Creation ex nihilo (1): The doctrine

what to expect and a Deleuzian beginning....

In my newsletters so far, I have attempted to lay out a thesis (roughly speaking that postmodern continental theology is shaped by its agonistic engagement with the scriptures of the Abrahamic monotheisms); spoken about basic ways of reading these scriptures (roughly speaking as invitations to intimate, embodied co-creation with their continuing unfolding sense); and opened up some issues that present immediately on reading the first verses of Genesis (roughly speaking the problem of dropping the name of God into a discourse; the problem of immanence versus transcendence, the problem of that God’s clear desire to interact erotically with humans not only within but outside the cult; and the problem of gender with respect to that creativity and intervention.)

I made a first pass at opening up the issues involved here in a previous post called “in the beginning, but it is time to take a closer look at the questions raised by the accounts of beginning in the Abrahamic scriptures, because for philosophers this is the primary foundational grounding move in the ontology of being in the judeo-christian traditions and the long train of construction and deconstruction in thought and analysis it has generated. As I have argued and will continue to argue, these texts are in generic terms less a statement of propositional truth than an invitation to a kind of thought experiment, with the promise that this thought experiment will be fruitful for devotional and spiritual life. “Surely there are signs in these for those who reflect,” as Surah Ar-Rad says.. They are, as I have tried to say — at least in operational terms — invitations, provocations really, to recapitulation and co-creation in the minds of their readers. They are hymns, chalisas, praise songs, not proof-texts for final philosophical conclusions on the one hand nor conceptual propositions to be hurled as rodomontads against modern science on the other. The initial response to these for the believer is what Jean-Luc Nancy calls adoration, not ratiocination and certainly not reification and idolatry of the letter.

That said, these scriptures are provocations to thought as well as devotion, and the formation of conceptual propositions may in fact be an important and legitimate part of the response to them. The God of Abraham clearly wants his humans to think, though not only to think. (And, of course, above all not to think that what we think is necessarily exactly what He thinks, or that thinking is sufficient to give us full access either to Him or to his creation independently of devotion and observance.) Hence, the standard doctrinal interpretations of these texts as they have emerged over time are important, and they have been highly productive both by impetus and by resistance in the work of postmodern philosophers.

In all three traditions, this response has consistently entailed engaging with the concept of creation ex nihilo. In light of this doctrine, Genesis 1:1-4 is taken to mean that nothing, or at least no form, pre-existed God’s creative act. To gloss this interpretation, we might say that this act came as it were out of the blue — except of course that God made blue in the first place. This is to say not simply that there was no pre-existent matter but that the creative act itself had (and for God at least continues to have) no causality, no necessity, no external constraint and no previous material base. That doctrinal formulation is by no means the only way of understanding these texts in the tradition, but it has been a primary one, and it was primary for Maimonides and for Aquinas and for several of the major theological schools of Islam (See the excellent article by Abdullah Galadri in Intellectual Discourse: https://philarchive.org/archive/GALCEN-2.; The notable exception in the Islamic case is Ibn Arabi and perhaps Averroes, though I leave it to experts to opine on this. )

Creation ex nihilo is then a concept that mainstream theology has derived from scripture and given perhaps a stronger reading that might have been intended. It is certainly a possible reading, but again it is not the only one.   The ex nihilo is already a second order concept, not one to read off the page; the activity of interpretation is at work here.  The necessity for this interpreting is not, however, a negative thing, nor is it due in any way to some insufficiency of scripture to say what it means, and insufficiency which must be rectified, with some embarrassment, by the scribe or scholar.  It is rather a prompt, an invitation, and for those who approach with the intent to establish contact with the divine, a mandate, of which the purpose is to drawn the human mind outside and beyond itself into a generative activity which does not stem from its representations.

The basis for this concept in the Jewish and Christian traditions, probably influential as well on Islam, is Genesis 1-4, which emerges from what scholars of the redaction history of the Hebrew Bible call the priestly source or P. In the context of that source, the original interpretation here seems to have been that God created the world not exactly ex nihilo, or at least not without equivocation, but indeed out of some pre-existent and perhaps chaotic soup of matter. The emphasis is not matter seen as inherently demonic or threatening, as in other creation stories of its historical context, but rather as neutral and eventually to be affirmed, as polarity itself is affirmed, as a value in the establishment of a system of differences conducive to life.

