The second article is understood thus to mean
the eternal existence of the world for the divine wisdom, that is: beyond
the world’s existence in time. There isn’t anything that God doesn’t know in
order to know it or choose it or do it later. In this sence it can indeed be said that the world has
existed from eternity.
The pope’s (very grave) mistake here is that
he ascribes time to God’s being (knowing it or not), since only in time the
notions of ‘before’ and ‘after’ have meaning, and only thus one can say that God
at some ‘moment’ ‘decided’ to create the world. If ‘time’ of the Deity is the
eternity, the distinct ‘moment’ of creation does not exist for God, but
only for the world, which is created in time.
On the other hand, the ‘naïve’ faithful that
listened to Eckhart were not in danger more than they were by listening to
Christ himself saying that ‘you are all Gods and Children of the Highest’. A
‘devaluation’ of the world does not avoid the scandal of pantheism, it avoids
salvation. Christian faith in any case is a scandal, since it is based on
the union of time with eternity, of the becoming with the immutable and of man
with God.
