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CHAPTER XVIII: HOW TO SOLVE THE OBJECTIONS AGAINST CREATION
FROM this we may see the vacuity of those who gainsay creation by arguments taken from the nature of movement and change: such as that creation must needs, like other movements and changes, take place in some subject, and that it implies the transmutation of non-being into being, like that of fire into air.
For creation is not a change, but the very dependence of created being on the principle whereby it is produced. Hence it is a kind of relation. Wherefore nothing prevents its being in the creature as its subject. Nevertheless creation would seem to be a kind of change according only to our way of understanding: in so far, to wit, as our intellect grasps one and the same thing as previously non-existent, and as afterwards existing.
It is clear however that if creation is a relation, it is a thing: and neither is it uncreated, nor is it created by another relation. For since a created effect depends really on its creator, this relation must needs be some thing. Now every thing is brought into being by God.[1] Therefore it receives its being from God. And yet it is not created by a different creation from the first creature which is stated to be created thereby. Because accidents and forms, just as they are not per se, so neither are they created per se, since creation is the production of a being, but just as they are in another, so are they created when other things are created.
Moreover. A relation is not referred through another relation,--for in that case one would go on to infinity,--but is referred by itself, because it is essentially a relation. Therefore there is no need for another creation whereby creation itself is created, so that one would go on to infinity.
- ↑ Ch. xv.
| Source: St. Thomas Aquinas, The Summa Contra Gentiles, trans. by The English Dominican Fathers from the latest Leonine Edition, Benzinger Brothers: New York, 1924. |
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