Critical Biblical scholarship here is to some extent supportive or at least patient of this early and eventually non-canonical view. According to Biblical scholar Gary A. Andersen (in his essay in a valuable volume called Creation ex Nihilo: Origins, Development, Contemporary Challenges edited by Anderson and Bockmuehl), the first three verses of Genesis in the original Hebrew are made up first of a set of subordinate clauses; they are not separate statements but qualifications designed to lead up to the main statement: “God… created” heaven and earth. etc. So a really careful translation might read: not “God created” but “When God set out to create” and “when the earth “was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the earth…” Then and only then did God say “let there be light.” The important point here is not that nothing preceded God’s creative act, but rather than this act was entirely free and did not arise, as in the parallel creation stories from Sumer for instance, from an antagonistic attitude toward darkness, formlessness, or ‘chaos,’ as it sometimes ambiguously called, but from a distinguishing between darkness and light while validating, so to speak, them both.

But this reading, if it were the original intention — which is still a question — very quickly gave rise, even in the scriptures, to a more radical, more counter-intuitive, and more bewildering one, one that has dominated the response ever since. As 2. Maccabees 7:28 puts it, “look at the heaven and the earth and see everything that is in them, and recognize that God did not make them out of things that existed.” This text too could go both ways: pre-existent matter but not things or no -prexistent matter at all, but the weight for most scholars falls on the latter, that is to say that this text is trying to insist on no pre-existence. Here is the scriptural seed of creation ex nihilo as the scholastics understood it: God made something out of absolutely nothing, period, exclamation mark, end of sentence.

This view seems to have first been conceptualized philosophically in the matrix of Second Temple Judaism, by then in extensive conversation with the intellectual energies of its surrounding Hellenistic cultures. The central problem to which the thinkers of the period tried to response was not, however, the question of ontology per se. The existence of gods, of deities, and of forces out with human mind and the human purview did not pose the kind of existential threat to human freedom, scientific progress and libertarian values that moderns tend to feel is at stake here. Not the existence of these entities but their power was the issue: the question of constraints and limitations on the creativity of deity of any kind. Was such a one bound by the laws of nature or not? Inside of and confined by temporality or not? Essentially a personality or only allegorically and mythologically so?

Plato was in the latter camp, placing the laws of truth, goodness and beauty above and beyond any specific creative act or its creator. Aristotle as well had on the whole no time for such musings, except to opine that there could never have been nothing, because why then would there be anything at all. For him everything is everlastingly in motion around an unmoved mover who is external to the created world but not in the sense either of a personal deity to be reckoned with or of a force prior to ontology and causality. Once installed as an axiom, so to speak, this external point of stability remans relatively inert and silent on the derivative operations over which it presides, which are his true object of study. Neither thought much about the ongoing role of a putative creator or unmoved mover in his system; such an entity, where it might be discerned, seems like a vestigial organ of sorts. Likewise these are not philosophies of the negative way; there is little or no lived sense here of the nihilo, the nothing before anything that is so operative in other philosophical and theologican traditions, Buddhism among them.

It is, however, pace the ancients, precisely this engagament with ‘nothing,’ like the invention of zero in mathematics, that enables thought to become productive in the reception of these texts. In terms of their reception, the minds of their readers tend to respond to this ‘zero’ or ‘nothing’ in two relatively antithetical ways: first, a sort of reeling back from this implied void and a population of it with the image of a force, entity or agency so outwith the universe and so heterodox, so ontologically distinct from it and yet so powerful that it can and does invent every phenomenon of that universe in a direct quasi-Aristotelian way, as first cause. This is the transcendental option, preferred in philosophy at least since Aquinas. (Whether or not this transcendental agency can be fully known, or whether it has a personalistic mode of expression, or whether its power and scope are limited or unlimited is a matter of debate. It can be figured in many ways, as Aristotle’s unmover mover, for instance, or as a humanoid Creator-God, or as Nature itself, these all seen as a causal force, whose vectors determine, at least in the last instance, the unfolding drama of life. )

