71

Father Antonin Dalmace Sertillanges, O.P. (1863-1945) dedicated numerous works to the philosophical study of the concept of creation which found their final synthesis in his master work of 1945, L’Idée de création et ses retentissements en philosophie. The present article re-situates Sertillanges’ speculative reflection on creation within the perspective that was his own, that of a philosophical apologetic, simultaneously oriented ad extra, toward his philosophical contemporaries, and ad intra, toward his fellow Christians. So it is that Sertillanges places Thomas Aquinas in dialogue with Henri Bergson to show that the Thomist understanding of creation ex nihilo escapes the Bergsonian criticism of the idea of nothingness, yet he also denounces the illusions that lead astray no small number of Christian thinkers, ancient and modern, as they reduce the idea of creation to that of a temporal beginning, which leads them to fail to recognize Christianity’s real contribution to philosophy. It is, however, in his analysis of Thomas’ texts themselves that Sertillanges shows himself the most penetrating and innovative. He demands a grasp of the Thomist doctrine of the relation of creation even in its ultimate consequences, upending the naive or false representations of creative causality, boldly joining the total dependence and radical autonomy of creatures, and drawing his contemporaries’ gaze toward the mystery of God, “the necessary Unknowable”.