Autor: Schmitz, Kenneth L.

Buch: The Gift: Creation

Titel: The Gift: Creation

Stichwort: Schöpfung - Geschenk; ex nihilo; Möglichkeit d. Bösen; Verhältnis: Schöpfer - Geschöpf: relatio rationis - relatio realis; Opfer: Liebe d. Schöpfers (2. Aspekte)

Kurzinhalt: ... the creator can receive a wound to his being as a lover. In his creative activity he makes an offer of being, and in that offering he exposes himself as a potential victim of malacceptance...

Textausschnitt: 91a It is against this sombre backdrop, then, that we must place the identification of creative power with radical love. There can be no such essential identification of human power with human love. Both remain in some way abstract; this is the tension peculiar to the creature, and of which man is especially aware. To be sure, the human lover does not make an empty gesture of good will when he "gives spiritual support" to his beloved. He rallies his resources and powers, and expends the totality of his energies to sustain the beloved if need be. Nevertheless, a human lover finds his actual power tragically limited, so that he feels an uneasy gap between what he wills for the beloved and what he can actually do for the beloved. This is because human love is the fusion of actual energies with an intention that may remain unfulfilled. The non-coincidence of intent and actuality can be a source of anguish for the human lover. The absolute creative power, on the other hand, can voluntarily withhold itself for the good of the creature and its integrity or freedom. But, just because it is absolute, there can be no necessary distance between intention and fulfillment, no restriction upon creative power, no emptiness in creative intent: power and intent are one and the same. In creation, a "most liberal giving" institutes or establishes ex nihilo creatures and their world. It thereby also constitutes and sustains them. This absolute fusion of power and love, of reality and intent, of effective determination and total concern brings about the existence of creatures whose integrity even the creator freely respects in keeping with the very character of his benevolence. (Fs)

92a Does risk remain for such an absolute giver? The answer must be: yes; for at the centre of creative giving lurks the dark possibility of evil. Just because the creator is a lover and just because creation is the generosity of a thoroughly radical love, just because that love respects the integrity and dignity of the creature, and just because that love wills into existence a beloved who can respond in freedom and therefore, badly or well, how could such a universe be and yet not carry within it the possibility of evil? To be sure, a bad reception of the creator's gift does not inflict upon him a wound to his being in its subsistence; just as, in many instances, a human lover does not lose something of his proper being, the being he possessed before he offered love and was refused. But, as with human lovers, so too with divine, the creator can receive a wound to his being as a lover. In his creative activity he makes an offer of being, and in that offering he exposes himself as a potential victim of malacceptance. Of course, because the creative offer of being is absolutely radical, it would be quite wrong to imagine that, before the offer is actually made, the creature waits in some state of possibility in order to accept or reject the gift. For the recipient of that radical gift only comes into being with it. No creature is consulted before it is created, because there is no creature to consult. We are, indeed, at the beginning. Nor does any creature ask to be created, or hover in the wings, like an actor worrying about his lines and waiting to be called on stage. Still, we are justified in speaking of creation as an offer. For it is freely given being, a sort of ontological credit advanced for subsequent realization in and through the career of the creature. (Fs)

94a Moreover, since the "most liberal giver" does not give out of need, but rather for the good of the recipient, the evil that comes through creaturely malfeasance is the evil that infects the creature and not the creator. The creator is "moved" by the fate of the creature because of his own concern for the creature. The "movement," to speak improperly, is intransitive; that is, it is not brought about by the transitive action of the creature. Indeed, even with human lovers, the plight of the beloved does not affect the lover in the same way as a productive force effects a product. The relation is intransitive in its essential nature. The intransitivity of the relation of knowing and loving does not mean that the knower and the lover are not attentive to what is known and loved. On the contrary, it is only in and through such intransitivity that there can be knowing loving concern. In creative activity there is a unique intransitivity. For, because he is absolute, the creator knows and loves the creature out of his knowledge and love of himself, and not out of any dependence upon the creature. His concern for the creature rises up in him through his own unconditioned self-knowledge and self-love. It is not that the creator is unconcerned with the fate of the creatures he has made; quite to the contrary, his concern flows from his unconditioned generosity. (Fs)

94b We have come again by another route upon the absolute inequality between creatures and their creative donor; and also upon the absolute non-reciprocity between the creative donor and the creaturely recipient. The medieval schoolmen expressed this absolute non-reciprocity by saying that God is related to creatures only by a relation of reason, whereas creatures are related to God by a real relation of causal dependence and participation.2 To this we can add the modern sense of intentionality, which is a kind of intransitivity, and according to which relations of knowing and loving concern are intentional. The relation of God to creatures is intentional, then, not only in the sense that it is not a real reciprocity after the manner of an interaction in which both parties undergo transmutation; but rather because the relation of God to creatures is like a relation of consciousness. Moreover, it is like a relation of consciousness that, out of its own generosity rather than out of any dependence upon creatures, is fully attuned to them in loving concern. The category of gift helps us to understand such knowing and loving concern, and to understand as well the nature of the risk undertaken by the generosity that characterizes radical creative love. (Fs)

95a Because of the absolute, unconditioned and unconditional nature of creative love, it might seem that neither subjective satisfaction nor objective discipline could be associated with it. But in truth we can speak of a divine self-worth that is absolute and of a self-satisfaction that is the unconditional joy of the creator in the good of the beloved, a joy that springs from no need in the creator, but rather out of the admiration and pride of the worker in his workmanship. The Biblical tradition gives religious expression to this joy: for the Lord looked at what he had made and saw that it was good, and so seeing he blessed it. And the Biblical tradition once again gives religious expression to the manifestation of this joy: it is the glory of God the creator shining before his creation. In philosophical terms, the moment of self-satisfaction, already transformed in human benevolent love into a joy for the sake of the other, now in creative self-satisfaction is utterly transformed into a concern that is identical with the genuine good of the creature. So that the glory and the goodness, the subjectivity and the objectivity of creative love is wholly and entirely the integral good of the creature willed by the creator. (Fs)

96a It may be well to emphasize once again, however, that the objectivity in creative love is not a condition imposed upon the creator by the creature, for then the creative love would not be absolute and unconditioned. The objectivity operative in creative love, then, is not, as with human lovers, a conditioned objectivity in which the lover stands in real, although intransitive and intentional relation to the object loved. Rather, the objectivity is the creator's, and it holds insofar as he freely determines to create a creature of a certain sort with integrity and freely determines to respect that integrity. In creating creatures who have freedom, he even determines to respect the capacity to flaw the original gift. The German word, Opfer, catches both meanings, for the creator's love is both an offering and, potentially, a victim. Theories of divine creative ideas (St. Augustine) and of exemplar causality (St. Bonaventure) catch the element of self-possessed objectivity in the creator. They must be completed, of course, with the reminder that by its very nature creative activity does not only bring about types of being, or even a world of being, but individual beings themselves. And we need to remember, too, the risk that arises not out of thought about creation, but only with the actual giving. And with that we come to the drama of creation: the conferring of actual existence ex nihilo. (Fs)