12 Preliminary Considerations 



He creates as the means of realising the emergence of 

 free beings, which is itself the purpose of His Creation. 

 The Universe is His work; it is, naturally, within His 

 experience, but it is not merely a part of Himself. It is 

 the expression of the fact that He has limited Himself; 

 it is the region of His experience in which He is under- 

 going process or becoming, and in which He is therefore 

 in duration, at least, and probably in space. At the same 

 time we must guard very carefully against any spatial 

 conception of immanence itself, or we shall be landed 

 once more in the box difficulty. 



At this point it is clear that we are up against the 

 problems of Reality and of Knowledge, as well as the 

 problems of Time and Space. Is the experience of be- 

 coming the immanental experience as real for God as 

 His transcendent experience? Are time and space as 

 real for Him as for us? What is Reality for God? Is His 

 knowledge complete in the immanent sphere? Such are 

 a few of the questions that confront us. 



Let us begin with Reality. In order to get a clear 

 view of the nature of the issues we will begin with the 

 same contradictory and really meaningless 1 assumption 

 that there was a state when God existed alone, before 

 any creation. What would Reality mean then for God? 

 Clearly, His self-experience. Of the nature of this self- 

 experience we shall have much to say in the succeeding 

 chapters, and we shall see that it involves a Trinitarian 



1 Meaningless, because it implies a before and after in the trans- 

 cendent experience of God, which experience is essentially simul- 

 taneous it introduces a time-element into absolute Being. Con- 

 tradictory because it implies a creative will which only became 

 active at a certain moment, and so introduces change into the 

 nature of God. God is Cause of the Cosmos only because the Cos- 

 mos as a whole is the expression of the nature of His Being as Love, 

 which term implies activity and the existence of 'otherness.' 

 The fact that God is eternally creative does not, of course, affect 

 the obvious truth that this universe had a beginning. 



