The first article.
When someone once asked him why God had not created the world earlier, he
answered then, as he does now, that God could not have created the world
earlier, because a thing cannot act before it exists, and so as soon as God
existed he created the world.
The second article. Also, it can be granted that the world has
existed from eternity.
The third article. Also, in the one and the same time when God was,
when he begot his coeternal Son as God equal to himself in all things, he also
created the world.
Probably, the condemnation of the first three
articles tries to protect the faithful from the belief in the co-eternity of the
world with God, which would abolish the doctrine of creation of the world out of
nothing.
Eckhart’s thought (in general, but even as
summarised in these articles), does not claim an eternity of the world,
but of God’s creative energy. Divine energies are uncreated and have the
divine nature, so that, as such, they are not defined by time.
