5. God in Creation

The self-manifestation of God in the Trinity is followed by his manifestation in his creatures. Everything in them that is truly real is God’s eternal being; but God’s being does not manifest itself thus in its entire fulness (101, 34; 173, 26; 503, 26). In this antithesis may be expressed the relation of Eckhart’s philosophy to pantheism, both as regards similarities and differences. According to Eckhart God’s creatures have not, as Thomas Aquinas held, merely ideal preexistence in God, i.e. their conceptual essence (essential quidditas) coming from the divine intelligence, but their existence (esse) being foreign to the divine being. Rather is the true being of the creatures immanent in the divine being. On the other hand, every peculiarity distinguishing, creatures from each other is something negative; and in this sense it is said that the creatures are a mere nothing. Should God withdraw from his creatures his being, they would disappear as the shadow on the wall disappears when the wall is removed (31, 2). This perishable being is the creature confined within the limits of space and time (87, 49). On the other hand, every creature, considered according to its true entity, is eternal. It is obvious that this necessarily involves a modification of the idea of creation. Even Augustine and the Schoolmen felt this difficulty. While they did not, like Eckhart connect the existence of the world with the being of God they did consider it unallowable to attribute to God any temporary activity. Albert the Great tried to avoid the difficulty with the sentence, “God created all things from eternity, but things were not created from eternity”; but this is more easily said than conceived. According to the bull of 1329 (p. 2), Eckhart asserted that “it may be conceded that the world was from eternity.” It is impossible here to investigate this view further; but reference must be made to the close relation into which Eckhart brings the process of the Trinity and the genesis, or progress, of the world, both of the real and the ideal world (76, 52; 254, 16; 284, 12; cf. Com. in Genes., ALKG, ii. 553, 13-17).