​Chapter 14. Creation

The deposit comes from the act, and creation is the name for the act's leaving a deposit.

Start from the inside. The will is what a being is when it has nothing — naturelessness named from within. Let the will move toward expenditure, press outward, and that pressing is energy; let the energy take a definite shape, this gesture and no other, and that shape is the act; let the act cool, and what it leaves as it cools is residue. These are four words for one motion as it sets, a single expenditure read at four points along its course. Energy is not a layer under the will, and residue is not a substance the act secretes; name them apart as standing things and one of them hardens into a thin nature, which is the move the whole account denies. There is the act, and there is the act gone cold. The four names mark stages.

The act is aimed from within. The direction is the will's own, carried in the doing, the will's design. Telos is a deposit projected forward on the line and given the standing of a destination — the nature's forward face dressed as a summons from ahead. When the will takes its direction from that projection, it has delegated to a nature it carries: the will supplies the force, and the attractor provides the aim. The free act carries its aim in the making and owes it to no deposit.

An act leaves residue. A gesture can spend itself and pass without leaving a created thing behind it, but it does not vanish without a trace: it cools into some deposit, however slight — a memory, a habit, a mark in the carrier, a change in the world that may never stand apart as a thing. Creation begins when the residue takes distance from the act that left it, when what cooled becomes encounterable otherness: something faced and answered to.

The created is therefore residue that has stood apart. The world is the first and largest of these: the great residue of free expenditure, freedom gone cold and set far enough from the act to be met as other. The world is the trace of an act — which is to say, nature at its largest.

This is the sense worth saving from creation out of nothing. The nothing was never empty stuff, a void waiting on matter. The nothing is the absence of a pre-given nature. The act creates from no prior essence and answers to nothing behind it that says what must come — which is why what comes is unprecedented. A world spilled from a fullness, or following from a substance by the necessity of what it is, could only ever have been what it is: a conclusion, pressed from its source. Creation from naturelessness is the one making that is no deduction.

This sets the act against the most influential theory of the act ever made, and the two run nearly backward. For Aristotle an act is energeia, the being-at-work of a thing, and an act in the full sense is entelecheia, the thing arrived at the end it carried within. Such an act is the actualization of a potency. A capacity, dynamis, sits in the thing beforehand, the power to become what its form prescribes, and the act is that power brought to completion: the builder's craft made actual in the house. Act there is a nature unfolding into what it was already set to be, the form drawing the potency forward to its term, a blueprint executed and a deduction from the essence.

That is the act of residue from start to finish. The dynamis is a deposit, a standing capacity that yields its settled output when the conditions arrive. The form is the essence, the what the thing is bound to realize. And the energeia is the deposit running to its appointed end, the most lawful motion there is, foreseeable from the form it serves. Aristotle's act is the falling stone given its fullest theory: the thing does perfectly and only what its nature is for.

The act meant here stands where his does not. It actualizes no potency, since nothing in the thing prescribed it, and a potency that already held it would make it the form's output, residue completing itself. It fulfills no form, being the break from the form. It carries no end within it to unfold toward, standing before the telos and the time the telos needs. Where Aristotle's act is the potency reaching its term, this act is the term refused, the answer the potency did not contain. The word is one and the events are opposite. The word energy hides the same trap: the will's raw outward pressure we call energy is the far pole from energeia, the drive before any form set against the form arrived at its end.

What is created is soil before it is anything else — lying where it was set, the ground a next act grows from. Here the created comes to a fork: it is released or it is held. Released, it stays soil. Held, it is claimed — taken up as mine, as how it must be — and a claimed deposit walls up, and a wall commands. The held creation stops being ground underfoot and begins to issue the next answer on its own, ruling the one who made it freely.

Release is what keeps a deposit from walling up. Take a discipline — a vow to rise before dawn, to train each day. It is a thing made and set apart, a standing rule over against any one morning's keeping of it. Held as soil, it serves while it works and is set down when it stops fitting; the life that made it goes on moving, free to keep the rule or let it go. Claimed — "I am disciplined, this is how I must live" — the rule turns into command. It is kept now past its use, as breaking it would crack the self raised on it, defended against any change, the keeper pouring all his force into holding a thing that was made to spend itself for him. One made thing, soil or wall, and the whole of the difference is whether it was let lie or signed.

So the world is a creation in this sense: the standing deposit of free expenditure, soil to whatever grows from it. Whether it lies as soil or is held and made to rule is a question for later. One thing comes first. To stand apart from the act is not yet to be met. The residue is created the moment it cools. It begins to exist only when it enters appearance, and that entry is an event of its own.