Cosmologies and Creation

I want to take a moment to articulate a few various worldviews or cosmologies:

First we will look to Plato. Plato assumed three eternal categories. The first is ‘form’, or the ‘model’. This category is typically referred to as ‘the forms’ or the ‘ideas’. Plato’s second eternal category is the ‘receptacle’, or unformed, shapeless and chaotic ‘matter’. The third category is the demiurge or the divinity “who does not create but shapes that which is of equal eternity with him.”[1] Thus, in the platonic worldview, the demiurge takes the shapeless and chaotic matter and creates the world according to the eternal forms. Everything is eternal. Creation (or the world we live in) is a reproduction or a representation of the eternal forms or ideas. Everything around us, including ourselves, is categorically lower or even denigrated in comparison with the eternal forms. All we have to do is think about his allegory of the cave to understand this separation of ourselves from the forms. (We can only see the shadows, not the forms/ideas themselves.) From this comes a dualism that prioritizes the non-material (or ‘spiritual’) over the material.

In a Christian worldview, God alone is eternal: always was and always will be. God creates ex nihilo (i.e., out of nothing). There is nothing co-existent with God and creation comes about from nothing outside of God’s abundant and loving creative activity. The duality set up in this worldview is that of Creator and created. There are no beings that mediate between the Creator God and the created order. As Basil puts it, there is an ontological homogeneity of the creation, for all things are, on an equal footing, created by God. There is distinction and variety of being rather than a hierarchy of being in this way of thinking. There is God’s reality and there is created reality; and these exist simultaneously without competition.

There is one more worldview that should be mentioned in this context, that of Plotinus or neoplatonism. In this worldview, there is one eternal category: the One, which is the source of all being. From the One flows all life, much like a fountain overflowing downwards. The farther “up” the fountain one was in this flow of being, the more divine, the farther down, the less divine. A number of heretical formulations of Christology, such as Gnosticism and Arianism, are really just variations of this hierarchical worldview. Gunton asserts that

Neoplatonism…held that reality formed a hierarchy or ladder, by climbing which it was possible to ascend to divinity. Thus one ascends through matter via higher forms of being like mind to the divine. This doctrine presupposed a fundamental dualism between the material or sensible and the spiritual or intellectual. It also presupposed the inferiority of matter to mind.[2]

This way of thinking has a huge impact on the Christian doctrine of the incarnation. How can God really come into space and time if the material world is inherently worthless or even evil? As Gunton argues:

If God in his Son takes to himself the reality of human flesh, then nothing created, and certainly nothing material, can be downgraded to unreality, semi-reality or treated as fundamentally evil.[3]

Also, how we construe the reality of the world around us shapes, in significant ways, our philosophy of the material of the world. If matter is necessarily imperfect or evil, why should we invest our lives and talents in the material world? Why should we work for peace or the good of all? If ‘spirit’, the ‘intellect’ or the ‘mind’ are really more ‘divine’, then, we can assume, we should spend our energies developing those human characteristics. Or, if this life and its materiality are really inherently flawed, then we should spend our energies evangelizing so that we can have a good afterlife somewhere else (i.e., heaven).

Instead, we are searching for a worldview that upholds the goodness of creation. God makes good. God declared the material order ‘good’. Thus, we are brought back to a more helpful duality that we want to develop: that of Creator and created. And, we want to somehow leave behind a hierarchical construal of reality; although this duality lies heavily within our language.

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[1] Gunton, Triune Creator [TC], 3 & 31. See Plato’s Timaeus.
[2] Obviously, this is a much more complicated concept. I am thinking about musical space here as a model for distinct yet simultaneous space. The triune Creator is not in competition with the creation. God is in relation, and does not have to be either completely immersed within the created order (immanentism; pantheism; panentheism) or absolutely other (deism). It is very difficult to hold together the concepts of particularity and oneness (unity); or of individuation and universality. Unity and diversity are concepts that are often construed as mutually exclusive rather than as mutually constitutive.
[3] Gunton, TC, 71.
[4] Gunton, TC, 52.