From: Carl W. Conrad (cwconrad@artsci.wustl.edu)
Date: Fri Feb 23 1996 - 13:39:45 EST
On 2/22/96, Stephen C Carlson wrote:
>
> Carl W. Conrad wrote:
> >On 2/21/96, Stephen C Carlson wrote:
> >> I can dig up the references if anyone would like, but the Greek physician
> >> Galen (late second century) criticized the creation EX NIHILO doctine of
> >> the "followers of Moses" (i.e., both Jews and Christians). So maybe that
> >> helps to narrow down when the doctrine emerged (i.e., it is not a modern
> >> view).
> >
> >Stephen, this would be very helpful, as I'm getting increasingly fascinated
> >by this question. I'm finding some interesting stuff in Louw-Nida on POIEW
> >and KTIZW as well, but it seems to me that what it says about KTIZW is
> >questionable. I'd like to check your Galen reference if you can find it and
> >see (a) if he refers to a Jewish/Christian source in particular, and (b)
> >what language he uses to refer to the doctrine.
>
> I went back to my reference, Robert L. Wilken, THE CHRISTIANS AS THE
> ROMANS SAW THEM (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984) pp 83-93, and
> it appears that I missed a crucial nuance in his chapter on Galen.
>
> Galen did not explicitly criticize the creation EX NIHILO, but rather
> criticized the Christian and Jewish belief that God created the world
> out of an (arbritrary) act of volition. De usu partium 11.14. This
> belief was the immediate precursor to creation EX NIHILO, and around
> the time of Galen, according to Wilken, there was no fixed
> interpretation of Genesis 1:1. On one hand there was Justin Martyr
> (1 Apol. 10, 20) holding to the Platonic views, but on the other hand
> there was Theophilus' first mainstream formulation of creation EX NIHILO
> (EC OUK ONTWN, ad Autol. 2.4) written about the same time as Galen's De
> usu. Shortly before Theophilus, the Gnostic Basilides also formulated
> a creation EX NIHILO doctrine (second quarter of the second century), but
> his influence on mainstream Christianity is uncertain.
I cite Stephen's post from yesterday because it sets the frame for what I
expect to be my last contribution to this thread which Will Wagers started
a few days ago. I've found it fascinating, I don't doubt that some have
found it boring, others exasperating. I want to thank David Moore for
putting up that thread from B-Hebrew on the question of Genesis 1:1-2 and
how it is to be understood. I have to say that that thread challenges my
very meager bit of Hebrew; I will say also that I agree that there's been
no real satisfactory answer to David's question about verse 2 beginning
with WAW. It appears to me that there are sufficient reasons to trip the
balance for understanding that text as one may prefer to read it as
implying absolute creation or creation out of pre-existent substance.
Probably more important for the question of the emergence of a CREATIO EX
NIHILO doctrine is the Greek text. The LXX reads Genesis 1:1 as a separate
sentence, EN ARXHi EPOIHSEN hO QEOS TON OURANON KAI THN GHN. Louw-Nida have
interesting notes on POIEW and KTIZW: POIEW, they say, is to create a
product out of a raw material; KTIZW, however, is the preferred word in the
NT texts for God's creative activity; without quite saying so directly,
they imply by contrast with POIEW that KTIZW should refer to creating out
of nothing. It is certainly conceivable that that's the way the NT writers
meant to use KTIZW, but I personally rather doubt that they were thinking
in terms of any explicit doctrine of a modus operandi of God's creation
other than that God's SOFIA or LOGOS was the agent of God's creating--a
doctrine developed in the Hellenistic Jewish Wisdom tradition.
I think it should be obvious that both POIEW and KTIZW are metaphorical
verbs when applied to God's creation. POIEW is problematic because it DOES
imply a pre-existent matter; that could be a reason for preferring the verb
KTIZW, which BAGD and Louw-Nida both emphasize as the regular NT verb for
"create"--although neither notes that the original sense of KTIZW is
"found" or "establish a colony." I don't think we get a metaphysical
doctrine of creation clearly stated when we use terms that are clearly
metaphorical.
I thought it worth checking Philo's De Opificio Mundi, as I have noted
before--and I have commented on that before. Philo works with the LXX text
and also with the Hellenistic Jewish Wisdom tradition in the background.
