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Aquinas, Augustine and the Illusion of Time
From Augustine F. Hewit D.D.
It is an illusion of the imagination to conceive of time as having existed before creation. "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth." That beginning was the first moment of time, which St. Thomas says God created when he created the universe. Time is a mere relation of finite entities to each other and to infinite being, arising from their limitation. The procession of created existences is necessarily in time, and could not have begun ab aeterno without a series actually infinite, which is impossible. Nevertheless, the first instant of created time had no created time behind it, and no series of instants behind it, intervening between it and eternity, but touched immediately on eternity.
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From James Lindsay D.D.
As to the world, Aquinas says reason cannot apodictically show that the world was made in time. The eternity of creation he does not affirm, though he does not think it can be refuted, so repugnant to reason is a beginning of created things. He allows that the philosophers have been able to recognize the first thing, but denies that they have, independently of faith and by use of their reason, been able to demonstrate that creation took place in time. Saint Thomas avers that the most universal causes produce the most universal effects, and the most universal effect, he thinks, is being. There is no impression which the mind more fundamentally gathers, in the view of Aquinas, from the object than that of being. This idea of being is the first of all first principles, and may be expressed in the negative formula, "Being is not not-being." Then being, he argues, must be the proper effect of the first and most universal cause, which is God. Creation is to him properly the work of God, who produces being absolutely. And the visible world is created after ideas that are externally existent in the Divine Mind, such ideas being of the essence of God—yea, being, in fact, God. But the separateness of God from the creation has to be softened down, and this is effected by Aquinas through insisting on God as being in all things by his presence and power. When his First Cause— which, we have seen, he conceives as actus purus—has been obtained, he must needs endow Him with attributes which will explain particular effects in nature and in man. He makes God one, personal, spiritual, clothes him with perfect goodness, truth, will, intelligence, love, and other attributes. The world of effects he thinks is yet like him, though they are distinct; for the effect resembles the cause, and the cause is, in sense, in the effect. Aquinas starts from created beings in his mode of rising to God. He has a stringent definition of creation as "a production of a thing according to its whole substance" (productio alien jus rei secundum suam totam substantiam), to which is significantly added, "nothing being presupposed, whether created or increate" (nullo praeposito, quod sit vel increatum vel ab aliquo creatum). Creation, that is to say, is the production of being in itself, independently of matter as subject. He distinguishes causality which is creative from causality which is merely alterative. He recognizes non-being as before being. Creation is to Aquinas the "primary action" (prima action, possible to the "primary agent" (agens primum) alone. Material form for him depends on primary matter, being consequent on the change produced by efficient cause. And Aquinas has much to say of the rapports between substance and its accidents, and of form as that by which a thing is what it is. Intelligence, he expressly says, knows being absolutely, and without distinction of time.
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From Saint Augustine
What then is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know.
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From James Orr
Creation for the beginning of motion within it. and Evolu- Of the original creative action, lying tion beyond mortal ken or human observation, science—as concerned only with the manner of the process—is obviously in no position to speak. Creation may, in an important sense, be said not to have taken place in time, since time cannot be posited prior to the existence of the world. The difficulties of the ordinary hypothesis of a creation in time can never be surmounted, so long as we continue to make eternity mean simply indefinitely prolonged time. Augustine was, no doubt, right when, from the human standpoint, he declared that the world was not made in time, but with time. Time is itself a creation simultaneous with, and conditioned by, world-creation and movement.
From Augustine F. Hewit D.D.
It is an illusion of the imagination to conceive of time as having existed before creation. "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth." That beginning was the first moment of time, which St. Thomas says God created when he created the universe. Time is a mere relation of finite entities to each other and to infinite being, arising from their limitation. The procession of created existences is necessarily in time, and could not have begun ab aeterno without a series actually infinite, which is impossible. Nevertheless, the first instant of created time had no created time behind it, and no series of instants behind it, intervening between it and eternity, but touched immediately on eternity.
...................................
From James Lindsay D.D.
As to the world, Aquinas says reason cannot apodictically show that the world was made in time. The eternity of creation he does not affirm, though he does not think it can be refuted, so repugnant to reason is a beginning of created things. He allows that the philosophers have been able to recognize the first thing, but denies that they have, independently of faith and by use of their reason, been able to demonstrate that creation took place in time. Saint Thomas avers that the most universal causes produce the most universal effects, and the most universal effect, he thinks, is being. There is no impression which the mind more fundamentally gathers, in the view of Aquinas, from the object than that of being. This idea of being is the first of all first principles, and may be expressed in the negative formula, "Being is not not-being." Then being, he argues, must be the proper effect of the first and most universal cause, which is God. Creation is to him properly the work of God, who produces being absolutely. And the visible world is created after ideas that are externally existent in the Divine Mind, such ideas being of the essence of God—yea, being, in fact, God. But the separateness of God from the creation has to be softened down, and this is effected by Aquinas through insisting on God as being in all things by his presence and power. When his First Cause— which, we have seen, he conceives as actus purus—has been obtained, he must needs endow Him with attributes which will explain particular effects in nature and in man. He makes God one, personal, spiritual, clothes him with perfect goodness, truth, will, intelligence, love, and other attributes. The world of effects he thinks is yet like him, though they are distinct; for the effect resembles the cause, and the cause is, in sense, in the effect. Aquinas starts from created beings in his mode of rising to God. He has a stringent definition of creation as "a production of a thing according to its whole substance" (productio alien jus rei secundum suam totam substantiam), to which is significantly added, "nothing being presupposed, whether created or increate" (nullo praeposito, quod sit vel increatum vel ab aliquo creatum). Creation, that is to say, is the production of being in itself, independently of matter as subject. He distinguishes causality which is creative from causality which is merely alterative. He recognizes non-being as before being. Creation is to Aquinas the "primary action" (prima action, possible to the "primary agent" (agens primum) alone. Material form for him depends on primary matter, being consequent on the change produced by efficient cause. And Aquinas has much to say of the rapports between substance and its accidents, and of form as that by which a thing is what it is. Intelligence, he expressly says, knows being absolutely, and without distinction of time.
................................
From Saint Augustine
What then is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know.
................................
From James Orr
Creation for the beginning of motion within it. and Evolu- Of the original creative action, lying tion beyond mortal ken or human observation, science—as concerned only with the manner of the process—is obviously in no position to speak. Creation may, in an important sense, be said not to have taken place in time, since time cannot be posited prior to the existence of the world. The difficulties of the ordinary hypothesis of a creation in time can never be surmounted, so long as we continue to make eternity mean simply indefinitely prolonged time. Augustine was, no doubt, right when, from the human standpoint, he declared that the world was not made in time, but with time. Time is itself a creation simultaneous with, and conditioned by, world-creation and movement.
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