During the general audience of 5 March John Paul II continued his catechesis on creation.

1. The reflection on the truth of creation, whereby God calls the world into existence from nothingness, urges the eye of our faith to the contemplation of God the Creator, who reveals in creation his omnipotence, wisdom and love. The Creator's omnipotence is shown both in calling creatures into existence from nothingness and also in maintaining them in existence. "How would anything have endured if thou hadst not willed it? Or how would anything not called forth by thee have been preserved?", asks the author of the Book of Wisdom (11:25).

2. Omnipotence reveals also the love of God who, in creating, gives existence to beings different from himself, and at the same time different among themselves. The reality of his gift permeates the whole being and existence of creation. To create means to give (especially to give existence). And he who gives, loves. This is stated by the author of the Book of Wisdom when he exclaims: "Thou lovest all things that exist, and hast loathing for none of the things which thou hast made, for thou wouldst not have made anything if thou hadst hated it" (11:24); and he adds: "Thou sparest all things, for they are thine, O Lord who lovest the living" (11:26).

3. God's love is a disinterested love. Its aim is solely this: that the good comes into existence, endures and develops according to its own dynamism. God the Creator is he "who accomplishes all things according to the counsel of his will" (Eph 1:11). The whole work of creation belongs to the plan of salvation, "the mystery hidden for ages in God who created all things" (Eph 3:9). Through the act of the creation of the world, and especially of man, the plan of salvation begins to be realized. Creation is the work of a loving Wisdom, as Sacred Scripture mentions on several occasions (cf. e.g., Prov. 8:22-36).

It is therefore clear that the truth of faith about creation is radically opposed to the theories of materialistic philosophy, which view the cosmos as the result of an evolution of matter reducible to pure chance and necessity.

Active role of Son and Spirit

4. St Augustine says: "It is necessary that we, viewing the Creator through the works of his hands, raise up our minds to the contemplation of the Trinity, of which creation bears the mark in a certain and due proportion," (De Trinitate, VI, 10, 12). It is a truth of faith that the world has its beginning in the Creator, who is the Triune God. Although the work of creation is attributed especially to God the Father—this we profess in the Creeds of the faith ("I believe in God the Father Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth")—it is also a truth of faith that the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit are the unique and indivisible "principle" of creation.

5. Sacred Scripture confirms this truth in different ways: first of all as regards the Son, the Word con- substantial with the Father. There are already present in the Old Testament some significant references, as for example this eloquent verse of the Psalm: "By the word of the Lord the heavens were made" (Ps 33 [32]:6). It is a statement that becomes fully explicit in the New Testament, as for example in the Prologue of John: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God... All things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made... and the world was made through him" (Jn 1:1-2, 10). Paul's Letters proclaim that everything was made "in Jesus Christ". St Paul, in fact, speaks of "one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we exist" (1 Cor 8:6). In the Letter to the Colossians we read: "He (Christ) is the image of the invisible God, the first-born of all creation; for in him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible... all things were created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together" (Col 1:15-17).

The Apostle emphasizes the active presence of Christ both as the cause of creation ("through him"), and as its final cause ("for him"). It is a subject to which we shall have to return. Meanwhile we note that also the Letter to the Hebrews states that God through the Son "also created the world" (1:2), and that the "Son... upholds the universe by his word of power" (1:3). 

6. Thus the New Testament, and in particular the writings of St Paul and St John, deepen and enrich the reference to Wisdom and the creative Word already present in the Old Testament: "By the word of the Lord the heavens were made" (Ps 33[32]:6). They make clear that that creative Word was not only "with God", but it "was God", and also precisely as the Son consubstantial with the Father, the Word created the world in union with the Father: "and the world was made through him" (Jn 1:10).

Not only that: the world was created also in reference to the person (hypostasis) of the Word. "The image of the invisible God" (Col 1:15), the Word, who is the Eternal Son "reflecting the glory of God and bearing the very stamp of his nature" (cf. Heb 1:3), is also he who is the "first-born of all creation" (Col 1:15), in the sense that all things have been created in the Word-Son, to become, in time, the world of creatures called from nothingness into existence "outside of God". In this sense "all things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made" (Jn 1:3).

7. It can therefore be said that Revelation presents a "logical" (from "Logos": Word) structure of the universe and also an "iconic" (from Eikon: image, image of the Father) structure. From the times of the Fathers of the Church there has in fact been consolidated the teaching according to which the created world bears within itself the "vestiges of the Trinity" (vestigia Trinitatis). It is the work of the Father through the Son in the Holy Spirit. In creation there is revealed the Wisdom of God: in it the above-mentioned twofold a "logical-iconic" structure of creatures is intimately joined to the structure of the gift.

The individual creatures are not only "words of the Word", whereby the Creator is manifested to our intelligence, but they are also "gifts" of the Gift: they bear within themselves the imprint of the Holy Spirit, the creator Spirit.

Was it not already stated in the first verses of Genesis: "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth (the universe)... and the Spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters" (Gen 1:1-2)? That reference, evocative even though vague, to the action of the Spirit in that first "beginning" of the universe, appears very significant for us who read it in the light of the full New Testament revelation.

8. Creation is the work of the Triune God. The world "created" in the Word-Son, is "restored" together with the Son to the Father, through that Uncreated Gift, the Holy Spirit, consubstantial with both. In this way the world is created in that Love, which is the Spirit of the Father and of the Son. This universe embraced by eternal Love commences to exist in the instant chosen by the Trinity as the beginning of time.

In this way the creation of the world is the work of Love: the universe, a created gift, springs from the Uncreated Gift, from the reciprocal Love of the Father and Son, from the Most Holy Trinity.