continual process.

The universe is the expression of the whole thought of the Father; it
is the language of the Word. Eckhart loves startling phrases, and says
boldly, "Nature is the lower part of the Godhead," and "Before
creation, God was not God." These statements are not so crudely
pantheistic as they sound. He argues that without the Son the Father
would not be God, but only undeveloped potentiality of being. The
three Persons are not merely accidents and modes of the Divine
Substance, but are inherent in the Godhead.[239] And so there can
never have been a time when the Son was not. But the generation of the
Son necessarily involves the creation of an ideal world; for the Son
is Reason, and Reason is constituted by a cosmos of ideas. When
Eckhart speaks of creation and of the world which had no beginning, he
means, not the world of phenomena, but the world of ideas, in the
Platonic sense. The ideal world is the complete expression of the
thought of God, and is above space and time. He calls it "non-natured
nature," as opposed to "diu genâ-tûrte nâtûre," the world of
phenomena.[240] Eckhart's doctrine here differs from that of Plotinus
in a very important particular. The Neoplatonists always thought of
emanation as a diffusion of rays from a sun, which necessarily
decrease in heat and brightness as they recede from the central focus.
It follows that the second Person of the Trinity, the [Greek: Nous] or
Intelligence, is subordinate to the First, and the Third to the
Second. But with Eckhart there is no subordination. The Son is the
pure brightness of the Father's glory, and the express image of His
Person. "The eternal fountain of things is the Father; the image of
things in Him is the Son, and love for this Image is the Holy Ghost."
All created things abide "formless" (as possibilities) in the ground
of the Godhead, and all are realised in the Son. The Alexandrian