I am reading Lossky with a friend. Reading him is like trying to swallow molasses. It’s slow, sticky, dense, and bittersweet — but nourishing!

As I read, I’m compiling some notes — practically line for line at the moment, but that will probably change. If anybody is interested in seeing any of it as it comes along, let me know. As a sample, here are the opening few paragraphs of ch. 2, “The Creation”, from Orthodox Theology (p. 51-52) with notes.

I. Introduction

The world was created by the will of God. It is of another nature than God. It exists outside of God, “not by place but by nature” (St. John of Damascus). These simple affirmations of faith open onto a mystery as unfathomable as that of the divine being: the mystery of the created being, the reality of a being external to any presence of God, free in relation to His omnipotence, having an interiority radically new in face of the trinitarian plenitude, in brief the reality of the other-than-God, the irreducible ontological density of the other.

Lossky moves from talking about God (in the previous chapter) to talking about creation. Creation is as great a mystery as God. (The corresponding chapter in MT starts the same way.)

Creation is of “another nature” than God — i.e. it has a different essence or kind of being altogether. The world is created whereas God is uncreated. There is an abyss here which we created beings cannot cross.

Do note that there are all kinds of immaterial and invisible beings which are yet created: angels, souls, thought, emotions, culture, etc. So it’s wrong to think of this fundamental difference in nature between the world and God as material versus spiritual or visible versus invisible. No, it’s created versus uncreated. As we say in the Creed, “Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible”.

God is not in a different “place” but is different from creation “by nature”. I.e. He can be right here with us, but His being is SO radically different from ours that it seems as if He were in a totally different “place”. (It may be that “place” is an attribute that applies only to created beings. It may be that “place” is an attribute that applies only to materially existing beings — i.e. those having a body.)

Creation is a reality. It is not God. It is “other”. It is other-than-God. It has “ontological density” — i.e. a “weight of being” of its own. It is free in relation to God. It has an “interiority” of its own, i.e. it’s own integrity and and web-like interconnectedness within and between its own components — as God has “trinitarian plenitude”, i.e. fullness of interrelation and interconnection in the persons of the trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

I’m not sure about “reality of being external to ANY presence of God”. If there were NO presence of God about creation, it seems to me that it would fall into non-being. And yet, it does have a difference of “nature” such that creation HAS being/nature/essence without having to BE God. In that sense it is “external” from the “presence” of God.

Lossky cont’d: Christianity alone, or more precisely, the Judaeo-Christian tradition, knows the notion of absolute creation. Creation ex nihilo is a dogma of the faith. It finds its first expression in the Bible, in the second book of Maccabees (7:28) where a mother, exhorting her son to martyrdom, says to him: “Behold the heavens and the earth, and seeing all that is there, you will understand that God has created it from nothing” (ek ouk ontwn, according to the translation of the Septuagint). If one remembers that ouk is a radical negation which, by contrast with the other adverb of negation, mh, leaves no room for doubt, and that it is here used systematically against the rules of grammar, one can measure the total implication of the expression: God has not created starting from something, but starting with what is not, from “nothingness.”

Here’s what my Greek textbook says about “ouk” and “mh” (pronounced “may”): “The adverb mh, ‘not’, is NOT interchangeable with ouk, ‘not’. Mh must be used to negate purpose clauses; ouk must be used to negate factual statements and questions with verbs in the indicative mood.”

A purpose clause is of the form: “in order that…” A negative would be: “in order that… not…” or “…. lest…”. For example:

Homer came to the island in order that he might educate the young men. Homer came to the island in order that he might not scandalize the Athenians. Homer came to the island lest he cause scandal to the Athenians.

The verbs used in these are in subjunctive (or optative) mood — i.e. not indicative. It’s a may/might type of thing rather than IS, a factual claim.

The Greek word for nothing uses the “mh” root. The Christian dogmatic claim then is as strong as it can be. ouk onton is literally NO being, NO existing thing.

Lossky: There is nothing remotely similar in other religions or metaphysics.

Explanation will proceed by contrast.

Lossky: Sometimes creation is said to begin with a possibility of being permanently open to demiurgic ordering: such was the prime matter of ancient thought, which immutable being was said to inform. This matter does not exist in itself. It is a pure possibility of being, non-being certainly, but the mh on, which is not the absolute nothingness, ouk on. By reflection, it receives a certain verisimilitude, a precarious evocation of the world of ideas. Of such in particular is Platonic dualism, but also, with certain differences, the perpetual taking-of-form of matter in Aristotle.

