"What is preserved from the tradition’s insistence on the gratuity of Creation is the deeper truth that the speculative reading both inherits and transforms: the world is not a constraint upon God, not a limitation of the divine freedom, not something that God requires in the sense of lacking without it; the necessity of Creation is not the necessity of need, but the necessity of caritas, – the movement of an universality that is fully itself only in giving itself away, a logos that is most fully itself in speaking itself into the concrete otherness through which it returns to itself enriched. The world is gift – not because it was arbitrarily bestowed by a will that could have withheld it, but because the movement of self-giving that constitutes it is the innermost nature of the divine life itself, the overflow of a love whose self-expression is identical with its freedom. Creatio ex nihilo preserves its speculative truth in this reading: the world does not come into being alongside the logos, as if Creation were an act performed by a divine agent who stood apart from His own rational self-expression; it comes into being through the logos – ‘all things were made by Him; and without Him was not any thing made that was made’ – which means the world’s entire being is the being of the divine self-expression in the mode of concrete otherness, the word spoken into existence not from need but from the excess of self-expression that is love. The world is not fashioned from a prior material, not the product of a demiurge working on pre-existing matter, not the degraded emanation of a divine substance that loses something in the emanation: the world’s entire being is the being of the logos in the form of its own concrete otherness, – it has no independent ontological ground apart from this self-expression and this is what ex nihilo most fundamentally means when stripped of its ontotheological frame.
The world that results from this self-extrusion has the character it has by necessity. The world is finite because the logos’s self-expression into concrete otherness is precisely the movement of the infinite word into the finite world, the absolute positing its own opposite as the condition of its own concrete self-knowledge. It is contingent in its particular determinations, not in the sense that its existence as such is contingent, but in the sense that the specific forms through which the logos externalizes itself – this particular arrangement of matter, this particular configuration of natural laws, this particular History of organic life – are not deducible in advance from the abstract structure of the kenotic movement, but are the irreducible concrete particularity through which the word effectively speaks itself into the world. It is organized as a progressive self-transcendence: from the indifferent exteriority of mechanical nature – the logos at its furthest remove from self-recognition, the word present in the form of its most complete self-alienation, as blind compulsion of matter upon matter that enacts a rational structure it cannot hear – through the internal relations of chemical process, where externally related terms begin to show an inner affinity that exceeds mere mechanical necessity, through the self-maintaining unity of organic life, where the logos first exhibits within nature something of its own structure of self-reference and self-determination, to the emergence of finite spirit as the first form of the absolute’s self-recognition within its own otherness. Each stage of this progression is the logos in the form of its concrete otherness becoming progressively less other to itself, the word moving from its most silent and self-alienated form toward the form in which it will first be able to hear itself. Nature is therefore not a static backdrop against which the drama of Spirit plays out; it is the first act of the drama itself, the movement through which the logos’s self-extrusion into concrete objectivity begins to stir toward its own recovery, the word spoken into the world beginning the long movement toward its own self-recognition."
Source:
ESSAY FOR THE CONSTITUTION OF THE HEGELIAN DOCTRINE OF ABSOLUTE SCIENCE