Bad Advertisement?
Are you a Christian?
Online Store:Visit Our Store
| That God Alone is the Creator of Every Kind of Creature, Whatever Its Nature or Form.
PREVIOUS SECTION - NEXT SECTION - HELP 
Chapter 25.—That God Alone is the
Creator of Every Kind of Creature, Whatever Its Nature or
Form.
For whereas there is one form which
is given from without to every bodily substance,—such as the form
which is constructed by potters and smiths, and that class of
artists who paint and fashion forms like the body of animals,—but
another and internal form which is not itself constructed, but, as
the efficient cause, produces not only the natural bodily forms,
but even the life itself of the living creatures, and which
proceeds from the secret and hidden choice of an intelligent and
living nature,—let that first-mentioned form be attributed to
every artificer, but this latter to one only, God, the Creator and
Originator who made the world itself and the angels, without the
help of world or angels. For the same divine and, so to speak,
creative energy, which cannot be made, but makes, and which gave to
the earth and sky their roundness,—this same divine, effective,
and creative energy gave their roundness to the eye and to the
apple; and the other natural objects which we anywhere see,
received also their form, not from without, but from the secret and
profound might of the Creator, who said, “Do not I fill heaven
and earth?”568
and whose
wisdom it is that “reacheth from one end to another mightily; and
sweetly doth she order all things.”569
Wherefore I know not what kind of
aid the angels, themselves created first, afforded to the Creator
in making other things. I cannot ascribe to them what perhaps
they cannot do, neither ought I to deny them such faculty as they
have. But, by their leave, I attribute the creating and
originating work which gave being to all natures to God, to whom
they themselves thankfully ascribe their existence. We do not
call gardeners the creators of their fruits, for we read,
“Neither is he that planteth anything, neither he that watereth,
but God that giveth the increase.”570
Nay, not even the earth itself do
we call a creator, though she seems to be the prolific mother of
all things which she aids in germinating and bursting forth from
the seed, and which she keeps rooted in her own breast; for we
likewise read, “God giveth it a body, as it hath pleased Him, and
to every seed his own body.”571
We ought not even to call a woman
the creatress of her own offspring; for He rather is its creator
who said to His servant, “Before I formed thee in the womb, I
knew thee.”572
And
although the various mental emotions of a pregnant woman do produce
in
the fruit of her womb similar qualities,—as Jacob with
his peeled wands caused piebald sheep to be produced,—yet the
mother as little creates her offspring as she created herself.
Whatever bodily or seminal causes, then, may be used for the
production of things, either by the cooperation of angels, men, or
the lower animals, or by sexual generation; and whatever power the
desires and mental emotions of the mother have to produce in the
tender and plastic fœtus corresponding lineaments and colors; yet
the natures themselves, which are thus variously affected, are the
production of none but the most high God. It is His occult power
which pervades all things, and is present in all without being
contaminated, which gives being to all that is, and modifies and
limits its existence; so that without Him it would not be thus, or
thus, nor would have any being at all.573
| 573 Compare de Trin. iii.
13–16. | If, then, in regard to that
outward form which the workman’s hand imposes on his work, we do
not say that Rome and Alexandria were built by masons and
architects, but by the kings by whose will, plan, and resources
they were built, so that the one has Romulus, the other Alexander,
for its founder; with how much greater reason ought we to say that
God alone is the Author of all natures, since He neither uses for
His work any material which was not made by Him, nor any workmen
who were not also made by Him, and since, if He were, so to speak,
to withdraw from created things His creative power, they would
straightway relapse into the nothingness in which they were before
they were created? “Before,” I mean, in respect of eternity,
not of time. For what other creator could there be of time, than
He who created those things whose movements make time?574
E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
|
