to invoke a purity of intention, particularly one that ends by evacuating the giver, the receiver, and the gift of any identity or content for fear of losing the gift. It is necessary to consider the dimensions of love expressed in the terms eros, agape, and koinonia. What follows will consider the difference that creation ex nihilo introduces and how the negative aspect is to be perceived, beginning with this threefold dimension of love.
To start with an obvious but important point, we must recall that creation ex nihilo, while a legitimately philosophical concept, presupposes a difference between God and the world that is not available to unaided human experience. Creation requires the possibility that the world could have not been and that God’s greatness would have been unaffected by the lack. As Sokolowski describes it, the Christian difference, that is, the difference between a world created ex nihilo and its transcendent God, was unknown to the Greeks.32 Greek tragedies taught that however the gods excelled human beings and historical affairs, their dwelling place was on Mount Olympus, and their eternal history was inescapably tied to human history. Although corrected on many crucial points, the worldview underpinning Greek mythology remains intact for the great philosophers. Sokolowski also notes that Aristotle’s unmoved mover or self-thinking thought, Plato’s Good, and even Plotinus’s One are part of the cosmos. Plotinus’s One, despite its extreme otherness, cannot be without the Spirit and the Soul; Plato’s Good, although separated by an abyss from finite beings (becomings), does not exist independently of them; Aristotle’s self-thinking thought, regardless of whether it is aware of it, shares a necessary existence with those finite beings that never fully reach the unmoved mover and that imitate it either through eternal circular movement or through continual reproduction.33 Once philosophy welcomes the intimation of divine revelation, it is possible to see that creation accounts for what human experience perceives as the truth of the gift: a complete, gratuitous donation that awaits, without demanding it, a free response. For there to be the gift of the concrete singular at all, this radical difference between the world and God is needed.
Without pondering the meaning of nihil, one could claim that what originary experience considers a gift is simple necessity, and that the cosmos does in fact enclose the divine within its own horizon. Since Hegel’s attempt to integrate within the absolute spirit the difference between God and the world established by the creative nihil and Heidegger’s claim regarding the equi-primordial nature of truth and nothingness, we are inclined to think that we enjoy a panoptic vision of nothingness. Nothingness tends to be perceived as a concept synonymous with biological death. As a verb, “nothingness” is an exercise in contradiction. Nothingness is thus pictured as an “absent being” or an “enabling void” waiting to be filled by being’s presence. Nihil, however, is not a crypto-being that human reason can handle. Just as being is not a mere concept that the human mind can encompass, so nihil is not the dialectical partner of being. Nothingness is not a primordial poverty (penia) longing to be enriched by fullness (poros). It is not Hegel’s power of the negative, or even the negation of the negation through which the syllogistic logic of absolute spirit moves from “Logic” to “Spirit” through “Nature.” Both structures presuppose being. As C. O’Regan describes it in his account of why Hegel’s system ultimately rejects a creation ex nihilo, the nihil of creation is an oukontic, absolute one.34 If it is no-thing, then the coming of beings from God cannot be a Plotinian emanation or a production that benefits from some pre-existent material. Creation is not another kind of movement or the prototype of becoming—although it makes both of them possible. In this regard, creation is not another exemplum of human efficient causality. If it were simply another human making, the radical difference required to account for the positive existence of concrete singulars would still be lacking. Creation ex nihilo is the one act in which God communicates his esse ad extra to what he is not and what was not there before the original donation. It is, in other terms, the positing of an authentic multiplicity of singular beings that remain other from the source while not weakening or transforming that source.35
Creation’s radical nihil alone accounts for the being of concrete singulars without their confusion with the divine source or their reduction to pieces broken away from it. That beings are “from nothingness” entails that they are given to themselves, hence, that they are irreducible to the origin. The difference that creation introduces between the original giver and the concrete singular, since it indicates that the concrete singular being does not have consistency in itself, also requires the presence of the source in the singular-gift. The giver is present in the gift without absorbing it into himself.36 How are we to think then of this presence of the divine giver in the gift? Besides the similarity between the giver and the gift, it indicates that the concrete singular is relation with the source. Aquinas clarified that if creation is neither a change nor a movement, because both change and movement presuppose the existence of something (even if this something is primal matter), then creation indicates relation with the source.37 The positing of this relation is coincident with the inception and endurance of the concrete singular’s existence. Yet since the giver is present in the gift, the “relation” the original giver intends toward the gift/receiver is one of indwelling. Obviously, this “indwelling” varies according to the specific nature of each concrete singular. Nevertheless, it is analogically the case for each that having been given to itself entails being itself in another. This indwelling preserves the radical difference between God and concrete singulars because it affirms the radical oukontic negation. To claim the contrary would concede the relation between the divine giver and the gift to be one of pantheism. Yet if pantheism were the correct view of the relationship between God and the world, what sense could we make of our own bodies? Indwelling perpetuates this negation—negation is also a verb, “noughting,” as W. Desmond indicates—because it makes the original giving as a return to the source as other possible.38
3. Giving Otherness
The foregoing reflection on the radical nature of the gift in terms of creation ex nihilo considers creation to be a unique type of giving that speaks of a primordial act of love on the part of the original giver. While creation ex nihilo will enter again into the discussion later, at this point a few words on the relation between gift and love are in order. As we saw with Derrida, the gratuitousness of the gift and the unity between the giver, the gift, and the receiver depend on what we mean by love and gift. Clearly it is beyond our purpose here to summarize the intricate debate on the nature of love. In light of the richness of the tradition we will limit ourselves to a suggestion of how to understand this term.39
To characterize creation as a giving could give rise to an understanding of the nature of God, the original giver, in terms of the transcendental bonum, the Good. Much of Greek thought, particularly in Plato and the neoplatonic tradition, already pondered the nature of the ultimate, the One, in terms of goodness. From this Good, they said, proceeds all that is. Every concrete singular receives from the eternal goodness form, being, light, and goodness, and some receive life. The ancient philosophers knew full well that the more perfect a being is, the more it communicates; bonum diffusivum est sui. This communication meant that the cosmos moved towards the One by means of love.40 Yet this communication is not seen as the One’s love for the singular; it happens without the free and conscious decision of the Good itself.41 Furthermore, what comes forth from the Good, though participating in its fullness, is always less than the Good. The love that moves the cosmos and the stars knows only an upward movement. It is the cosmos that loves the Good, not vice versa. This is why for Plotinus, for example, the name of “good,” rather than indicating what the One is, has to do with its relation with the other hypostases.42
Through Christian revelation, God presents himself as a mystery of love. God not only gives creation to itself; he loves it and does so to the utmost. This understanding of God as absolute love fulfills the revelation of God as being (Exod 14:4; John 8:28) and transforms the Greek understanding of the Good. There is of course a sense in which the Good and love are synonymous. Love too, as revealed by Jesus Christ (1 John 4:8 and 16), regards the very essence of God. However, they do not coincide fully. Let us note three aspects of what love unfolds of the nature of God.
First, the identification of love with the divine esse permits a vision of love as witnessing to the transcendentality of the transcendentals,
