The Unchanging yet Creative God, Part 3

The question before us remains: if we are not allowed to introduce change into our concept of God’s Being, or time either, how can God ever do anything He wasn’t doing from all eternity? How can He “one day” start to create the world? How can He, having once begun creating, stop doing so and rest on the seventh day? In fact, how is it He can stop or start any activity, such as responding to my prayers? How is it He hasn’t already judged me, and either saved or rejected me, from before all time, as the Calvinists believe? How is it even possible to have a genuine, person-to-person relationship with an absolutely unchanging God?

The Scholastics said it wasn’t. In that system of thought, exemplified by Thomas Aquinas, God only indirectly creates the world we know.

For Aquinas, what God does is eternally create, within His own Being (Essence), “exemplars,” or patterns, or ideas of the creation. This, for the Orthodox, is Problem One: that we have, within the very Essence of the Godhead, created things! Remember that God’s Essence is whatever He has that He can’t not have and still be God. If God did have created things within His Being, then His own creation would be part of what is required for God to be God!

It is natural for these “exemplars” or blueprints to radiate outward from God. God doesn’t directly cause them to do this; they just do it naturally. And these emanations, projected into time and space, create the material world. (How time and space got there to receive these emanations I do not know. I also do not understand why these eternal ideas emanating from God didn’t eternally have the effect of creating the world we know, making the universe beginningless.)

In Aquinas’ thought, God, to create, doesn’t have to change. Rather, the change is in us. We change in relation to Him as we come into being from non-being. Aquinas compares this to a hypothetical relationship between an animal, analogous to us, and a column, analogous to God. If the position of the column relative to the animal changes, it is because the animal moved, not the column.

All this makes Problems Two, Three, and Four for the Orthodox.

Problem Two: Is this biblical? Is it anywhere in Holy Tradition?

Problem Three: the exemplars become intermediaries between God and creation. Although Aquinas tries to uphold the doctrine of creation without any “raw materials,” (ex nihilo), yet here he compromises it. The exemplars are created things which in turn create the material world. This, in opposition to the Judeo-Christian doctrine that God creates the world alone, without intermediaries, with no help, especially not with help from created things, by His Word (Christ), not by emanations.

Problem Four: The created Ideas within God have more and greater reality than their emanations outside of God. This devalues the material world, telling us reality is to be found outside it. The world is but a shadow cast by the true reality, or a ray shining forth from the reality. This undoes or at least severely undermines the entire sacramental worldview, in which the world is very real indeed, and is in fact meant to be the sacrament of communion between God and man and is the (real) meeting place between God and Man.

Still, Aquinas preserves us from pantheism while insulating his concept of God from temporality and change, which is no small feat. But that’s Problem Five, because in the process, Aquinas also has to insulate his concept of God from any real relationship with us! Yes, it’s true. He asserts that while our relationship to God is real, although indirect (via the exemplars within His Essence), yet His relationship to us is not real! Actually, God only relates to His eternal ideas of us. See here and here.

In the thought of Western Christendom in general (not just in Aquinas), for the sake of protecting God’s changelessness without resorting to pantheism, the notion that God cannot relate to us really or directly is unavoidable to anyone who gives serious thought to it. (Fortunately, the average man in the pew doesn’t.) There really is no known way out of it. It is therefore implicit in Western theology.

This is why, generally speaking, grace is assumed to be a created thing. This is why, in the West, knowledge of God is pursued by means of the intellect more than with the core self, truth is when your thought accurately reflects or coincides with what you are thinking about, and revelation is primarily a matter of words. This is why the things of God (together with God Himself) are dealt with as concepts, concepts, concepts and faith involves cognitive thinking and “theology” is so abstract, so theoretical, something you learn by academic study more than from your own communion with God. That is why catechizing is usually about imparting concepts instead of holiness, teaching ideas instead of asceticism and the art of prayer. And ideas, to which God relates instead of to us, are also our mode of relating to the world and to each other. Even that most personal relationship, marriage, is cast as a legal contract, complete with solemn vows. (There are no vows in an Orthodox wedding.) That is why, in the West the goal of man is not theosis, deification, but something called "The Beatific Vision," that is, beholding the very Essence of God.

Now the devastating idea that God has no real relationship to the created order not only spawns the impersonal sort of culture we see collapsing around us, but also and absolutely rules out anything recognizable to the Orthodox as spirituality.

But here’s the sad yet wonderful joke: near the end of the life of this man who had said God does not have real relations with us, God came to Thomas Aquinas in Person. It was for Thomas a direct, intense, and undeniably real encounter. Of course this upset the very foundation upon which he had built his thought and shook him up badly. No wonder then, that afterward, Thomas called all he had written “straw”. It was a "theology" by a man who had never even met God, had never known Him at all. Afterwards, Thomas never attempted to write a single sentence more of theology - just when he had finally begun to be qualified to do it.

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