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Aquinas and Augustine on Creation and God as “Eternal Being”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2024

Janet Soskice
Janet Soskice*
Affiliation:
Jesus College, Cambridge, CB5 8BL
*
Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

This paper considers the centrality of the doctrine of creation ex nihilo to both Augustine and Aquinas, especially as these pertain to knowing and naming God. It argues that too much has been ceded to Augustine's purported debt to neo-Platonism, and too little to the doctrine of creation as found in the Christian (and Jewish) middle-Platonists. In these thinkers God's self-disclosure from the burning bush was of signal importance, the ‘I AM WHO I AM’ glossed in terms of God's creative and redemptive power. The theme is traced through Augustine and Aquinas before returning the Christology of the Book of Revelation.

Keywords

CreationBeingGoodNamesChristologyBook of Revelation
Type
Original Article
Information
New Blackfriars , Volume 95 , Issue 1056 , March 2014 , pp. 190 - 207
Copyright
Copyright © 2014 The Dominican Council

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References

1 Turner, D., Thomas Aquinas: a Portrait (New Haven/London: Yale UP, 2013) p. 157Google Scholar.

2 Ryan, F., Formation in Holiness: Thomas Aquinas on Sacra Doctrina (Leuven: Peeters, 2007)Google Scholar.

3 For the chronology of Thomas's writings see Torrell, J-P., Saint Thomas Aquinas: Vol 1, Person and His Work (Washington D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1996) passimGoogle Scholar.

4 On this topic, see Schroot, Henk, Christ, the “Name” of God (Leuven, Peeters, 1993)Google Scholar.

5 “I am He that IS” (Ex 3.14), which is equivalent to “My nature is to be, not to be spoken.” (Philo, de Mut., II.12–13).

6 On this see Harrison's, Carol Rethinking Augustine's Early Theology (Oxford: OUP, 2006), p. 76 ffCrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 Augustine tells us that he read ‘very few’ of the books by Plotinus. See Rist, John, “Plotinus and Christian Philosopher” in ed by Gerson, Lloyd P., The Cambridge Companion to Plotinus (Cambridge: CUP, 1996) p. 405Google Scholar.

8 Ibid., p. 403, p. 387. Much of what is footnoted as referring to Plotinus, for instance, by Chadwick in his translation of the Confessions, could as readily be attributed to Christian middle-Platonists, or to Philo.

9 Fowden, Garth “Plotinus among the Christians” in Fowden, Elizabeth Key and Fowden, Garth, Contextualizing Late Greek Philosophy (Athens: National Hellenic Research Foundation, 2008), p. 141Google Scholar.

10 “Ever since the creation of the world his eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been understood and seen through the things he has made.” (Rom. 1.20).

11 Denys Turner argues with conviction that these “work”. Maybe so, but their placing in the Summa, which is after all a work written for Dominican novices and not as a piece of apologetics, is odd. Even if they do work, they are used in the text to do something else as well, that is, to introduce some primary attributes or, as I would prefer to say, some primary “divine names”.

12 On this, see Henk Schroot, op. cit., p. 76ff.

13 1a 13.11.

14 See Maurer, Armand, ‘St Thomas on the Sacred Name “Tetragrammaton”’ in Maurer, A. ed, Being and Knowing: Studies in St Thomas and Later Medieval Philosophers (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1998) p. 59Google Scholar.

15 Maimonides, Moses, Guide for the Perplexed, trans. Friedlander, M. (New York: Dover Publications, 1956), Part II, Chapter 13, p. 171Google Scholar.

16 J-P. Torrell, op. cit., p. 112.

17 Louth, Andrew, Denys the Areopagite (London: Continuum, 1989) p. 84ffCrossRefGoogle Scholar.

18 Maimonides, op. cit., pp. 154–6.

19 I have written more extensively on this, and also in criticism of Jean-Luc Marion's contentions about Augustine and “Being” in “Augustine on Knowing God and Knowing the Self” in eds.Oliver, Simon, Kilby, Karen, O'Loughlin, Tom, Faithful Reading: New Essays in Theology and Philosophy in Honour of Fergus Kerr O.P. (London: T&T Clark, 2012)Google Scholar.

20 I have seen a medieval font in Lucca with Christ centred in the burning bush. See also the Orthodox, and especially, Sinaitic icons of Mary as the burning bush, where the theotokos is sometimes pictured inside the bush, sometimes as containing it.

21 Here I am drawing on Richard Bauckham's excellent The Theology of the Book of Revelation (Cambridge: CUP, 1993)Google Scholar.

22 See R. Bauckham, ibid., p. 27.

23 R. Bauckham, op. cit., p. 27.

24 Augustine, per ipsum ad ipsum, City of God, XIII.24; Aquinas, S.T., Prologue before Question 1a.2.