Aristotle and Plato discussed at length what it meant to be something — i.e. to have a nature or essence. What is a tree? Plato said a tree was a being that partook of the Form (Idea) of tree-ness. The Form itself existed in some way independent of individual trees. (Later thinkers said that the Form existed in the Mind of God.) Aristotle didn’t think the forms of things existed independently of individuals. But he still thought there was “form” to things. Things have a “formal cause”, i.e. something “in” them that makes them what they are — gives them a nature or essence. According to Aristotle, individual things had three other “causes” as well, a material cause, an efficient cause, and a final cause or purpose.

If you take the analogy of a sculptor molding clay:

material cause - the clay

formal cause - the idea the sculptor has in mind, the form he wants to shape the clay into, the clay’s form/shape once it is molded — say a jar

efficient cause - the sculptor (or his hands or tools)

final cause (purpose) - to hold water

For a chair:

material cause - the wood

formal cause - the idea of a “chair” in the carpenter’s mind; chairness

efficient cause - the carpenter or his tools

final cause (purpose) - to sit on

While Plato and Aristotle argued about how “form” (essence, nature, thingness) got into things, and whether or not Forms existed outside of the things themselves, they did not debate that matter, that out of which individual things were formed, pre-existed the formation. There was always “stuff” there to work with, matter, a primordial potentiality or material to begin with.

The Christian dogma says that not only did God shape; he made the clay and the wood, too.

Lossky: Sometimes we encounter the idea of creation as a divine procession. God brings forth from His own being, often by a primordial polarization which gives rise to the multiform universe. On this understanding the world is manifestation of emanation of divinity. Such is the fundamental conception of India, which we find again in the Hellenic world with gnosticism and to which the thought of Plotinus, which tends towards a monism, is very close.

Indian thought, gnosticism, Plotinus: the world is really an extension or “emanation” (that’s the key word) of God. Everything that is sort of flows out of God Himself.

Monism is a metaphysical position that says there is fundamentally only one kind of “stuff”. In this case, all would be god-stuff. In the Christian dogma, there would be two fundamentally different kinds of stuff: uncreated and created.

Lossky: Here cosmogony becomes a theogony:

It’s not the cosmos that comes into being. (The word “cosmos” by the way has the connotation of an orderly universe.) It’s god that comes into being. I.e. in the “emanations” more god-stuff, god-things come to be.

“Theogony” is the title of the work by the ancient poet Hesiod, who wrote of the origins of all the Greek gods. He is a primary source of Greek mythology. The gods were always mating and creating/birthing things, including other gods, half-human heroes, and all the various things in the world.

Lossky: the absolute becomes relative through stages of descending “condensation,” it manifests and downgrades itself in the universe. The world is a fallen God who strains to become God again. Its origin resides sometimes in a mysterious catastrophe which one may call the fall of God, sometimes in an inner necessity, in a strange cosmic passion where God seeks to assume consciousness of Himself, sometimes in a cyclic temporality of manifestations and reabsorptions which seem to be imposed upon God Himself.

There are different theories of theogony/emanation to explain how/why God “emanates”. The emanations all have a lower status than God Himself (or God before this “fall” or whatever it is).

All this is very foreign to the Judeo-Christian understanding of God. But it’s part and parcel of ancient gnosticism, whether gnosticism as a pseudo-Christian heresy or purely pagan gnosticism.

Lossky: In neither of the two cases

i.e. the Aristotelian/Platonic view or the Indian/gnostic/Plotinian view

Lossky: does the idea of a creation ex nihilo exist. For in Christianity, matter itself is created. This mysterious matter which Plato said only bastard concepts could grasp, this pure possibility of being, is itself created, as St. Augustine has remarkably well demonstrated. And on the other hand, how could creation have an uncreated substratum, how could it be God doubled, since it is by essence the other-than-God?

Matter itself is created, and creation is not God. Creation cannot have God/the uncreated as a “substratum” (as on the emanation idea) because creation and God are fundamentally different by nature or essence. And you’re back to the original paragraph which emphasizes the Christian dogma that God and creation are fundamentally different by nature — i.e. created and uncreated.