- The Rationes Seminales in Augustine's Theology of Creation1
My substance was not hid from thee, when I was made in secret, and curiously wrought in the lowest parts of the earth. Thine eyes did see my substance, yet being unperfect; and in thy book all my members were written, which in continuance were fashioned, when as yet there was none of them. How precious also are thy thoughts unto me, O God! How great is the sum of them!
(Psalm 139:15–17; KJV)
The Challenge of Creatio ex nihilo
The classical Judeo-Christian account of creation, creatio ex nihilo, serves to cement the Creator–creature distinction. God creates something that is not God, something wholly other than himself: being that is finite, tending towards non-being, lacking stability and simplicity, in a word, that which is contingent. The doctrine of creatio ex nihilo, then, establishes a fundamental line of demarcation between the creature and the Creator.2 On the other hand, any account of creation must propose some account of the relation between Creator and creature. How to parse this relation? What is the character of divine action in creation? The doctrine of creatio ex nihilo is a stark rejection of the (only) two other ways of navigating the Creator–creature relation in creation: (1) God involves himself in time, in a realm of becoming and flux, such that he too is subject to the vicissitudes of becoming. (One variant of this position is the rather flatfooted "process theology" of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.) (2) [End Page 413] Creation is taken up into divine eternity, such that it is understood to be co-eternal. Here creation is an extension or profusion of the divine. This was the philosophically astute position of ancient cosmogonies, which understood finite being as an emanation and diminution of eternal being. Here one could point to a host of ancient philosophers (most famously Plotinus) and Christian theologians (most famously Origen) who understood God as a "benevolent and creative energy" who from eternity "fathers-forth whose beauty is past change."3
Augustine was acutely aware of the theological landmines lurking in the doctrine of creation. How to account for God's creative action in a way that avoids the Scylla of compromising divine transcendence and the Charybdis of divinizing creation? I propose that Augustine's theology of the rationes seminales articulated in De Genesi ad litteram allows him to avoid these two doctrinal pitfalls. Augustine carefully distinguishes between the rationes aeternae, the eternal ideas of all things that exist in the divine Word, and the rationes seminales. These latter rationes are the primordial "seeds" implanted in creation at the beginning of time. It is on account of the rationes seminales that the earth receives a certain "power" (virtutem) to produce and reproduce subsequent life. My contention is that Augustine's theology of the rationes seminales allows him to affirm with Genesis that creation was complete when God rested from his work. The payoff of this claim is that it avoids the first pitfall in the doctrine of creation, namely that God is immanent in his own creation. Augustine insists that God creates all things in an instantaneous moment when he implants the rationes seminales. This precludes an understanding of God creating (as a process), which would subject him to the time he creates. However, the rationes seminales also allow Augustine to affirm God's sustaining providential governance of his creation. God does not withdraw from his creation; through the rationes seminales he remains present, imbuing creation with his own life and being. After an exposition of Augustine's theology of the divine ideas (the rationes aeternae), I will argue that his conception of the rationes seminales allows him to articulate the expression of the divine ideas in time and space in a manner that neither compromises divine transcendence nor conceives of creation as a divine profusion. The rationes seminales express the divine teleological [End Page 414] governance of creation according to measure, number, and weight as well as the manner by which the creature participates in the eternal mensura, numerus, and pondus of God himself.
In response to a...