Although he uses the verb POIEW which he takes directly from the LXX text,
it is ironic to me that he begins his account of creation with an elaborate
image of a Hellenistic city-builder (he may very well have in mind the
splendid plan and construction of Alexandria itself) who carefully draws
out IN HIS MIND (whether or not "on paper") a formal scheme of the city's
layout--a Platonic idea of the city--and then produces it on the spot. That
is to say, Philo is actually thinking of the process of creating as the
work of a KTISTHS in the original Greek sense of that word--not in the
specialized NT sense of "creator."
I cited Stephen Carlson's post to me from yesterday above because his
citation from Robert Wilken brought us another interesting phrase:
> . On one hand there was Justin Martyr
> (1 Apol. 10, 20) holding to the Platonic views, but on the other hand
> there was Theophilus' first mainstream formulation of creation EX NIHILO
> (EC OUK ONTWN, ad Autol. 2.4) written about the same time as Galen's De
> usu. Shortly before Theophilus, the Gnostic Basilides also formulated
> a creation EX NIHILO doctrine (second quarter of the second century), but
> his influence on mainstream Christianity is uncertain.
As I recall, Edward Hobbs? (My thanks or apologies to whoever actually
deserves the praise or blame for bring it up) also cited a II Maccabees as
referring to a creation EC OUK ONTWN. Will Wagers responded that that's
just another instance of "creation out of no-thing" rather than creation
out of NOTHING--in that sense I tried to sketch a couple days ago of a
substrate termed by Plato MH ON and by Aristotle PRWTH hULH--completely
unintelligible, formless "pure possibility."
Well, I have found it lurking in the instances cited in BAGD under KTIZW;
it is Shepherd of Hermas, Vision 1.1.6:
hO QEOS hO EN TOIS OURANOIS KATOIKWN KAI KTISAS EK TOU MH ONTOS TA ONTA
KAI PLHQUNAS KAI AUCHSAS hENEKEN THS hAGIAS EKKLHSIAS AUTOU ...
Here it is not EC OUK ONTWN but EK TOU MH ONTOS--it is Plato's very term
for the antithesis of Being which is the foundation of Aristotle's "prime
matter."
I mentioned also the other day that my colleague Patout Burns had said that
the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo had emerged actually from an attempt to
solve the problem of evil. I think it is worth pointing out that St. Thomas
solves that problem by equating evil with "not being." It is not created by
God; yet it has some sort of demonic potency.
This is not really the dualism that one wants to combat by means of the
CREATIO EX NIHILO doctrine. As I argued a couple days ago, there is no
intent to undercut the faith-proposition that there is no creation that is
not attributed to God in this assertion. Rather it is a paradox--and we can
have no theology without paradoxes unless we push Calvinistic assumptions
to the point that we deny freedom of the will altogether in order to make a
wholly rational world-order. Most of us, I think, affirm BOTH God's
pre-conditioning AND human freedom to choose--although it is impossible to
square the two points rationally. I think that the doctrine of CREATIO EX
NIHILO likewise involves a self-contradictory proposition: we are caught on
the horns of a dilemma, asking, "is nothing really nothing--or is nothing
something after all?" And I suspect we may have to end up saying it's both.
In sum, it seems to me that believers in the sovereignty of the God of
Israel were drawn inevitably into the web of Hellenistic speculation as
they encountered the perils and possibilities of Greek cosmological
speculation. They embraced in part the Zoroastrian mode of dealing with the
problem of evil and postulated a Satan opposing the power of God, but
making him a fallen angel rather than a dualistic counter-power, and so in
theory preserving the notion of God's creative sovereignty. But they also
embraced in part Greek conceptions of creation: the Platonic model of thee
DHMIOURGOS or artisan crafting a finished product out of a raw material or
the Philonic model of the founder of a city, who conceives his blueprint of
a human community as a KOSMOS and proceeds to execute it in space and time.
They intended to do this without infringing upon the sovereignty of God,
but they couldn't really escape the paradox that KTISIS is rooted in,
shaped, molded, or bulldozed out of--NOTHING. And I suppose this also has
theological implications: we have no being at all, but for the creative and
redeeming love of God.
Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University
One Brookings Drive, St. Louis, MO, USA 63130
(314) 935-4018
cwconrad@artsci.wustl.edu OR cwc@oui.com
WWW: http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~cwconrad/
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