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5 Creation and the Light of God In the last chapter we investigated what it means for God to be understood as light, both as an essential attribute and as one that is appropriated to the different Persons, primarily the Son. This chapter will focus on the variety of ways in which God expresses his light in creation and how it is found most intimately in the form of intelligible light in angels and humans. For Aquinas, a God who is light in his essence will manifest that light in a multitude of ways. The nature of corporeal light is to diffuse itself over as much area as possible; likewise, God expresses goodness and light throughout creation. Creation and Corporeal Light If “God is light and there is no darkness in him,” as we have just argued and as the writer of 1 John claimed, then we would expect God’s creation to be resplendent with his light. Indeed, creation itself reveals great truths to us about God in the same way that any piece of art or careful craftsmanship reveals something about its maker. By being attentive to the created world we have one basic means to understand something about God, so that we know God in this life, inasmuch as we know the invisible things of God through creatures, as it says in Romans (1:20). And so all creation is a mirror for us; because from the order and goodness and multitude which are caused in things by God, we come to a knowledge of His power, goodness and eminence. And this knowledge is called seeing in a mirror.1 Mirrors, of course, need light for us to see in them, and in this sense the corporeal light that God provides is a gift that makes all of creation manifest 1. In I Cor. 13.4 §800. 135 to us; without the ability of telescopes to collect in their mirrors light from all over the known universe we would know much less of the beauty and diversity of creation. A mirror, however, does not give one a perfect vision of what is seen, and this was especially true in Aquinas’s day, where the mirrors lacked the clarity that ours have. So while creation can reveal important truths about God to us, as Aquinas sees it, that still leaves many important truths unknown to us, for creation can only reveal to us what is true about God inasmuch as God is “the principle of all existing things.”2 Nevertheless, we can see in Aquinas’s account of creation that there are a variety of ways that light appears—in the distinction between good and evil, in the very act of the creation of light in the production of corporeal creatures, in the absence of a creation of darkness, in our participation in the light, in God’s providential governance of creation, in miracles, and even in the light of heaven and the darkness of hell. We will look at each of these in turn. LIGHT IN THE DISTINCTION BETWEEN GOOD AND EVIL After giving a thorough account of the mystery of the Trinity at the end of the treatise on God in the Summa, Aquinas turns his attention to the creation of the universe by God. He begins this section of the Prima Pars with a general description of creation and then turns to the distinction of things, that is, how we come to have diverse objects in this world, and he divides those distinctions into two sets: 1) the distinction between good and evil (QQ. 48–49), and 2) the distinction between spiritual beings (QQ. 50–64) and corporeal beings (QQ. 65–74). The distinction between good and evil might seem like an odd way to begin with the distinctions in creation, when the distinction between spiritual and corporeal beings would seem to be more fundamental to us. Yet again Aquinas seems to have the Cathar heresy fully in his sights in organizing this section, since by Cathar teaching, the creation of corporeal things was caused by an evil principle. As Aquinas understands it, the Manicheans misunderstood this [John 18:36], and said that there were two gods and two kingdoms; there was a good god, who had his kingdom in a region of light, and an evil god, who had his 2. ST I 32.1: “Humans cannot obtain the knowledge of God by natural reason except from creatures. Now creatures lead us to the...

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