-
BOOK ONE: Creation or the Everlasting Foundation of Things
- University of Wisconsin Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
123 BOOK ONE CREATION OR THE EVERLASTING FOUNDATION OF THINGS G OD spoke. That comes second. It is not the beginning . It is already the fulfillment, the audible fulfillment of the mute beginning. It is already the first miracle. The beginning is: God created. God created. This is what is new. Here, the shell of the mystery breaks. Everything we knew about God till now has been only knowledge of a hidden God, of a God who hid both himself and his life in his own mythical domain, in a citadel of gods, a mountain of gods, a heaven of God. This God whom we knew was coming to an end. But God the Creator is in the beginning. In the beginning. What seemed to be an end, God’s vitality, reverses itself into a beginning. Here again, God’s birth from out of the foundation, his creation before the Creation, will appear as the prediction of his Revelation. For what is the difference between promise and fulfillment? Isn’t it that the former remains still, finished, immovable, whereas the latter happens, or rather: intervenes? From promise to fulfillment, then, nothing has changed: the content of the promise and the phases of the fulfillment are one and the same thing; only, that which was finished is reversed to become beginning. But through this, the pieces that contribute to finishing the content of that which is finished are reversed and become the prediction of the event that emerges from what is finished, having become beginning again. As already stated, this reversal can be externalized only as inversion of the two first original words. That which came out as Yes appeared as No, and vice versa, just as we unpack things we put into a suitcase in the order that is opposite to how we packed them. As trivial as the comparison might sound, we must not take it any less seriously. For if the birth from out of the foundation is disassociated in these actions, and especially in the first two, they do not develop dialectically such that the second would emerge from the first; the No is not the “antithesis” of the Yes; on the contrary, facing the nothing, the No has the same imme- PART TWO: BOOK ONE 124 diacy as the Yes; and for its confrontation with the Yes, it does not presuppose the Yes itself, but only the emergence of the Yes from out of the nothing. The enormous importance of this equally immediate relationship of both acts to their origin, the importance, consequently, of the opposition between the method used here and the dialectical method, can be clearly seen only in the developments to come in this Part. But the perfect applicability of the comparison with packing a suitcase and so also of the comparison with the subsequent unpacking, has its basis here. IN God’s creating as the beginning of his self-externalization, his divine power that flowed into his vitality with the primordial No is thus externalized. But this power, which came from his divine freedom, hence from his primordial No, now emerges otherwise, no longer as No, but as Yes. As Yes, so not as singular “act” that is torn from God in a spasm of self-negation, but as quiet, infinite “attribute” whose essence is shown in that which lasts. The figure of God, until now hidden in the metaphysical beyond of myth, steps into the visible and begins to light up. The figure of God—for what else is it if not a figure, that which allows us to say that he has an essential “attribute.” It is the only attribute; all else that lays claim to this name does so wrongly, as we shall see. Before his emergence from himself, God cannot have any attributes at all; for the attribute is something outside in relation to which the bearer of the attribute is something quite simply inside, that is to say something that externalizes itself only in the attributes. At any rate, this attribute includes in it that which is rightly designated otherwise as an attribute of God. What is power once it has become attribute? We have already said it: no longer singular act, no longer arbitrariness, but essence . God the Creator is essentially powerful. His creative work is therefore omnipotent, without being arbitrary act. The God who is visible in Creation can do all that he wills; but he wills only what he must will by nature. In...