Creation

Concerning Manifestation And The Parody Of The Term "Creation"

René Guénon, EDH112

Those last considerations[1] lead us directly to explain the idea of "creation": this concept, which is rather strange to the Orientals, except for the Muslims, as it was in Greek-Roman antiquity, appears as specifically Jewish at its origin.

The word which designates it, is although Latin in its form not the meaning it received in Christianity, for creare did first of all mean nothing else than "doing", a meaning which was kept in sanskrit, of the root kri, which is identical to the word.

But there has been a profound change in its meaning, and this is - as we have mentioned - equally the case of the term "religion". Its is obvious from Judaism that the respective idea has been passed into Christianity and into Islam[2]; and what concerns its essential raison d'être, it is basically the same as for the prohibition (of the use) of antropomorphic symbols.

Actually, the tendency to conceive God as a "Being" more or less analogous to individual beings and particularily to human beings, has to have as a natural corollary[3] - everywhere it exists - the tendency to attribute to it (God) simply a "demiurgical" role [the role of a demiurge][4], [demiurgical as here] meaning exerting an action towards a [an element of] "matter" supposedly exterior to one-self, which is the proper mode of action of human beings.

Under these conditions it was necessary, in order to maintain the notion of unity and of divine infinity, to affirm expressly that God had "made the world out of nothing", which is to say in sum, that nothing was exterior to Him, because the [above] assumption [to conceive God as a Being] would have had the effect of limiting him by giving rise to a radical dualism.

The [above described] theological heresy is here only the expression of a metaphysical non-understanding [nonsense], which by the way is the usual case; but the danger, which is non-existing regarding pure metaphysics, becomes very real at the religious viewpoint, because the absurdity of this derived form does not at once become apparent. The theological concept of "creation" is an adapted translation of the metaphysical concept of the "universal manifestation", and the best adapted to the mentality of occidental peoples, but it is (by the way) not [possible to] establish any correspondance between those two concepts...EDH112u

[1] Concerning the prohibition of using symbols of human resemblance in Judaism and Islam[2].

[2] The author RG uses the word "Islamism" instead of Islam

[3] corollary: A statement which follows immediately or very simply from a theorem. (For example) a proposition A is a corollary of a proposition or theorem B if A can be deduced quickly and easily from B. (www.kids.net.au/encyclopedia-wiki/th/Theorem)

[4] demiurge: http://www.thefreedictionary.com/demiurge