Santo Tomás, Leibniz y el dilema creación – eternidad del mundo

As impervious members of the Christian theology, Aquinas and Leibniz, at first glance, both subscribe to the thesis according to which the world is a divine creation out of nothingness (creatio ex nihilo), raising this truth to the category of divine mystery or miracle of religion. Despite the fact that Leibniz himself invokes Aquinas’s authority in order to understand the creation of the world in the context of Revelation, the epistemological status of proofs or arguments over which both justify the creatio ex nihilo thesis is however different: while Aquinas accepts that the world could be eternal even if it is, in fact, created -preserving by that approval God’s omnipotence-, the German polymath thinks in a different fashion, namely that it is not rationally demonstrable that the existing or actual world be not, actually, eternal. Moreover, in some passages, Leibniz actually suggests that the world, instead of being the result of a divine creation, can be conceived as a eternal divine emanation. Considering several textual pieces of both authors, our task consists in sketching a comparative survey, examining, in the first place, the manner in which Leibniz, relying on Aquinas’s authority, conceives the divine creation in his theological metaphysics (section 1) in order to retrospectively analyse, in a second part, Aquinas’s creationist doctrine (section 2) for then, finally, wonder if both Aquinas and Leibniz hold -or not- a coincident philosophical doctrine about the creation of the world from the point of view of theological metaphysics (section 3).