Treatise 4 - 1. The Creation of The World

I. There is a regular progression in the productive activity of God the Creator. First, there is the internal activity of intellect and will, which produced from all eternity and is now producing the Persons of the Blessed Trinity. Then came the external activity of God on the spiritual plane, which produced the angels. Lastly comes the external activity which produced the material universe. After having been the origin of angels and their supernatural order, with its varied life and its laws which transcend our intelligence, God becomes, in the creation of this world, the source of the mundane order. God is the producer of its substance, life, and movement; His infinite intelligence and will, revealed in this world, become the immutable code of natural laws. Thus there are three lines of procession, the one divine eternal and internal, and two external, of which one is spiritual and the other material. The material is brought into union with the spiritual in human nature, and these two, when perfected, return into the higher union with God in the supernatural life of grace and glory. Praise and adore the Lord as expressing Himself in this wonderful triple series of harmonious action. You are one atom in it. Take care to keep your place in it and fill it worthily. Avoid sin, which violates the harmony, and breaks the continuity, and cuts you out from your place in that series.

II. Creation is production out of nothing by God. Although this action lies entirely on the natural material plane, yet it is beyond the grasp of our investigation and imagination. We cannot say what it is or how it is. We can trace the works of God far back through incalculable æons, but we can never see His hand actually forming them. The direct creative action is wrapped in mystery impenetrable. In the long process of creation there is a triad of stages which defy our research. We cannot tell how the original energy breathed forth from the Spirit of the Lord brooding over the abysses, comes to express itself in extended matter. Nor, although science has led us to the very frontier of life, can we detect the action which changes inorganic substance into the living organism. Nor can all our investigations solve the mystery of the origin of reason in a world of irrational beings. Every creature asks the question, Whence did the universe come? Men have forgotten the truth, or perverted it, or overlaid it with their speculations. God, therefore, proclaims to us as the first truth of the natural order and the moral order: “In the beginning God created heaven and earth” (Gen. i. 1). The deepest gratitude is due for these brief words. They save us from fatal errors; they are the dawn of spiritual light.

III. The universe is ancient beyond what language can express, but it is not eternal. Eternity is a quality of the Infinite alone—of God. The universe is subject to conditions of time and space, to succession and movement; this state is incompatible with the Godhead and with eternity. Secular science can instruct us thus far, that the universe had a beginning and will have an end. Investigations into molecules and atoms show them to be “manufactured articles”; and it is no less manifest that all the conditions which fall under our observation point to an ultimate exhaustion of energy and to extinction. The stages of creation are not supernatural, nor miraculous, nor are they breaks in the natural order. They lie entirely within the limits of the natural plane; they are one harmonious and continuous process, acting in accordance with a supreme law which is invariable and complete, and needs no supplementing, viz., the immutable idea in the divine mind. Man does not know the law which regulated the first appearance of matter, of life, of reason. Each was a new, but still a normal action, induced by God in His character of source of natural order and law. The first intervention of the supernatural was at the infusion of sanctifying grace into man. Worship that infinite power which has “ordered all things in measure and number and weight” (Wisd. xi. 21).