The Dialectic of Finite Creation

Abstract

Creation is the eternal actualization of absolutely primordial potency; it must thus be abruptly distinguished from every form of durational production. Nor can the existence of durational beings be unambiguously attributed to an eternal agent as such. But this exclusion of durational beings from the creative action must not be interpreted as meaning that there are no finite creata: the infinite potency actualized as the macrocosm is in the very act self-actualized as infinite microcosms in perfect communitas hierarchically constituting that macrocosm, and by it constituted under the limitations of their finiteness, i.e. as embedded in a complement by communitas with which they are constituted, and by the transcendence of which they are finite. Thus the created finite is eternal, but no mere section of the infinite. Its finiteness is framed on the analogy of the infinite, and it is thus that it has been described as a ‘finite-infinite.’¹ Creation is infinite and eternal in a manner such as not to exclude the reality of the finite creatum in a form in which it is both a constituent of the macrocosm and its analogue.