The first of these options, the Creator-God option, is often associated in popular culture and theology with creationism, positing as it does a personal deity with what look a lot like humanoid attributes and intentions who invents and directs the unfolding of life as a kind of puppet-master from above. No other explanation for that life is needed or welcome than the perfection of His will, especially no explanation that relies on evolutionary biology. This view has the virtue of rational coherence, although at the expense of empirical observation and open inquiry; it leads to the reductive and largely sterile clash between ‘religion’ and ‘science’ that afflicts the chattering classes today. It has been a profound obstacle both to real science and real philosophy, and it has rightly drawn the ire of many defenders of science and speculation alike, Spinoza pre-eminent among them.

It is not, however, and has never been, the only way to understand the mode of a putative transcendental agency; there are many others, from Augustine to Kant and beyond, and there are cogent rebuttals of this understanding in all three monotheisms; most philosophers and theologians alike would call these rebuttals defintiive. So, although the creationist reading of Genesis persists in fundamentalist circles, in part because it is so scrutable, so human, and so approachable for believers, it will not detain us here.

Alternatively to any version of the transcendental view, the mind can reject this inscription and projection of a sometimes (though not always) personalistic agency into the empty space or void of the nihilo and embrace instead the notion of a divine energy arising from within the field of chaos itself and coming into form, much more along the lines of a machinic process (machinc in the technical sense Deleuze gives the term) than a humanoid one. This agency, too, can be personified; it is so in gnosticism, where it is called the Demi-Urge, but it is more usually seen as an impersonal force or process, an upwelling of creativity and generation from within chaos itself and driving its rise and fall into and out of form. This is the immanentist option, preferred in postmodernism, though not, as we shall see, without qualification.

One of the advantages of this immanentist reading is that it is, at least on first look, more friendly to current scientific cosmologies that bear on creation, to the big bang theory, to evolutionary biology, to the concept of emergence, to the mazes of complexity and chaos theories. Basically, in terms of intellectual mapping, this resistance to transcendent agency appear more conducive to thought and invention in these domains than are scholastic or popular accounts of a creator God who stands outside of the flow of time and the reifications of space, operating beyond and independently of to the material and embodied world.

 For Deleuze, for example, one advantage of this anti-transcendental view of causality is that it can underwrite the life sciences, which can both model an immanent view of creation and encourage its operations in our own thinking and experience. For Derrida, it can better accommodate the linguistic model of meaning making, where concept and invention emerge through a process of differentiation internal to the system of signification itself.  For Lacan, this push back against the transcendental signifier, which he genders as masculine in a way highly consonant with scriptures.  signifier, while never definitive, is essential to healthy psychic function. For Nancy, it constitutes the basis for all challenges to systems and regimes of thought that would foreclose the unknown and the new. And for Laruelle, all transcendental accounts of creation participate in the hubris of the elite and are designed to obscure the poverty and negative capability which is thought’s sole reliable virtue.

It is this notion of a generative, heterodox agency arising from outside all that can be otherwise known or experienced, a agency, somehow superior to its creation, that seems to many philosophers nothing more than a default, a way of shutting down thought and insulting humanity by appealing to a first cause so far outside and above our realm and so pretentious of superiority on this basis as to be not simply a fiction, but a dangerous, a debilitating, indeed an ethically and politically pernicious one.  For Spinoza, for instance, this fiction of an external God making and then operating on a passive world is the ultimate joy-killer as well as the killer of science, knowledge, and philosophy itself. 

One by one the philosophers we are tracking here announce their deep opposition to this vision of a transcendental agency. It is for them, as the herald of this critique Roland Barthes liked to point out, nothing more than the positing of a tyrannical Last Signifier, the final word, the ‘final solution,’ so to speak, with all the connotations of that phrase, of a scribal elite that wishes to shut down human freedom in the name of a perfect representation of truth after which there is nothing more to say.

