“Creatio ex nihilo” and the Theology of St. Augustine: The Anti-Manichaean Polemic and Beyond by N. Joseph Torchia, O.P. (review)

496 BOOK REVIEWS and contingency almost as the dominant formal element of the universe in which we live, there is no getting around the fact that difficulty, particularly as exemplified in the virtue of courage, will become a mainstay of our consideration of the ethical project associated with Thomas. Marquette University Milwaukee, Wisconsin MARKJOHNSON "Creatio ex nihilo" and the Theology of St. Augustine: The Anti-Manichaean Polemic and Beyond. By N. JOSEPH TORCHIA, 0.P. New York: Peter Lang, 1999. Pp. 312. $49.95 (cloth). ISBN 0-8204-3775-1. Torchia explores creatio ex nihilo first as a doctrine in its own terms, as well as its background and development in Augustine's thought, and second as a doctrine that functioned in a pivotal way in the larger whole of Augustine's theology. He construes Augustine's theology as, in a way, a radical theology of creation. In this he largely succeeds, tacitly undoing certain theological cliches about Augustine along the way. The helpful introduction displays scriptural, patristic, and philosophical backgrounds, suggesting what access Augustine had to them and what use he may have made of them. Succeeding chapters trace the development of the doctrine of creation in the context of the development of Augustine's antiManichaean polemic. Chapter 1 depicts the "anti-cosmic mentality of the Manichaeans" for whom the visible universe "was but a painful (albeit necessary) stage in the process whereby Light would ... be liberated from its imprisonment in matter" (78-79). Chapter 2 treats Augustine's exegesis of Genesis, focusing on the crucial issue of "God's action in creating and forming matter" (98). Christianizing the Platonic doctrine of creation meant distinguishing creatio ex nihilo from the Timaeus's doctrine of the formation of pre-existent matter, and from the Neoplatonic doctrine of the cosmos as a great continuum in which "'creation' amounts to the emergenceofthe different levels of the One's power and goodness" (111). For Augustine, creation establishes God's independence of all else that is. The "expression of the unconstrained Divine will," its motive is only "God's love of what He wills to create" (117). Augustine's exegesis becomes increasingly Trinitarian; by the De Genesi ad litteram he places his theory ofcreatio ex nihilo "squarely in a moral context," by interpreting formatio as a kind ofconversio or imitatio analogous, on the level of created being, to the eternal unity of Father and Son. (An BOOK REVIEWS 497 important corollary might be that we cannot understand scriptural teaching on creation apart from our own growth in conversion.) Augustine's exegesis of Genesis establishes the sovereignty of God as Creator, with goodness correlative to being, and evil simply a corruption of being, non-existent in its own right, contrary to the Manichaean cosmogony and theodicy (chapters 3 and 4). Since evil can manifest itself only in relation to good things, it cannot assume an ontological priority enabling it to "shape and dominate" (153) what God creates, as the Manichaeans believed. Torchia, following Bonner, explains that the doctrine of evil as a corruption of the good is not strictly speaking Plotinian, as commonly believed, but represents a development. Plotinus links evil with matter, unformed and on its own, farthest from the One on the continuum of being, an ontological deficiency characterized by lack more than by being. There is, in effect, a substantiality to evil as a necessary terminus of an ontological continuum (174), a necessary stage in the emanation and return of being to its source (182). Augustine departs from this scheme because he "completely separated evil from matter" and so "imparted a more thoroughgoing negativity to evil as an absence (in varying degrees) of being itself" (174). In creatures in their original condition, evil exists only as the negativity of the lack of the higher perfection of unchangeability proper only to something not created from nothing, namely God. Torchia calls this negativity "metaphysical evil," carefully qualifying his usage to distinguish it from the position that evil has any substantiality (175). Chapter 5 demonstrates the position of creatio ex nihilo in Augustine's defense of monotheism, preparing the reader for an extensive treatment of the foundational role of the doctrine of creation in Augustine...