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

Abstract

Reviewed by: Creation and Contingency in Early Patristic Thought: The Beginning of All Things by Joseph Torchia Alexander H. Pierce Creation and Contingency in Early Patristic Thought: The Beginning of All Things Joseph Torchia Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2019. Pp. xxxiv + 229. ISBN: 978-1-4985-6281-2 The publication of Gerhard May's Schöpfung aus dem Nichts in 1978 (and its subsequent translation under the title Creatio ex nihilo in 1994) contributed to a heightened concern among biblical scholars, theologians, and historians of philosophy to trace the development of the doctrine of creation ex nihilo within Jewish and early Christian literature and to situate it in the light of the philosophical traditions that developed in response to Plato's Timaeus. Many scholars have called May's proposal into question and others have come to his defense. Joseph [End Page 446] Torchia's book under review successfully accomplishes pushing the focus of the conversation beyond controversy over whether the explicit terminology of creation ἐξ οὐκ ὄντων is the evidence necessary to evince early Christian selfdifferentiation to a more implicit factor, what he calls the "contingency criterion," by which he means "whether the text in question affirms the contingency of created reality in relation to the sovereignty and omnipotence of its Creator" (xxvii). In this excellent monograph, Torchia builds on a diverse and expansive literature by offering a well-balanced analysis that provides us with a greater level of clarity concerning the theological horizon of creatio ex nihilo as the absolute sovereignty of God and contingency of all creation. Creation and Contingency is comprised of three parts. In the first, Torchia examines the sources of the development of the doctrine of creation, including Christian Scripture (Chapter 1), Plato's Timaeus (Chapter 2), and the debates among Middle Platonists concerning Aristotle's criticism of Plato's cosmogony (Chapter 3). Torchia contends in Chapter 1 that Scripture attests both the correlativity of creaturely contingency and divine sovereignty and that God's creation is invested with an intelligible purpose, to participate in the God who is its highest Good. In Chapter 2, Torchia takes the "beginning" of all things in Tim. 27d-69a as a point of departure to explore how Plato presents a teleological world in which true Being is immutable, cosmogony involves the mutability of this sensible world, and the changing world of Becoming we experience is good because of its participation in intelligible Being. In anticipation of the third chapter, Torchia presses the issue of the literal and metaphorical readings of Plato's Timaeus, contending that whereas the majority of Plato's successors took his claim that the world came into being (γέγονε) metaphorically, Aristotle read Plato literally, which conflicted with his own view that the world is eternally existent, without beginning or end. Chapter 3 then charts the Middle Platonists who uphold the "majority opinion," siding with Aristotle on the eternal world while referring to Plato to speak of causal principles that explain its order (e.g., Alcinous, Apuleius), and those who maintain a temporally originated universe (e.g., Plutarch, Atticus). As he turns to consider the early patristic reception of these sources, Torchia alerts readers to an important issue often underappreciated in such studies, namely, the problem of "meaning variance" in the unwarranted conflation of creation as ordering disorder with creation as bringing being out of non-being (64–65). The second part of the book attends to the theology of creation and the relation of God to the world in Hellenistic Judaism and the Apostolic Fathers, finding in these sources both the conflicted reception of the biblical text and Plato's Timaeus and the undeniable anticipation of later developments among the Greek apologists of the second century. In Chapter 4, Torchia treats the creation account according to Philo Judaeus, showing how Philo's reading of Genesis as a Middle Platonist enabled him to function as a point of contact between Hellenistic and Judeo-Christian thought and a model for how to incorporate Plato's Timaeus and Genesis (among other scriptural texts) in a satisfactory account of the beginning of all things. Chapter 5 prepares the [End Page 447] way for the final part by considering the Apostolic Fathers' affirmations...