Creation
The doctrine of creation from nothing, known through Genesis, which demonstrates God's omnipotent power and is the foundation of the biblical account of origins. From the beginnings of the world and the enterprise of creating it from nothing, we measure the omnipotent power of its Author.
Preface and Praise of Sacred Scripture
-
Section One
— From the beginnings of the world and the enterprise of creating it from nothing, we measure the omnipotent power of its Author.
"from the very beginnings of the world and from the enterprise of creating it from nothing, we measure the omnipotent power and energy of its Author"
-
I. The Old Testament Establishes Faith
— From Genesis we know the world's beginning, creation, and Creator: "by faith we believe that the ages were fashioned by the word of God."
"Whence, I ask, do we know the world's beginning, creation, and Creator, unless because by faith we believe that the ages were fashioned by the word of God?"
-
Chapter II: On the Object and Breadth of Sacred Scripture
— The work of the six days, treated by St. Thomas and the Scholastics, clearly derives from Genesis chapter 1.
"those things which are treated in the First Part concerning God's essence and attributes, predestination, the angels, man, and the work of the six days (all of which clearly derives from Genesis chapter 1)"
Chapter I (The Six Days of Creation)
-
He Created
— God created heaven and earth from nothing, by Himself alone, according to His eternal idea, and because He is good.
"HE CREATED -- properly, that is, from nothing, from no pre-existing matter. So that holy mother of the Maccabees, 2 Macc. ch. 7, says to her son: "I beg you, my child, to look at the heaven and the earth, and at all that is in them, and understand that God made them from nothing.""
-
He Created
— God created not from need but from goodness, to communicate His goodness to the world and mankind.
"Fourthly, He created the heaven, not because He needed it, but because He is good, and because God willed by this means to communicate His goodness to the world and to mankind: for it was fitting that good works should come from a good God, says Plato, and after Plato, St. Augustine, book XI of The City of God, ch. 21."
-
He Created
— In Scripture, "to create" means to make something from nothing, as distinct from pagan usage.
"in Sacred Scripture, 'to create,' when it is said of those things which before in no way existed, means to make something from nothing."
-
God (Elohim): Thirteen Definitions
— The four causes of creation: material cause is nothingness; formal cause is the form of heaven and earth; efficient cause is God; final cause is our good.
"These therefore are the four causes of creation and of creatures, namely of heaven and earth: the material cause is nothingness; the formal cause is the form of heaven and earth; the efficient cause is God; the final cause is the good, not of God, but ours."
-
He Created
— The errors of philosophers refuted: Strato (world ungenerated), Plato and Stoics (from eternal matter), Peripatetics (from necessity of nature), Epicurus (by fortuitous collision of atoms).
"Hence it is clear, first, the error of Strato of Lampsacus, who imagined that the world was ungenerated and had existed of its own power from eternity. Second, the error of Plato and the Stoics, who said that the world was indeed created by God, but from eternal and unbegotten matter"
-
He Created
— The world itself, by its orderly mutability and beauty, proclaims that it was made by God.
"The world itself, by its most orderly mutability and mobility, and by the most beautiful appearance of all visible things, proclaims in a certain silent manner both that it was made and that it could not have been made except by God, who is ineffably and invisibly great, ineffably and invisibly beautiful."
-
He Created
— God created by commanding and saying; by the same power He could create many more worlds or annihilate this one.
"God created heaven and earth by commanding and saying: Let there be heaven and earth, as is expressly stated in IV Esdras, vi, 38, and Psalm xxxii, verse 6: "By the Word of the Lord the heavens were established;""