Contemporary theologians often agree. Creation ex nihilo so understood is what the process theologian Catherine Keller — already cited in these pages and a generative and productive contemporary theologian but one with whom I and others disagree here — calls a phobic reading of Genesis 1. It is a reading based on the very fear of chaos, of the feminine, of cyclical patterns of flux and eternal return, of ongoing unfolding without telos of which it purports to deny the pre-existence. It is this fear which has generated, for Keller, a misconceived doctrine of God’s omnipotence which grounds little more than a ‘dominology,’ a charter for a capricious, controlling, patriarchal authority. (Cf. Keller’s The Face of the Deep.)

The alternative to this transcendental reading of scriptures is often thought to be a fully immanentist point of view: the insistence that creation does not spring from some agency external to its own process but from the generative unfolding of that process through a primal capacity for differentiation and through the interplay of differing possibilities which are activated and deactivated, moving into and out of manifestation and virtuality. One starting point for understanding and appreciating most postmodern philosophy is its general commitment to this fully immanentist point of view. This profound commitment was first expressed in philosophy by Spinoza, whose philosophy plants the seeds for for much of postmodern thought — more perhaps than is generally recognized.

Spinoza held, argued for, and celebrated the concept of an entirely immanent universe, divine in every aspect, and with divinity expressed in its every particle and every flow of mind and matter. This view obviated not only the notion of God as watchmaker, but any form of heteronomy, any ‘other’ or ‘outside’ view of first causes; God is fully expressed in nature with no remainder and no need of an appeal to a conventional view of divine agency as operating above, beyond and independently of mind and matter. Indeed for Spinoza such a view would be utterly misguided, leading only to dejection and despair, to what he called ‘the sad passions,’ rather than to that joy and ultimately that state of beatitude of which he spoke so movingly and with such deep love of life.

It is important, as Spinoza himself constantly argued, to be aware of the affect in reading these immanentist views. As Deleuze writes:

There is a double reading of Spinoza: on the one hand, a systematic reading in pursuit of the general idea and the unity of parts, but on the other hand, and at the same time, the affective reading without an idea of the whole, where one is carried along or set down, put in motion or at rest, shaken or calmed according to the velocity of this or that part. Who is a Spinozist? … Sometimes, certainly, the individual who works ‘on’ Spinoza, on Spinoza’s concepts, provided this is done with enough gratitude and admiration. But also the individual who, without being a philosopher, receives from Spinoza an affect, a set of affects, a kinetic determination, an impulse, and makes Spinoza an encounter, a passion.

 It is this set of affects, this kinetic determination, this celebratory liberation, that is the primary affect of the rejection of a transcendental reading of Genesis 1:1-4 in postmodern phlilosophy. Deleuze feels it, Derrida feels, it, Nancy feels feels, and we as their readers must catch at least a gust of this “wind,” as many have expressed their felt response to Spinozist ideas. But a fully immanent philosophy also has its constraints, its contradictions and its challenges. If the transcendental view lends itself to the anthropomorphizing of God and to insane corollaries (like the idea that he operates like a human patriarch, obsessed with His own power over his family and the perpetuation of his own name), the second, the immanentist view, can go in the direction of the divine as an abstraction, impersonal, imperceptible and attenuated to the point where this kind of agency can be erased altogether.

The first of these errors, the anthropomorphizing one, leaves us with a deity who operates something like we do at our worst: inventing things, sometimes out of whole cloth and then manipulating them to our own aggrandizement. The second, countervailing mistake is that of conceiving a deity so abstract that He has and can have no real speaking, loving and ethical relationship whatsoever with the cosmos, so that there is nothing to be done in His regard except hold one’s tongue or even foreclose any awareness of his putative presence whatsoever.

There is also the very challenging problem of the genuinely new, of which the source is hard to find if all arises from what has already arisen. If everything is implicit at least virtually or ab ovo in ‘what is,’ if there is no external principle or force of creation, then how and where can we avoid the trap of repetition? As I have noted this concern is primary for our philosophers, because of the doomed sense of fated return they associate with the political and religious violence of the holocaust.  Each of the figures under discussion here has a unique and interesting way out of this dilemma, and these are often elegant and inspiring. To a few of these constructs, those of Deleuze, Derrida and Nancy, we now turn.