![]() The contrast between being and becoming has been common among philosophers and theologians at least since Plato. The father might be in all things and the source of all things, but cannot be all things if those things are to come to be at all. Limit makes things possible: without it, any potential thing, even if it inexplicably did come to be, would simply be absorbed into the father. This Limit divides the father from what then becomes not-father. The term is often capitalized by translators to capture this personal aspect, since, unlike "father," "limit" does not generally designate even the persona of something. As the first step of creation, the father generates, in their own image, a personified Limit. This father is both (and neither) everything – there is nothing else, and all that is will come from them – and nothing – because there is no distinction to set anything apart from the father, and apartness is a necessary condition of thing-ness. The cosmogony of one early Christian group, the Valentinians, begins with an androgynous father who is both one (like the more orthodox Christian God) and two (not so much like that God, though there are echoes of the idea of a holy trinity). Christian versions of the first option – creation by limitation – show up around the same time that the idea of creation from nothing really takes hold. To draw out this strangeness, we may run through a short, incomplete, but representative sampling of these less standard creation narratives. The "why", however, the stubborn philosophical devotion to inquiry, remains intact. Also less obvious is "is" insofar as it indicates a necessarily stable and unchanging existence. "Something" and "nothing" both become stranger than they appear in Leibniz's formulation, making the opposition of "rather" not so clear. So, if we begin with the creation of nothing, nearly all parts of the Leibnizian question are changed. By contrast, creation ex nihilo requires an unchanging and transcendent God who exists absolutely without transition, no matter what differences develop in creation. This gives us a very mobile sense of creation, with creator and world alike caught up in the process. After this constraint, which makes nothing (we'll see in more detail how this happens), the making of something is often described as an outflow or emanation. Both options somehow constrain the source. It then creates by pulling itself in and leaving emptiness around it. Here the source starts out by being everything and occupying all space (again, this may be poetic). The second is the contraction of the creative source. Here the source sets up some sort of boundary "around" itself, though in a non-spatial fashion that may be poetically metaphorical. Process, feminist, liberation, and ecological theologies have all found this kind of power, granted to a single divinity who passes it along to a single institution, problematic – the work of contemporary theologian Catherine Keller is especially clear in both summarizing and elaborating this point.Ĭosmogonies that begin with making nothing tend to start in one of two fairly similar ways: The first is the limitation of the creative source. Beyond theology, part of the appeal of this notion may have been that an all-powerful creator can have a very powerful church. Correspondingly, what would become the orthodox version of Christianity seized on the idea of creation out of nothing, since it shows their God at maximum power: not just reshaping unformed matter, but not even needing that matter at all to form the cosmos by its own power. But early in the second century of the Common Era, Christian scholars began to emphasize the all-powerfulness of their God. The task of creation is just to separate and form this great mess of stuff into recognizable things, into regions and objects. In the first chapter of Genesis, the creator "in (or during) the beginning" encounters both earth, which is formless and chaotic, and water, upon which wind blows. This interpretation of creation depends on an odd and rather forced reading of the book of Genesis, assimilated into Christianity from the Hebrew Bible. Unimportant in its own right, nothing only sets off and emphasizes the creator's power. In such a creation story, "nothing" is an uncomplicated and not very interesting absence. By the time that Leibniz wrote, this version of creation, often called, even in English, creatio ex nihilo, was standard in the major monotheistic faiths, and was particularly central to Christianity.
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