Aquinas on Creation and Preambles of Faith

1 The Thomist 78 (2014): 1-36 AQUINAS ON CREATION AND PREAMBLES OF FAITH JOHN F. WIPPEL The Catholic University of America Washington, D.C. OBERT SOKOLOWSKI is well known for having emphasized in some of his writings what he has called the “Christian distinction.” By this he is referring to the Christian understanding of the distinction between God and the world. At the risk of oversimplification, I will here quote from a description he offers of this in his The God of Faith and Reason: In Christian belief we understand the world as that which might not have been, and correlatively we understand God as capable of existing, in undiminished goodness and greatness, even if the world had not been.1 As he goes on to explain in the same context, while we recognize that the world exists, in acknowledging the Christian distinction we also recognize that the world might not have existed and that this would not have resulted in any loss in God’s greatness and his goodness. As Sokolowski nicely phrases this: “When God does create, there may be ‘more’ but there is no ‘greater’ or ‘better’.”2 Moreover, he points out that according to this distinction, God is not to be viewed as a part of the world but as totally distinct from the world. Nor, as we shall see below, are God and the world to be viewed as parts of some *This is an expanded version of a paper originally presented in a lecture series in honor of the 75th birthday of Robert Sokolowski sponsored by the School of Philosophy of The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. 1 The God of Faith and Reason: Foundations of Christian Theology, 2d ed. (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1995), 19. 2 Ibid. Also see the following chapters 3-5 for much more on the Christian Distinction. R 2 JOHN F. WIPPEL greater whole, at least not according to Robert Sokolowski, nor according to Thomas Aquinas, I would add.3 As the title of this article suggests, here I want to concentrate on Thomas’s overall understanding of creation and to determine which of his particular views about it are philosophical and which are theological, that is, held solely on the grounds of religious belief. It may prove to be the case that in his eyes some of them overlap, as it were, being included or implied in Christian revelation in some way, but also discoverable in principle and perhaps in fact by unaided human reason, and hence constituting what Thomas himself at times refers to as preambles of faith. In this sense I will be building upon a study I have published elsewhere entitled “Philosophy and the Preambles of Faith in Thomas Aquinas.”4 By “preamble of faith” Thomas has in mind a truth concerning God or the world that can be established by natural or philosophical reasoning and that is in some way presupposed for faith or for making an act of faith. While such a preamble is not in itself an article of faith, it is logically implied by or presupposed for what is indeed an article of faith. As examples Thomas always cites our knowledge that God exists, usually also that he is one, along with other truths of this kind, a number of which he identifies for us in various texts, but without ever giving us a complete list.5 My purpose here, therefore, will be to determine what aspects of his under3 Ibid., 107. On Thomas’s refusal to include God under ens commune or under esse commune see the conclusion of the present paper. 4 See Doctor Communis: The ‘Praeambula Fidei’ and the New Apologetics, fasc. 1-2 (Vatican City: The Pontifical Academy of St. Thomas Aquinas, 2008), 38-61; reprinted as chap. 9 under the title “Thomas Aquinas on Philosophy and the Preambles of Faith,” in The Science of Being as Being: Metaphysical Investigations, ed. Gregory Doolan (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2012). Here I will cite the latter version since it contains some slight changes. 5 For an excellent text concerning this see Thomas, Super Boetium De...