CHAPTER XVIII—Solution of Arguments against Creation²¹⁸²¹⁸The addition of ab aeterno is evidently out of place in the title of this chapter. It contains no reference to the question raised in Chap. XXXVIII.

HENCE appears the futility of arguments against creation drawn from the nature of movement or change, — as that creation must be in some subject, or that non-being must be transmuted into being: for creation is not a change, but is the mere dependence of created being on the principle by which it is set up, and so comes under the category of relation: hence the subject of creation may very well be said to be the thing created.²¹⁹²¹⁹‘Creation’ here spoken of is not the action as it is of God, but the action as it is received in the creature, constituting a relation to God which we may call ‘creaturedom.’ Nevertheless creation is spoken of as a ‘change’ according to our mode of conceiving it, inasmuch as our understanding takes one and the same thing to be now non-existent and afterwards existing. If Creation (creaturedom) is a relation, it is evidently some sort of reality; and this reality is neither uncreated, nor created by a further act of creation. For since the created effect really depends on the Creator, this relation must be a certain reality. Now every reality is brought into being by God; and therefore also this reality is brought into being by God, and yet was not created by any other creation than that of the first creature, because accidents and forms do not exist by themselves, and therefore neither are they terms of separate creation, since creation is the production of substantial being; but as they are ‘in another,’ so are they created in the creation of other things.