Page 81 - GALIET HEAVEN´S SCROLL IV

to fashion)81 with κτιζειν, to express “to create,” “to found,”82 in creation out of nothing’s sense, to eradicate any link to an artificer creating from pre-existent matter. Philo’s God, in contrast to Plato’s Demiourgos-ποιητην, created all things from the Perfect Ideas existing within His mind, and not pre-existing Him.
Inasmuch as κτιζειν or “creation,” always predicated of God’s creative action83 in both Old and New Testaments, expressed Yahweh’s absolute sovereignty, once juxtaposed to the notions of emanation, it divided philosophers. The relationship between God and His creation no longer was, in Philo and in Christian thought, reiterates Guitton, the relationship between cause and effect, nor between two different forms of being, but the relationship between a Divine Creator and the created.84 What is created is something precisely because, as Anderson reiterates, it has come “out of nothing” by Yahweh, by his omnipotent Word.85 Indeed, the form of relationship between Demiurge and the
81 Philo and the LXX translators later avoided using the term δημιουργεω to refer to God’s Creation to eradicate any association with the idea of a worker or an artificer who produces things out of pre-existing materials. Similarly, NT writers favour κτιζειν and its derivatives. Anderson, B.W. The Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible. An Illustrated Encyclopaedia. “Creation.” Ed. Arthur Buttrick and Emory Stevens Bucke. Volume 1. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1962. 731.
82 Originally, this word expresses the idea of building, colonizing, founding a city state; to plant a grove in Pindar; to set up an altar; to create, bring into being, bring about in Aesch.; to make so and so, Aeschylus; to perpetrate a deed, Soph. Afterwards, it expresses the notion, loosely, of praxis, a doing, an act, Pindar; and the Creation of the universe, NT. Liddell and Scott’s Greek-English Lexicon. Oxford. 453.
83 κτιζειν. To Create, and all things related to Creation, Creator, Creature. Vine’s Expository Dictionary. 246-247.
84 Guitton. Le Temps et L’Eternite Chez Plotin et St. Augustin. 1933. 154-155. 85 Guitton. Le Temps et L’Eternite Chez Plotin et St. Augustin. 1933. 154-155.
—81—