relation. It follows that the Persons of the Trinity, which are only
"relative names," are fused in the Absolute.[215] We may make
statements about God, if we remember that they are only metaphors; but
whatever we deny about Him, we deny truly.[216] This is the "negative
road" of Dionysius, from whom Erigena borrows a number of uncouth
compounds. But we can see that he valued this method mainly as
safeguarding the transcendence of God against pantheistic theories of
immanence. The religious and practical aspects of the doctrine had
little interest for him.

The destiny of all things is to "rest and be quiet" in God. But he
tries to escape the conclusion that all distinctions must disappear;
rather, he says, the return to God raises creatures into a higher
state, in which they first attain their true being. All individual
types will be preserved in the universal. He borrows an illustration,
not a very happy one, from Plotinus. "As iron, when it becomes
red-hot, seems to be turned into pure fire, but remains no less iron
than before; so when body passes into soul, and rational substances
into God, they do not lose their identity, but preserve it in a higher
state of being."

Creation he regards as a necessary self-realisation of God. "God was
not," he says, "before He made the universe." The Son is the Idea of
the World; "be assured," he says, "that the Word is the nature of all
things." The primordial causes or ideas--Goodness, Being, Life, etc.,
_in themselves_, which the Father made in the Son--are in a sense the
creators of the world, for the order of all things is established
according to them. God created the world, not out of nothing, nor out
of something, but out of Himself.[217] The creatures have always
pre-existed "yonder" in the Word; God has only caused them to be