Creation Ex Nihilo: Thomas Aquinas on Creation and its Consequences | Prof. Corey Barnes

The Thomistic Institute

Christianity, Religion &Amp; Spirituality, Society & Culture, Catholic Intellectual Tradition, Catholic, Philosophy, Religion & Spirituality, Thomism, Catholicism

4.8 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 6 June 2022

⏱️ 58 minutes

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Summary

This lecture was given on March 31, 2022 at the University of Oklahoma. For more information on upcoming events, please visit our website at www.thomisticinstitute.org. About the speaker: Corey Barnes is an Associate Professor of Religion at Oberlin College specializing in scholastic thought from the 12th to the 14th centuries. His research areas include Christology, causation, creation, providence, knowledge of God, theological language, and scholastic receptions of classical, patristic, and late antique sources.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This talk is brought to you by the Tamistic Institute. For more talks like this, visit us at
0:06.6	tamistic institute.org. I'm going to speak tonight on Creation X. Nilo, Thomas Aquinas
0:15.5	on Creation and its Consequences. I'm going to try and walk slowly through things, but as you'll see, much of this is fairly technical.
0:23.6	So, but hopefully it will also be interesting, and you'll see the value of going through things in technical detail.
0:30.6	So, talk of creation conjures myriad images.
0:37.5	Many ancient Near Eastern creation narratives speak of conflict.
0:41.4	The world, as we see it, the very stuff of our material reality grew from dismembered pieces
0:48.0	of horrendous monsters.
0:50.2	These monsters were often inhabitants and representatives of a watery chaos subdued into dry compliance by God's waging fierce battles.
1:00.0	Genesis dispenses with the conflict and simply speaks of a primeval chaos ordered swiftly and benevolently through a divine word.
1:10.0	Genesis 1, 1 to 4 reads, quote, in the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth,
1:16.3	the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while the wind from
1:22.7	God swept over the face of the waters.
1:25.3	Then God said, let there be light, and there was light, and God saw
1:30.4	that the light was good. End quote. God's effortless, serene creative act in Genesis lacks the drama
1:38.9	of cosmic battles, but gains the drama of a divine command so singularly powerful as to speak the world
1:47.4	into ordered existence. Later traditions of interpretations read the narrative meaning of Genesis
1:53.8	to indicate yet a more profound level, yet a more radical idea. This came to be designated creation ex-Neilo or creation from
2:03.5	nothing. If this sounds anything less than radical to our years, we have misunderstood entirely.
2:10.6	The notion of creation ex-Nilo seemingly violates a long-standing conviction of classical philosophy, dating at least to the 5th century
2:20.1	BCE pre-Socratic Permanides. The conviction holds that nothing comes from nothing. Ex nihilo
2:27.5	nihil fit. Aristotle would repeat the formula in his physics, as would Lucretius in his De Rererardum
	...

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