Creation and Contingency in Early Patristic Thought: The Beginning of All Things by Joseph Torchia, O.P

Abstract

Reviewed by: Creation and Contingency in Early Patristic Thought: The Beginning of All Things by Joseph Torchia, O.P M. J. Edwards Creation and Contingency in Early Patristic Thought: The Beginning of All Things. By Joseph Torchia, O.P. Pp. xxiv + 228. Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2019. Pp. xxiv + 288. $95.00 (cloth). ISBN 978-1-4985-6281-2. Although this book covers ground that has been covered by previous books on the Christian doctrine of creation out of nothing, the title intimates that the question for Christian writers before Nicaea, and even their philosophical interlocutors, was not so much the provenance of the substrate of the world as its “contingency,” its dependence on an eternal power and purpose. As Torchia demonstrates in his first chapter, the opening verses of Genesis, while not entirely destitute of a philosophy, were written to proclaim the complete [End Page 330] subjection of the world to its maker, not to determine the ontological status of the chaos that preceded it. The prophets extol God’s majesty and beneficence, while the Psalms and Solomonic books ascribe all the works of nature to his wisdom, without pronouncing on the origin of matter, and even the incidental praise of God as the one who made all things “from what is not (ex ouk onton or ouk ex onton) at 2 Maccabees 7:28 does not tell us whether this state that precedes existence as we know it was one of absolute nothingness. Torchia argues that the early Christians were chiefly concerned to renew and refine this doctrine of contingency when they married the Mosaic account of creation to its most beguiling rival in the Greek world, the Timaeus of Plato (which is the subject of chapter 2). In the Timaeus (which, as Torchia says, follows the discussion of formal causes in the Phaedo and of the good as final cause in the Republic), the efficient cause of creation is a Demiurge, or artificer, who imposes upon the labile realm of becoming the timeless principles that inhabit the realm of being. His action as creator is voluntary, yet also a logical corollary of his goodness; the narrative inevitably depicts him as acting in time, yet time itself is one his first productions, the necessary matrix of the laws which regulate change and succession in the physical cosmos. For the shaping of this world a receptacle is necessary; consistency of reasoning forbids us, however, to grant it any definite form, so that even Plato’s own word khora or “space” is only a symbol of the unbridged lacuna in our vocabulary. While it is never called “matter,” it is sufficiently recalcitrant to impose limits on the resemblance of the temporal copy to its eternal paradigm; at the same time, we are not told whether the Demiurge is the author of this paradigm or what it was a paradigm of in the time (if it was a time) before the cosmos came into existence. Even without the assistance of Aristotle, any thoughtful reader of Plato might have come to the view that this “likely tale” was not a literal statement of his beliefs but a new sketch of the “way of seeming” which his venerable predecessor Parmenides of Elea had opposed to the way of truth. To these arguments against the literal reading of the dialogue, which are accurately set out by Torchia, we must add that in the Phaedrus of Plato, soul is necessarily immortal, being the source of every movement and therefore the only possible mover of itself. From this it would seem to follow both that the temporal creation of the soul in the Timaeus is not to be understood literally and that the motion of the receptacle before it submits to the Demiurge must also be attributed to a pre-existent soul. This second point accounts for the postulation of an evil soul of the world in both traditions of exegesis, the literal and the allegoretic, in the early Roman era. Torchia declares the allegorists a majority, though they include at the highest count Calvenus Taurus, Apuleius, Alcinous (whose date and identity are uncertain) and Albinus if he is not the same person as...