In the last two posts, I explained what I mean by ‘pre-existing ingredients’. In the first of those two posts, I said that an ‘ingredient’ in a product is something that is (i) in the product, and (ii) not identical to another ingredient or to the whole product. In the second of those two posts, I explained that an ingredient is ‘pre-existing’ if it’s not produced by the same productive act that brings the product into being.
Now that I’ve made the sense of these terms clear, we can formulate a more precise definition of creation. Earlier, I said that something is created from nothing if it’s produced without any pre-existing ingredients. That’s the loose definition. Here’s the more precise definition: a producer creates a product from nothing if and only if the producer causes the product itself and each of its ingredients to come into being by the same productive act. So:
Creation:
For any x and y, x creates y from nothing
by a productive act P =df iff
(i) x causes y to exist by P, and
(ii) for any ingredient F in y,
x causes F to exist by P.
On this definition then, something is created from nothing if it’s produced without any pre-existing ingredients, and something is not created from nothing if it’s produced with at least one pre-existing ingredient (in my sense of ‘pre-existing ingredients’). It just takes one pre-existing ingredient to show that something is not created.
I presume that this definition also applies to cases where multiple producers work together to create something from nothing. Suppose, for example, that God the Father creates Socrates’ body, and God the Son creates Socrates’ soul. By my definition of creation, the Father alone doesn’t create Socrates. He only creates Socrates’ body. Likewise, the Son doesn’t create Socrates either, for he only creates Socrates’ soul. But taken as a single productive unit, the Father and Son jointly create Socrates from nothing.
With this definition of creation in mind, we can now turn to the disagreement between Arius and Athanasius. As I said above, Arius thinks the Father creates the Son out of nothing, but Athanasius denies this. In the next post, I will turn to Arius.
“Can something be made ‘partly’ from nothing?”
Of course. Otherwise there would be nothing new in the product, and in that case, ‘producing a product’ would amount to nothing more than re-arranging some already existing ingredients.
“For example, suppose there are these pre-existing types of ingredients: x’s thinking of x, x’s loving x“.
I’m very confused. I don’t see how those could be ‘pre-existing ingredients’. My thoughts and love about myself don’t come into being ‘before’ I do.
On the other hand, if you’re thinking about the producer’s thoughts and desire for a product — well, those are in the producer, not the product. So they don’t count as ‘ingredients’ in the product because they fail to satisfy the first condition I stated for being an ingredient.
(In the divine case, it gets tricky, because for some theologians (like scholastic ones), some of the Father’s thoughts, and all of his love, end up in the product (the Son). But such things end up in the product only in virtue of the divine essence getting shared with the product. And since the divine essence counts as a ‘pre-existing ingredient’ in the Son, by extension so too would anything that comes along with it like knowledge or love.)
I’m still not sure I understand anything you’re talking about here, but my short answer to the main question is: no, I don’t think we need to distinguish between kinds of pre-existing ingredients. Here’s what matters:
If some x — no matter what sort of thing it is — is (i) in the product, and (ii) not identical to another ingredient or the product itself, then x is an ingredient in the product. If x exists independently of the productive act that brought the product into being, then x is a ‘pre-existing ingredient’. And just one of those in the product is sufficient to disqualify the product from being created.
My crazy questions are trying to elicit whether it depends on what _kind_ of ‘pre-existing’ ingredient we are talking about, in order for us to say that what gets produced is not a creature. For example, suppose there are these pre-existing types of ingredients: x’s _thinking of x_, x’s _loving x_. I would think that we’d have to discriminate btwn. kinds (as it were) of pre-existing ingredients, and that these two kinds of pre-existing ingredients which I mentioned may not suffice for saying that what gets produced from one of these is not a creature. So here’s the question: must the pre-existing ingredient be an essential (definitional) kind-nature, or could it be just some bare property or stuff; or, does it even matter what kind of pre-existing ingredient we are talking about so long as there is something that pre-exists the product and constitutes the product?
Can something be made ‘partly’ from nothing?
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Because there’s one pre-existing ingredient, so it’s not made entirely from nothing.
My question is fairly straightforward. Suppose there is a being constituted with 1 pre-existing ingredient and 1 non-pre-existing ingredient. Is this being created, or not? Why suppose that _one pre-existing ingredient and one non-pre-existing ingredient_ taken together amounts to a non-creature?
I’m not sure I understand what you’re asking. Something is created if it’s made from nothing, so if it has any pre-existing ingredients, it’s not created. That’s pretty much it. Nothing tricky or fancy here.
Here’s a question that I’ve wondered about;
you say: ‘something is not created from nothing if it’s produced with at least one pre-existing ingredient’. What reason do we have for thinking that this suffices to distinguish btwn. a creature and a non-creature? For example, suppose the Son is constituted by 1 pre-existing ingredient (deity) and 1 non-pre-existing ingredient (e.g., filiation, or _being a mental Word_, etc.). What reason do we have for thinking that the Son isn’t a creature if one of his constituents is not a pre-existing ingredient?
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