Abstract

In his 1982 Aquinas Lecture, Schmitz brings to bear upon the problem of creation his considerable resources of reflection, erudition, and contemporary awareness. He rethinks the topic in four sections that utilize human experience, history of philosophy, and anthropology. Creation is first formulated in reference to types of beginnings. There is a distinction between three modes of mythic accounts of origins: the world comes to be by partition or primary division, by emergence or growth, and by intelligent activity involving some act of mind or will. Reflection upon the experience of division, growth, and decision helps to illuminate the meaning of creation as a beginning ex nihilo. Schmitz uses the thought of St. Anselm on privation to suggest the complete gratuity of a creative beginning. "In the Anselmian analogy, the privation indicates no determinate lack rooted in a specific subject, because there is no subject at all.... Creation is to be understood as a reception of a good not due in any way, so that there cannot be even a subject of that reception."