KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 10 September
And God said … and God saw that it was good
It is a recurring refrain that frames the first Chapter of The Book of Genesis and opens us out to the mystery of existence. As Meister Eckhart (early 14th c.), following a long tradition of philosophical inquiry into the nature of things, notes, “creation is the conferring of existence”, following the pagan neo-Platonic philosopher Proclus’ proposition that “all beings” – every that exists – “proceeds from one First Cause” (5th c.). Heady stuff but that is really what the account of creation in the first Chapter of Genesis is really all about. It is about the intellectual principle upon which all knowing and being depend. Wow.
How do we think nature, and, indeed, how can we think at all? Is there only one way to think the natural world and, by extension, our place within it? Is ‘modern science’, whatever we mean by that, the only way to think nature? Is ‘religion’, whatever we mean by that, the only way to think about reality? It would be a huge mistake, I think, to suppose that modern science negates religion or that religion negates modern science; in short, that there is only one way to think nature, only one way to think period. In a way, Genesis opens us out to the very assumptions that underlie the possibilities of our thinking and knowing anything. The Genesis account understood philosophically identifies a principle essential to our activity as students and learners. We can only think and come to know anything if things are in principle knowable.
We begin with God, with what can be called an intellectual principle. Everything is in God and comes from God. The great Jewish philosopher, Philo of Alexandria, writing in the time of Jesus, and drawing directly upon Plato and Aristotle, emphasizes “that in all existing things there must be an active cause … and that the active cause is the intellect of the universe,” echoing Plato’s idea of a world soul. Creation is in the mind of God first, as it were, and only then made perceptible to the senses; the sensible world as modeled upon the intelligible idea. The world has its origins in “that good which is founded in truth”. For the metaphysical traditions primacy is given to formal cause in order to explain the ‘what-it-is’ of things, not material, efficient, or even final cause. As Boethius (6th c) expresses it, God “bear[s] the beauteous world in [his] mind and form[s] it to be like that image.”
Genesis 1 is not science however much it belongs to the possibilities of science, both ancient and modern. It is a poetic and philosophical way of thinking. It presents us with an ordering intellectual principle. “When creation was begun, when God spake and it was done,” as the hymn we sang on Monday and Tuesday puts it. God speaks creation into being. But “unlike us,” as Eckhart notes, “God’s speaking is his making and also unlike us his speaking is the cause of the entire work and its parts.” After all, we too only come after.
