Emanació i creació del no-res en Hasday Cresques

Abstract

Emanation and creation ex nihilo are two theories about the origin of the world that are usually set against each other. Emanation is a philosophical conception derived from Plotinus, despite the fact that Arab thinkers before Averroës including Maimonides would also attribute it to Aristotle. Creation out of nothing, on the other hand, is based on the Second Book of the Maccabees (7,28), even though Maimonides and most mediaeval thinkers would trace it back to the history of creation in Genesis. Both theories have in common the idea that the formation of the world depends on a first cause, namely on God; but they differ in the way in which they explain that formation by Gods causality. According to the emanation theory, the world came out of Gods substance, while the theory of creation out of nothing affirms that the world was created by God out of nothing, that is to say, from an absolute privation or absence of all reality. Crescas deals with these two theories in one of his reflections on the theory of creation put forward by Levi ben Gerson, in which Crescas strives to demonstrate that the idea of nothing does not mean that nothing is the substratum from which the world emanated, but rather that the world existed after its non-existence or privation. Also the idea of emanation should be understood in the sense that «matter and form emanated together after their privation». Considering that the two conceptions mean the same, Crescas came to the conclusion that they are one single conception despite their being expressed in different words. On that score, he points out that emanation can be by necessity or by will, and explains the difference that exists between the two conceptions in relation to the voluntary nature of creation and its temporal beginning. In the present article, the author confines himself to a discussion of the sources and parallels of three of the points dealt with by Crescas in that reflection, namely: (1) that the expression out of