​Chapter 6. Creation

Suppose the case for the One holds. The infinite is undivided, complete, and wants nothing. That raises a question: why would it create a world? Nothing in it lacks or strains outward toward what it does not have. The doctrine offers its reasons, and when set beside one another, they do not agree.

God is good, and the good pours past its edge, giving off being as light gives off radiance. This is the Neoplatonic idea beneath the Kabbalah, the One of Plotinus emanating from no need and no decision, by what it is. The world follows from the source as a consequence follows from its ground, and the source is undiminished.

Then disclosure. The hidden God wished to be known. Mercy, judgment, and kingship, the names by which the concealed becomes legible, have nowhere to show themselves unless an other is ready to receive them, since a king without a kingdom is not yet a king. Creation is the infinite becoming readable, putting on the garments through which it can be addressed.

Furthermore, bestowal. The good seeks someone to receive it, and a gift wants a recipient who stands apart from the giver, far enough off to take what is given as his own. The infinite fashions a being separate from itself, a vessel able to hold what is poured into it.

Above these there is the noblest reason. Love reaches toward the other and wants that other to remain free, set over against the giver and separate in its own right. Where bestowal asks for a vessel to receive the gift, love needs someone who can be loved. Here is the warmth the whole doctrine draws on, the reason that lets creation seem more than the working of a mechanism.

Beneath them all lies an act. Before anything emanates, Ain Soph contracts. It withdraws its presence from a point within itself and leaves an emptiness where the other can exist. Tzimtzum is the opening move of love, the infinite clearing room for a beloved.

The doctrine inherits these reasons more often than it argues for them. Under pressure they all give way.

Begin with overflow, since it alone seems to escape the problem that a full One desires nothing. The good pours by what it is, from no need and no choice. What this reason gains by dropping desire, it loses in freedom. A source that emanates being by its nature acts under the law of being what it is, and an origin that cannot fail to pour is not free. The theologian answers that no law rules above God, since the law is divine nature, so that in him necessity and freedom coincide. Grant it, and the reason still splits in the hand. If the overflow is truly necessitated, then love and disclosure and gift had no part in it, and the world falls from God without choice. If instead the overflow is willed freely, then a choice has been made, and this world occupies the place other worlds might have occupied. Either necessity empties the warmer reasons, or the account surrenders its ground to the divine will.

Love is offered as the noblest reason, and it makes two demands the doctrine cannot grant together. A love compelled by nature is the necessity examined above, warmed with a better name; a love worth the word is free, and a free love that settles on this world has chosen it, so the choice waits again on the will. The second demand belongs to love alone, and it undoes the reason from inside. Love is directed toward an other, and it wants that other to remain apart, someone capable of loving. Yet the doctrine fixes the end of creation as return: the creature drawn upward, sinking at last into the source, the separate self annulled in union with what made it.

Hold love to its meaning, and the creature must be left apart; the return that was the whole purpose of the descent then has no task left. There is a heavier cost still. A creature left to exist on its own is a real other set over against God, a not-God possessing independent being, and the Without-End can hold no such outside. To let the beloved be sovereign is to draw an edge around the infinite and set something beyond it, and God with an outside has stopped being infinite. Keep the return in place instead, and this was never love of the other. It was an other posited for the pleasure of reclaiming it, a going-out staged for the sake of the coming-back.

We found that overflow hands its ground to the will. Love follows the same path once it is held to its sense, since the choice of this world also falls to the will. The reasons drain toward the bare volition: God creates because God wills it, and a will answers to nothing beneath it.

To will is always to will something. A will that settles on this world has taken it from among all the worlds that might have been and let the others fall away. Selection excludes; exclusion sets a limit. A will fixed on the determinate is itself determinate, while an infinite, indeterminate will is fixed on nothing in particular. The instant God creates this world rather than another, he has acquired an edge.

Tzimtzum confesses that edge in the doctrine's first act. Before a single Sephirah shines, Ain Soph contracts, and the contraction lays a limit on the Without-End: a void outside which it now remains. Take the withdrawal as real, and the boundless has accepted a bound, the Without-End has found its end. Take it as a figure of speech, with no real withdrawal, and the other has no independent ground; the world lies undivided within God as it always did. Either the infinite is unmade at the first step, or the first step was never taken. Boundlessness keeps its name only while it remains inert, and the move that opens creation is the act of a defined will, a God with an edge wearing the Without-End as a title.

Two escapes remain, and simplicity is the first of them. The will of God, the schoolman says, is identical with the divine essence, so that the determinacy falls to the world that follows while the one who wills stays undivided, willing a particular without becoming particular himself. Set the determination in the effect, and the source stays intact. Yet the selection is already a determinacy in the act of willing, before any effect exists to carry it off. Either willing this world differs from willing another, and then the difference lies inside the God who wills, or it does not differ, and then the will no longer explains why this world came rather than another, which was the whole reason the will was summoned. The will can account for this particular world by being already determinate; the escape hands back exactly what it was meant to remove.

Silence answers where simplicity failed. The infinite is ineffable, says the negative theologian; of the fullness we know nothing, and we approach Ain Soph only by stripping predicates away. One might hope to corner him by asking how we come to know of any fullness at all, and he grants the point without a struggle: we do not know the fullness. But if the fullness lies wholly past speech, and only the determinate is ever met, then the fullness does no work. The providence and love the system attributes to the infinite source are carried in fact by the willing and bounded God of the Sephiroth, who alone acts. The infinite fullness dwindles to a name set above to consecrate this bounded God, while remaining sealed off where no act reaches it and no consequence follows. The making and the willing are done by the God with an edge.

The same figure steps forward each time: a bounded will. A fullness has no cause to spill and no edge to spill across, so overflow was never what did the work. What creates is a will that has settled on this world and shut off the rest, a will with a boundary.

Nothing in the One sends anything downward. A completeness desires no outside, so it has no reason to multiply into a world, and the motion from Kether down the Tree cannot arise from a totality. Yet the Tree is thick with motion. Upward runs the return the tradition builds its practice on, the soul climbing back toward unity as the thing longed for. Downward runs emanation, and something did lay the Tree down: not the fullness, which stays inert, but the bare volition to which the reasons have led, the will that settles on this world and shuts off the rest. That will is the source the doctrine cannot look at, because it has an edge and unity may have none. So the tradition sets the undesiring One at the summit and names it the origin, a goal dressed up as a beginning, and hangs the descent on a fullness that could not have initiated it. What actually laid the Tree down waits to be taken up.