Ex Nihilo

The three cases I laid out yesterday may not be sufficient adequately to explain the full range of reality. Those cases involved A. the soul’s eternal existence, B. its creation at birth, and C. its emergence from matter. Our context was memory. Based on the fact that the vast majority of us do not remember existing before, the second case, B, appeared most logical.

That “model,” however, entangles us with the concept of God creating souls ex nihilo at the moment when ova are fertilized by semen. That idea ultimately rests on the assumption that the creation of every human being requires God’s personal intervention precisely as described in Genesis: “And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul” (2:7). I’m happy for those for whom this verse is answer enough. But I’m moved to understand reality at another level. Much as the Greeks—who launched the civilization that stands in a parental role to ours—disliked the notion of creation ex nihilo so do I. From a purely logical stance, if God created the universe, it did not come from nothing; God was present. Ex nihilo creation, as I see it, is an interpretation of Genesis 1:1, “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” Understood poetically, this is a wondrous statement. To parse it apart strikes me as courting disaster. You have to get into a quagmire of interpretations from which you’ll never get past the word “beginning.” No human has satisfactorily explained time. And precognitive dreams, for one—the existence of which I cannot doubt—make me doubly sure that exegesis of this verse in hard conceptual terms is going nowhere.

This leads me to evoke another poetical image of creation originating, as best I can determine, with the Gnostics and the Neo-Platonists, but present also in Hindu beliefs. It is the notion that our reality is the emanation of the Godhead, thus a kind of overflow of an infinite plentitude. This is equivalent to the concept of a continuing, ongoing, and, indeed, eternal creation. In this idea the created world does not spring from nothing. On the contrary, it is God—but with a difference. The idea is also discernible in the Jewish Kabalistic image of sparks from a broken divine vessel falling into the void—our own mission being to raise the sparks again: the old theme of descent and ascent.

What makes this poetic image—its model recognizably being solar radiation, but no one claims that it originated that way—unappealing to the West is that it is perhaps too naturalistic. In the Judaic conception—which is at the root of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—the emphasis is on an active God in active and personal relationship with his creation. It is a model assertively based on moral behavior. Its very premise rests on command, its disobedience, the consequences of it, and the resolution of that error.

What underlies the emanation concept is quite another emphasis. It is that creation is a diminished, weakened, or dispersed aspect of divine plentitude. The agencies that we observe did not arise from nothing but are separated instances of God; their limitations are due to the separation. This model is equally impossible to render into hard concepts because as the ex nihilo concepts defies explanation by involving time, so this one, through the concept of separation, involves space, and neither one yields to human understanding—as Kant well understood. In what way, precisely, can a spark be separated from God who is everywhere? If we could make sense of that, we might equally well make sense of “in the beginning.” The moral element is also present here but embedded, from the outset, in the individual agent who, being a particle of divinity, carries consciousness and therefore the essence of morality, of free choice.

These problems of space, time, and responsibility have plagued philosophers throughout time. The Gnostics shifted responsibility to an intermediate semi-divine meaning, Sophia, one of the higher emanations of God—but not Sophia personally but to one of her agents, the demi-urge. No human thought can get around the problem that if God is all God must be ultimately responsible—not least for freedom and therefore evil. Swedenborg tried to deal with this using the concept of “permission” in rather tortured ways. In the Hindu conception, a part of divinity develops a yearning for limitation, for experiencing it. This conflicts with the notion of God as all knowing. We cannot escape the problem—and I will certainly not solve it. The issue I’m trying to address—and strictly for myself—is that of ex nihilo creation versus another conception of how reality might be explained.

The ex nihilo model is consistent with our experience of memory. The other model must rely on forgetting. That is where I will go next. I’m not the first to think that it is a good way to go. I will end with a bit of Wordsworth’s “Intimations of Immortality” by way of introducing what is to follow:

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!