Medieval Philosophy

by Peter S. Adamson

Aren’t we now saying that the things around us were in fact created from something, namely the primordial causes? Well, yes (664a). So the only possible conclusion is that the phrase “creation from nothing” applies to the way the primordial causes themselves are produced by and within God. The word “nothing” simply indicates that God is beyond all being or, as Dionysius would say, “super-essential.” God Himself is the nothingness from which all things come, an unknowable nothingness or “darkness” that transcends even the things He creates within Himself (681a; as we’ll see later in this volume, this Dionysian theme will be taken up by authors like Meister Eckhart and the author of the Cloud of Unknowing).6 This account of unknowable darkness sheds further light on the division of four kinds of nature at the beginning of the Periphyseon. As the first creating and uncreated nature, God the Father is utterly transcendent, an unknowable source of the things He fashions within Himself in an act of “begetting.” What is begotten within Him is the Word,