The term creation (from the Latin creatio, “the act of bringing forth,” “producing,” or “begetting”) designates the act by which God gives being to that which was not. In the strict metaphysical and theological sense, to create does not mean to transform pre-existing matter or to organize a primordial chaos, but to bring into existence that which, apart from this act, would be absolutely nothing.
More particularly
Creation is thus radically distinct from every form of production, fabrication, or generation. An artisan fashions an object from already existing materials; nature generates a living being from another living being; God alone creates, that is, confers existence itself.
In the Judeo-Christian tradition, creation is understood as creatio ex nihilo (“creation out of nothing”). This expression does not mean that nothingness is a kind of raw material employed by God, but rather that no pre-existing reality is required for the creative act. Nothingness is not a cause; it merely signifies the total absence of being prior to creation.
Nor should creation be conceived merely as an event situated in the past. According to classical metaphysics, the creative act is permanent: every created being depends continuously upon God for its existence. Were this dependence to cease for even an instant, the creature would return to nothingness. As St. Thomas Aquinas teaches, for God, conserving beings in existence is a continual act of creation.
This ontological dependence distinguishes creation from ordinary causality. A natural cause produces an effect that may continue to exist independently of it; the creature, by contrast, remains dependent upon its Creator in its very act of existing. Creation is therefore not merely a relation of origin but a permanent relation of being.
Metaphysics likewise distinguishes creation from emanation. In certain Neoplatonic doctrines, beings proceed from the Principle through a necessary process of diffusion comparable to the radiance of light. Creation, on the contrary, is traditionally understood as a free act. The world exists not because God could not do otherwise, but because He wills it.
This freedom of the creative act allows us to understand the contingency of the world. Nothing in the nature of created things requires their existence absolutely. They might not have been. Their existence therefore points to a cause that possesses being in itself and not by participation.
Yet although the world does not proceed from a necessary emanation, it nevertheless manifests certain possibilities contained principially within the Divine Infinite. Traditional metaphysics teaches that God eminently contains all possibilities of being and non-being. Creation may therefore be understood as the contingent manifestation of some of these possibilities—not because they must necessarily unfold, but because Divine Freedom actualizes them according to a design belonging to Divine Wisdom.
This perspective makes it possible to understand creation as manifestation without reducing it to emanation. What is manifested in the cosmos is never the Divine Essence itself, which remains absolutely transcendent and incommunicable, but rather reflections, participations, or determinations of the possibilities contained within it principially. Thus, the created order is not a portion of God, but the finite expression of possibilities whose source remains infinite.
The doctrine of creation also makes it possible to distinguish clearly between theism and pantheism. If the world is created by God, it is not God. It depends entirely upon its Principle without being identical with it. The Creator infinitely transcends His creation while remaining intimately present to it as the cause of its being.
From a metaphysical perspective, creation manifests the symbolic character of the cosmos. Because it receives its being from a Principle that transcends it, the visible world may be understood as the sign or image of an invisible reality. As Plato writes, the world is necessarily “the image of something” (Timaeus, 29b). According to Jean Borella, the universe therefore possesses an iconic function: in its very substance, it is both symbol and manifestation of a higher order.
Creation thus appears as a genuine theophany. Not because God is identical with the world, but because creatures reveal, by analogy, certain divine perfections. The beauty, truth, goodness, order, and intelligibility of created beings bear witness to their Source without ever exhausting it. The visible refers to the invisible; the relative to the Absolute; the manifested to its Principle.
Modern materialist conceptions tend to reduce the question of origins to that of the physical transformations of the universe. Creation, however, does not answer the question, “How did the world evolve?” but a more fundamental one: “Why is there something rather than nothing?” Creation therefore belongs first to metaphysics before it belongs to cosmology.
Creation thus appears as the fundamental relation uniting every contingent being to its transcendent Principle. It expresses the radical dependence of everything that exists upon the very Source of being, while revealing the cosmos as symbol, manifestation, and participation in a reality that infinitely surpasses it.
See also: Absolute, Cause, Contingency, Cosmos, Being, Logos, Manifestation, Nature, Participation, Symbol, Theophany.
Further Reading
• Genesis, chapters 1–2.
• Plato, Timaeus, 28a–30d.
• Dionysius the Areopagite, The Divine Names.
• Augustine of Hippo, Confessions, Book XI.
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I, qq. 44–46.
• Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, Time and Eternity.
• Frithjof Schuon, Understanding Islam; Logic and Transcendence.
• Jean Borella, The Crisis of Religious Symbolism.
• Wolfgang Smith, The Wisdom of Ancient Cosmology.
• Bruno Bérard, Metaphysics for Everyone (Angelico Press, 2024); Italian translation: Sui sentieri della metafisica; Spanish translation: ¿Qué es la metafísica?; German translation: Was ist Metaphysik? Zwischen Ambition und Wirklichkeit.