Their commitment to the biblical doctrine of creatio ex nihilo brought the Church Fathers into head-on collision with the Greek conception of the eternity of matter. For both Plato and Aristotle, the greatest of the Greek thinkers, creation consists, not in God’s bringing the world into being out of nothing, but in His imposition of form upon formless prime matter, thereby fashioning a cosmos out of chaos.149 As we have seen, despite the tremendous pressure exerted by Greek philosophical thought, the Church Fathers with few exceptions refused to relinquish a Hebraic understanding of creation for this Greek conception. Because Aristotle had not merely asserted but argued for the eternity of world, Christian theologians could not rest content with citing biblical proof-texts for the Judaeo-Christian view but engaged Greek thinkers in philosophical discussion of their competing paradigms. The last great champion of creatio ex nihilo prior to the advent of Islam was John Philoponus (d. 580?), an Aristotelian commentator from Alexandria, who in his works Against Aristotle and On the Eternity of the World against Proclus initiated a tradition of argumentation for creatio ex nihilo based on the impossibility of an infinite past, a tradition subsequently enriched by medieval Muslim and Jewish theologians and then transmitted back again into Christian scholastic theology. Any person who rejects the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo cannot responsibly ignore this tradition but must respond substantively to such thinkers as al-Ghazali, Saadia ben Gaon, Bonaventure, and to their modern counterparts.
