Permanent Creation in Saint Thomas Aquinas

Abstract

The intellectual climate in which Aquinas matured was one of conflict. The arrival of the works of Aristotle in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries brought to the Christian West an awareness of the natural world as an integrated, self-sufficient entity. Aristotle, as the first historian of philosophy, expressed the Greek philosophical tradition that ‘from nothing nothing comes’, a challenge to the Christian notion of creation. Let us mark but a couple of sayings discoverable in the tradition. Heraclitus, for example, wrote: ‘This world order (the same for all) did none of the gods or men make, but it always was and is and shall be: an everlasting fire, kindling in measures and going out in measures. Empedocles is even more adamant in his refusal to entertain any notion of making from nothing: ‘Fools—for they have no far-reaching thoughts—who fancy that that which formerly was not can come into being or that anything can perish and be utterly destroyed.’ Aristotle’s position, although subtler than his predecessors’, is consonant with the tradition: ‘We ourselves are in agreement with them in holding that nothing can be said without qualification to come from nothing.’ To the ears of a growing population of Aristotelian disciples who equated Aristotle with truth, this seemed to amount to the philosophical denial of creation from nothing.This and other doctrines apparently incompatible with Christianity caused a reactionary movement among many theologians, and what was already a fairly well-established theological tradition became more explicit. It was argued that, since the world was created from nothing, it tends towards nothing and will, in fact, finally return to nothing.