Infinite Art: The Problem of 'Making' for a Christian Metaphysics

Abstract

This thesis is a philosophical exposition of ‘making’ in the Christian tradition. I argue that a defensible Christian metaphysics stands or falls with the coherence of its understanding of the existential modalities of producers and products and the cognitive structure of productive knowledge or ‘know-how’. I initially frame my project as a response to Martin Heidegger’s influential critique (even upon Christian theologians) of the doctrine of creation from nothing as a ‘productionist metaphysics’ which naïvely reduces the being of all entities to the ontological status of artefacts, predetermined in advance in the sovereign intellect of their ‘maker’ and so dispossessed of their own spontaneity and possibility. Because Heidegger’s critique is rooted in his general suspicion of Platonism, which also traces origination to artisanal shaping, I continue my study by analysing the original, defining discussions of poiēsis and technē in the works of Plato and Aristotle. I argue that while it is true that both Plato and Aristotle can be interpreted as defending an ‘intellectualist legend’ about making, portraying production as an instrumental procedure for exerting intellectual control over disorderly phenomena, Plato especially is shown to be more sensitive to the ambiguities surrounding the dēmiourgos, technē, and the relationship between orders of being and becoming. Significantly, Aristotle, who more obviously thinks the artist simply realises a preceding concept in his mind, lacks an account of productive metaphysical origins, suggesting that Heidegger’s assumption of the link between an intellectualist origin of art and a productionist account of reality is not so evident after all. I then seek to draw out how the fusion of Platonic ‘productionism’ and Aristotelian ‘intellectualism’ in Middle Platonic thought impacted the evolution of the Deus Artifex concept in patristic and medieval Christian thought. Among the Church Fathers, tensions emerge over the question of God’s immanent relative to his transitive operations: is God’s ‘thinking’ already his ‘making’? Thomas Aquinas attempts to resolve this, but ultimately espouses an interval between God’s reserved potential and actualised power, inviting the spectre of an arbitrary creation, even if this is later exacerbated by John Duns Scotus. I conclude that Nicholas of Cusa thinks through the eternal creativity of God more coherently, arriving at a more defensible metaphysical synthesis, and defying both of the dialectically interrelated poles of intellectualism and voluntarism by prioritising ars over other divine perfections. My final reading of Cusanus breaks new ground, marshalling his thought to intervene in contemporary philosophical debates, in both the continental and analytic traditions, concerning the cognitive dynamics of productive knowledge and the relative priority of actuality and possibility. Cusanus demonstrates avant la lettre that the coherence of any ‘productionist’ ontology and epistemology depends on a wider horizon of irreducibly theological claims. ‘Making’, for Cusanus, is convertible with ‘being’, and ‘art’ with ‘knowledge’, because of the non-contradictory transcendence and immanence of the triune productivity of God.