Autor: Schmitz, Kenneth L.

Buch: The Gift: Creation

Titel: The Gift: Creation

Stichwort: Schöpfung - Geschenk; ex nihilo; Generosität - schöpferische Kausalität (identifikation von Macht und Liebe); Analyse d. wahrhaft Menschlichen - Analyse d. Wirklichkeit; metaphysische Interiorität; Böses: Unmöglichkeit ohne Integrität d. Geschöpfs

Kurzinhalt: In terms of creative causality, generosity expresses itself as the power that brings creatures and their world ex nihilo into being.... The interpretation of creative causality through the category of gift ... restores a metaphysical interiority ...

Textausschnitt: 86a The preceding analysis is meant to have shown that an absolute giving is compatible with the integrity and dignity of the creature and with the freedom of human receptivity. It has sought to clarify the conception of creation ex nihilo. If we were to put that conception into play, we would have to show that there is actual creation, and this would require us to mount a proof that would show that the transcendental aspects of giving and receiving can be grounded only in an original giving whose source can only be the actually existing creator, this "most liberal giver." Such a proof lies beyond the intent of the present lecture, which is attempting to analyze and clarify the meaning of gift as the mode appropriate to creative causality. In furthering that clarification we need to outline the way the three aspects of benevolent love function in creative causality: creative generosity, creative subjectivity and creative objectivity. (Fs)

87a Generosity is inseparable from all giving. It is the primal reality at the source of the breaking forth accomplished in giving; for giving is a deed: it is done, something is given. Generosity nourishes the reality of power that is fused with the intentionality of intelligence to form the communication. In terms of creative causality, generosity expresses itself as the power that brings creatures and their world ex nihilo into being. Now, such a creating power is not an extravagant display of physical or trans-physical force, a sort of cosmic super-power, a celestial megaton bomb in reverse. Creative activity is not to be understood in terms of the lowest common denominator among the modes of power. (Fs)

87b Nor is it to be understood in terms of an indeterminate concept of causality. Such a general concept of causality is simply not definitive enough to sustain the unique and unexampled determinacy of creative causation. This may not have been so obvious as long as the medieval notion of causality was rich enough to carry implicitly the sense of the higher modes of causality; as long, for example, as it was generally accepted that intelligence and being are convertible (ens et verum convertuntur), that the exercize of power was at root the activity of intelligence, and that cosmic power was associated with order and wisdom. With the subsequent modern reduction of causal power to that exercized in physical nature alone, however, the general concept of causative power has become increasingly empty and unable to support the requirements of creation ex nihilo. (Fs)

88a In this present essay, the turn to the category of giving is not meant to place an anthropological or "merely subjective" restriction upon causative power; quite to the contrary, it intends the opening out of the category of causality to richer and more definitive forms and potencies. And we are justified in taking this turn on the general grounds that what holds really and truly at the level of human life is as apt for analysis of the ultimate nature of reality as is the methodologically restricted concept of power-as-physical-force operative in the objective consideration of physical nature. The objectification of nature (and by extension, of the human as well) is promoted today with impressive results. It proceeds in the name of external criteria of verification and in accord with the acceptance of the world as a set of given facts (data) to give its account of reality in terms of external relations. Such objective study will and must go on. It is a precious contribution to our understanding, and in the form of scientific technology it alone can provide the means for meeting many of the problems of contemporary existence. But we have seen that it takes the world as a starting point from which to construct experiments, hypotheses and techniques that seek to control the repetible dimensions of things. Its external grasp of evidence does not carry us into the region of ultimacy, so that ultimate questions are then left to religious faith (bereft of the support of rational understanding), or what is at least as likely to the misapplication of a scientific theory to an inappropriate field, or what is worse to vague opinions confirmed by shifting opinion polls. The withdrawal over recent centuries of much of philosophical and scientific intelligence from the interiority of nature is not simply a particular change in philosophical theory; it is the retreat of discourse from an entire intellectual domain. It is not uncommon today to counteract the withdrawal of interiority from nature (objectification) by a process of subjectification that heightens man's own interiority. This is the modern anthropological turn characteristic of recent centuries in European and American culture.1 (Fs) (notabene)

89a The interpretation of creative causality through the category of gift, on the other hand, restores a metaphysical interiority to nature, as well as to the natural in man. By metaphysical interiority I mean that which accounts for the intelligibility without which nature could not enter into scientific and philosophical enquiry; that which accounts for the serviceability by which it can play its role in human technology, meshing with human purpose; that which accounts for its availability to religion in its sacraments and symbols, and in other ways, to literature, art and music; indeed, to what Hegel called the works of spirit. But, first of all, by the metaphysical interiority of nature I mean its own immediate inner ground of integrity, the proper foundation upon which it rests its own "right" to claim respect. Now, this metaphysical interiority cannot be confirmed or even reached by external methods of objectification. It is a rich metaphysical texture grounded in the intimate presence of the creative cause to the things of nature, and to the natural in man. In and through the category of gift we can recover the metaphysical interiority of nature, since the analysis permits us to see the outlines of a causality that is fully determinate, both as to its mode: it is intelligent, voluntary and loving, and as to what is communicated: the most determinate and decisive actuality, the very existence of the world and its creatures. (Fs)

90a Now, this highly determinate causality is characterized by the identification of power with love. Often enough we encounter power in indifferent, uncaring or even hostile form. This is the dark mystery of contending forces that threatens even the conception of benevolent love when it is understood as absolute creative power. It is the scandal not of the mere possibility of evil but of its actual existence. Within the limits of this lecture, and mindful of the lectures given on this topic already in this series, it is only possible to remember that far from being able to "solve" the "problem" of evil all of one's intellectual acuity and spiritual courage is required simply to contain it, even in the order of analysis. But by a paradox that is the ground for hope, it should be recognized that there could be no evil in a universe created by an absolutely benevolent love, if its creatures did not possess their own integrity, and were not bent upon realizing their own possibilities, including for some of them their free possibilities. But so they were made. Indeed, if creatures as we know them lacked their own integrity, it is difficult to see how they could be the product of an absolutely benevolent love. Here we are at the centre of the ontological tension between creator and creature, a tension that the benevolent love could have avoided by not creating at all, but which it sustains rather than removes. What great good is to be realized by this universe, that a benevolent love should create it in the face of the possibility might we even say, the likelihood of great evil? (Fs)