Participatory Metaphysics and Creation out of God
Christian tradition has uniformly both (1) rejected Aristotle’s eternity of matter and (2) insisted on creation ex nihilo rather than creation from pre-existing matter. Differences remained, however, on how exactly to understand the creator-creature relationship. Two streams of thought emerged within Christian tradition. One emerged from Augustine, which held on to Aristotelian prime matter as substratum, as a result of which creation ex nihilo over time became an instrument in defending the autonomy or independence of creation in relation to God. The other, which emerged via Irenaeus, Gregory of Nyssa, Dionysius, and especially Maximus the Confessor, held that creation is not only ex nihilo but also ex deo (ἐκ θεοῦ). Here, ex nihilo teaching served not to shore up the independence of creation but rather to limit it: it served as an anti-materialist argument and (in some forms) relied upon immaterialism.
We need both the notion of creation ex deo and Cappadocian immaterialism to sustain a genuinely participatory metaphysic. The Augustinian-Thomist approach relies unduly upon an Aristotelian-Plotinian view of matter. We should resist using creation ex nihilo to shore up the modern notion of nature as independent from God. The Christian teaching of creation ex nihilo opposes primarily the Greek—and especially Aristotelian—belief in the eternity of matter.
One cannot maintain both creation ex nihilo and God’s transcendence. These are self-refuting claims. One must maintain that creation ex nihilo is actually creation ex deo. Furthermore, creation ex deo as simply “participation in God’s energies” in some “inferior mode” is an attempt at asserting a false ontological distinction between God’s essence and energies, which is a metaphysical impossibility and a common misunderstanding of Gregory’s essence/energies distinction.
Ultimately, it must be seen that creation is none other than the energetic manifestation of God - the One appearing as the Many. This, however, is far from becoming the mainstream understanding of a Christianity that seeks to maintain its false, dualistic beliefs regarding God, man, and the cosmos.
Thank you Fr. For I have actually have been meditating on this very issue for a while, especially in some posts here where I was arguing, or trying to, a very similar point. There is in Aquinas an attempt to account properly for creation but his reliance on Aristotle renders him speaking of what is essentially an eternal substrate (prime matter) without offering an explanation for its existence. Ultimately, I wonder if in part this isn’t partly just a problem inherent to a metaphysics that doesn’t start from an apophatic stance which acknowledges that God is, in himself, beyond being. This allows Maximus to call Being itself an eternal work of God and separate eternal works from temporal one’s—even if they are read as an act in two modes as Jordan Daniel Wood does—I wonder if without this framing of things, essentially one which acknowledges the essence energies distinction, if we don’t end up with the impossibility of true deification and Theosis. The more we become God the more we seem to lose our self or essence and end in pantheism.