The Lord Has Made All Things: Creatio Ex Nihilo and the Ecological Imagination

Josef Pieper’s insight into Aquinas’s metaphysics, that “createdness determines entirely and all-pervasively the inner structure of the creature,” applies equally to philosopher William Desmond.¹ For at the heart of Desmond’s metaphysical project lies a refusal to take creation for granted, a challenge to Bertrand Russell’s assertion that “the universe is just there, and that’s all.”² Desmond work aims at “renewing metaphysical astonishment before the enigma of being that was, and is, and always will be too much for us, in excess of our groping efforts.”³ This “enigma of being” arouses a sense of astonishment at creation’s givenness, “that it is,” and at creation’s contingency, for all that is “might not have been at all.”⁴ In short, Desmond resurrects the question of creation, exploring how asking “why something rather than nothing” can point beyond creation toward a Creator.⁵ Thus, the centrality of creatio ex nihilo: a doctrine maintaining the distinction between creation and Creator, grappling with creation’s nonnecessity and capturing a sense of astonishment at its existence.

While intending to respond to creation’s fragility, ecological initiatives frequently perpetuate a subject-object dichotomy between humans and creation; ecology is something humans must do for the environment. There is an irony in this, for even efforts to pique ecological sensitivities necessitate a mastery of nature, a grasping and framing of intending to preserve it. The irony: efforts to defend the earth require an exercise of power over it, an assertion of the conatus essendi to release the earth from our stranglehold. Desmond’s treatment of creatio ex nihilo, however, offers a path toward a nondominative ecological imagination. For Desmond, before the acquisitive drive of the conatus essendi, there is a more fundamental passio essendi, an undergoing of creation giving “beings to be before they can give themselves to themselves.”⁶ An imagination informed by creatio ex nihilo, awed by creation’s fragility and gratuity, has been tutored to view creation as robustly ecological, as a common oikos or home shared with all creatures.

In this oikos, Desmond and René Girard make interesting conversation partners. Each is critical of the modern “illusion of autonomy,”⁷ and Girard’s mimetic anthropology, grounded upon desire as “desire according to Another,”⁸ understands humans as socially constituted. Yet, Girard’s anthropology takes for granted the conatus essendi, the grasping at being, as the engine driving desire. Contrary to this, Desmond asserts that creatio ex nihilo uncovers a primordial and more fundamental passio essendi, a being given to be before any grasping. How might this insight into the passio essendi inform our understanding of human desire? Might a reawakening to the gratuity of creation hold the key to unlocking an increasingly pacific mimesis by cultivating an ecological imagination able to celebrate the gift of creation and to resist the urge to dominate it?

This essay records an effort to consider Girard’s mimetic anthropology in light of Desmond’s metaphysics. My goal is to develop a description of agapeic mimesis, of desire miming the Creative Other who creates both freely and agapeically. Agapeic mimesis may arise by rekindling a sense of astonishment at creation’s gratuity and fragility, an astonishment enshrined in and at the heart the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo. I suggest using this doctrine as a text for a sort of lectio divina, contemplating the question of origin: why is there something rather than nothing? If this question points us toward a Creative Other who creates lovingly, agapeically, then I believe our deepened mindfulness of this Creator might yield an ecological imagination able to perceive the whole of creation with an eye not to domination but to celebration.

Nothing Casts a Shadow

Desmond attempts to rekindle metaphysical mindfulness by provoking a sense of astonishment before the givenness of being. He deliberately chooses “astonishment” over Aristotle’s “wonder”: “wonder” bears the sense of prompting a quest for understanding, an achievement of knowledge. “Astonishment,” by contrast, intends to register the sense of overwhelming shock. The astonished subject is rocked...