CREATION’ BE A METAPHYSICAL CONCEPT? Peter Harris Memorial University of Newfoundland INTRODUCTION It may seem strange to raise the question of creation as a possible metaphysical concept in the context of the work of Martin Heidegger, who notoriously announced the end of metaphysics. However, the question as to whether Heidegger was successful in this enterprise remains open to debate in spite of his intention to “leave metaphysics to itself.”1 There can be little question that Heidegger’s work at least belongs to the history of metaphysics, if for no other reason than its ongoing engagement with the tradition of metaphysical thinking in western philosophy. This essay makes a choice between two available approaches to the question of the concept of creation and the nature of metaphysics. One approach would be to question in a rather general way whether the concept of creation has a place in metaphysical thinking in general, along with other concepts like being, time, causality, etc. The other possibility is to examine it 127 William Sweet (ed.), Approaches to Metaphysics: 127–136. © 2004 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands. 128 PETER HARRIS in a particular instance, e.g. the place of the idea of creation in the metaphysics of a particular philosophical view such as that of Hegel or Bergson or Whitehead or Heidegger. For the most part it seems to the present writer that the latter contextualized approach is more fruitful, and it has determined the main theme of the paper. However, I have felt it useful to begin by asking in a rather general way about a distinction between creation in a strong sense and what for want of a better term I have called “ontological dependence.” In particular I will ask the question: What does the concept of creation add above and beyond the notion of ontological dependence? By ontological dependence I mean something like the positions reached by the philosophers of antiquity, by Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus and other neo- Platonists, according to which the world remains unintelligible in the final analysis without a relation of dependence on some principle or ground such as the Good, God, the One, the One “beyond being” and so on. In each of them an ultimate principle or ground is assigned. Although Plato does indeed, in the Timaeus, make use of a creation myth to account for the mediation between chaotic matter and ideal order, there is little to suggest that this was for Plato anything more than a useful myth serving to bridge the world of becoming with the world of pure intelligible being. It is quite clearly other than the Christian doctrine of creation in both its premises and its import and intent. The Platonic myth does not, in my view, add anything substantive to the notion of ontological dependence. Whether this ultimate reality is called the Good, God or the One, Greek thinking designates a term for the ontological dependence of the cosmos. This end point of speculative thought is, as Aquinas repeatedly points out in the five ways, what all people at least mean by God. Nothing more is established by these arguments than the notion of ontological dependence. The conclusions of the five ways offer points of connection for the incorporation of Greek speculative thought into the service of fides quaerens intellectum.2 They do not establish that the nature of this dependence is one of creation in the strong sense. Nevertheless, the primary source for Christian theology and, in the present context, for the strong notion of creation was never unaided human thinking but rather the event of divine self-disclosure or revelation. For Christian speculative theology or theological science the question has always arisen as to the measure of agreement and contradiction which might exist between rational, philosophical conclusions and the vision of things disclosed by divine revelation. Is the Christian believer justified in importing humanistic speculation into the understanding of faith? For the medievals, grace does not destroy but perfects nature. This essential optimism with regard to human nature and knowledge is what underlies the belief of the scholastics that a ground for agreement can be found between Greek CAN ‘CREATION’ BE A METAPHYSICAL CONCEPT? 129 philosophy and Christian belief. It is therefore not surprising that the philosophical notion of ontological dependence should be tied into the distinctively Christian doctrine of creation in medieval thinking, while nevertheless including quite new elements derived from revelation. The Protestant tradition from Luther to Barth has, on the other hand, tended to draw a more radical divide between philosophy as merely human conjecture and the saving faith which condemns speculation as mere vanity and untruth. The close integration of ontological dependence with the Christian belief in creation remains in that context much more dubious. While still at this rather general level it is already interesting to note the position adopted in these matters by Heidegger in a relatively early, but important, essay on “Phenomenology and Theology.”3 Heidegger embraces elements of both positions – drawing a hard “fideistic” (“Protestant”) line between philosophy and theology and accepting the “necessary atheism” of philosophy, yet at the same time recognizing that theology inevitably builds upon, even as it transforms, the essential structures of the analytic of Dasein. Unfortunately, at least as far as I know, Heidegger did not return to a formal discussion of the relation after the turn from this analytic to the question of Being as he approaches it in his later work. This rather formal statement of position, however, probably does not do full justice to the reality of Heidegger’s implication of theology into his speculative thought about Being – as, I hope, the present essay will go some way to show. ONTOLOGICAL DEPENDENCE AND ‘CREATION’ At this point I want to raise in a preliminary and rather general way the question: What does the Christian doctrine of creation add over and above the bare notion of ontological dependence? I think there are three essential elements: creation ex nihilo (certainly questionable for Aristotle); creation in time (the world has a beginning – also rejected by Aristotle), and divine freedom in creation (perhaps excluded also in neo-Platonic theories of emanation). It is certainly not my aim here to go into the medieval treatments of creation to show how the biblical material concerning the divine making of the world was amalgamated with the notions of ontological dependence derived from the Greek tradition. I have elsewhere argued that in Aquinas, for example, the analogies of emanation and causal production are combined in the treatment of creation to realize just such a fusion.4 What is quite clear is that the direction of the argument is from the divine creator as the first article of faith to conclusions about the nature of the relation of the created world to Him, rather than the other way about. In other words, the argument does not 130 PETER HARRIS move from ontological dependence to creation in the strong sense, but rather the other way about. As Aquinas recognizes, without this privileged source, no certain conclusion could be reached, for example, about the creation of the world in time. Nevertheless, in giving an account of creation ex nihilo, Aquinas imports, with suitable qualifications, an Aristotelian causal- productive analysis of the divine creative act.5 Although Plato’s demiurgos is the closest prefiguring of this aspect of the doctrine of creation, extremely important differences are to be noted: the activity of the demiurgos does not include the creation of matter as such, which pre-exists as the elements in a chaotic state; the activity of the creator is subject to and limited by the eternal, pre-existent forms; and time is patterned upon eternity in its orderliness. It is a myth of creation based simply on a theory of ontological dependence. In the Christian version and its development in medieval theology, in spite of the dependence on the speculative instruments of Greek philosophical concepts, the dependence on pre-existing matter and the patterning on eternal pre-existing forms is progressively eliminated and the creation of the world in time is directly linked to a linear historical sense of time, rather than to the eternal regularity of cyclical time. It might therefore be argued, in the light of these considerations, that what we now have is a good example of what Heidegger rather scathingly referred to as “onto-theology” – in other words, Greek philosophical insights, debased through their subordination to the “positive” science of theology. Nevertheless, it could be well argued that a great deal in modern speculative metaphysics results precisely from the new view of the world heralded by these developments in medieval theology. It was precisely through the recognition of the unlimited freedom of God in creation that events and beings in the world could be seen as essentially individual and as autonomous, as radically temporal and as in some sense self-structuring. The question of the metaphysical validity of the concept of creation cannot therefore be answered, I think, by reference backward to Greek metaphysics, but rather by reference to developments in modern speculative thinking.6 It was no doubt a long road historically that eventually led to the demise of “eternal ideas” and in general to the causal-productive way of thinking about the essential nature of
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