Political Philosophy and the God of Abraham

CHAPTER TWO: Creation and the Meaning of Divine Omnipotence

29 chapter two Creation and the Meaning of Divine Omnipotence In teaching us, at the outset, about the creaturely character of the heavens and the earth and everything that they contain, the Bible ignores, or does without, what the Greek philosophers have taught us for centuries to speak of as ‘‘nature’’ (fúsiw; physis). This silence signifies the denial of the very possibility of what philosophic science means by knowledge. Creation renders self-destructively delusive the life consumed in the love of such knowledge. For this life and love is constituted by the deeply gratifying, progressive discovery of the unaltering and unalterable attributes and causal relations that define the beings that make up our perceived world. But the opening of the Bible implies that all such apparent insight is not merely incomplete (as philosophic science readily admits ) but superficial and unsteady; what is truly at work in every single thing we experience is the expression of an unfathomable and totally autonomous will: He therefore moves His whole creation by a hidden power, and all is subject to this movement: the angels carry out commands, the sidereal things revolve, the winds blow now this way, now that, a deep pool seethes with tumbling waterfalls and mists forming above them, meadows come to life as their seeds put forth the grass, animals are born and live their appropriate lives according to various appetites, the evil are permitted to try the just—God unfolds the ages which he laid up in creation when He first founded it; and they would not be unfolded to run their course if He who founded those things ceased to administer with His provident motion . [Augustine Genesis XII 5.20.41] In the entire scope of the Torah there are only miracles, and no nature or custom. . . . [A]ll the assurances of the Torah concerning those blessings [which will result from the observance of the law], and all the good fortune of the righteous ones because of their righteousness, as well as all the prayers of our king David [in the book of Psalms] and all our prayers, all are founded upon miracles and wonders, except that there is no heralded change in the nature of the world, as I have already mentioned, and I Political Philosophy and the God of Abraham 30 will explain yet further, with the help of God. [Nachmanides Commentary on Genesis ad 46:15 (pp. 556–57)]∞ As Augustine and Nachmanides are well aware, philosophic science in general, and Socratic/Platonic science in particular, frames the fundamental issue in its classic form by asserting the eternity of nature or of the natural whole.≤ The deepest import of this insistence is suggested by the pregnant declaration of Averroës that ‘‘the philosophers only call the world eternal in order to safeguard themselves against the kind of creation which is from something, in time, and after a state of non-existence’’; for once creation in this sense is accepted, ‘‘then anything whatever might proceed from anything whatever, and there would be no congruity between causes and e√ects.’’≥ Or in Pierre Bayle’s acuminate words, Continue to assure yourself as much as you wish that, according to the notions that Logic gives us in the chapter On Contraries, a human is not a rock; only take care not to assure yourself, as Aristotle would have done, that it is impossible that a human be a rock. Would not Aristotle have assured himself that it is impossible that God be born of a woman; that God su√er cold and heat; that God die; that God, in a word, be man? And would he not have been mistaken in this assertion? Now, as soon as one knows that the contradiction between the concept of God and the concept of a human does not prevent one of these being truthfully predicated of the other, must one not say that nothing stands in the way of a human and a rock becoming, the one the subject, the other the attribute, of a very truthful a≈rmation?∂ As Augustine stresses, ‘‘Since it was not impossible for God to institute whatever he wished, therefore it is not impossible for him to change, in whatever way he wishes, those natures that he instituted.’’∑ ‘‘Within the limits of our human weakness we can know what might be in the nature of a being we have observed by experience in so far as past time is concerned; but with regard...