"everlasting process." The creatures are "absolutely nothing"; but
at the same time "God without them would not be God," for God is
love, and must objectify Himself; He is goodness, and must impart
Himself. As the picture in the mind of the painter, as the poem in
the mind of the poet, so was all creation in the mind of God from
all eternity, in uncreated simplicity. The ideal world was not
created in time; "the Father spake Himself and all the creatures in
His Son"; "they exist in the eternal Now"[10]--"a
becoming without a becoming, change without change." "The Word of
God the Father is the substance of all that exists, the life of all
that lives, the principle and cause of life." Of creation he says:
"We must not falsely imagine that God stood waiting for something to
happen, that He might create the world. For so soon as He was God,
so soon as He begat His coeternal and coequal Son, He created the
world." So Spinoza says: "God has always been before the creatures,
without even existing before them. He precedes them not by an
interval of time, but by a fixed eternity." This is not the same as
saying that the world of sense had no beginning; it is possible that
Eckhart did not mean to go further than the orthodox scholastic
mystic, Albertus Magnus, who says: "God created things from
eternity, but the things were not created from eternity." St
Augustine (Conf. xi. 30) bids objectors to "understand that there
can be no time without creatures, and cease to talk nonsense."
Eckhart also tries to distinguish between the "interior" and the
"exterior" action of God. God, he says, is in all things, not as
Nature, not as Person, but as Being. He is everywhere, undivided;
yet the creatures participate in Him according to their measure.[11]
The three Persons of the Trinity have impressed their image upon the
creatures, yet it is only their "nothingness" that keeps them
separate creatures. Most of this comes from the Neoplatonists, and