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 gena-turte nature,” 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 Fathers, in identifying the Logos with the Platonic [Greek:  Nous], the bearer of the World-Idea, had found it difficult to avoid subordinating Him to the Father.  Eckhart escapes this heresy, but in consequence his view of the world is more pantheistic.  For his intelligible world is really God—­it is the whole content of the Divine mind.[241] The question has been much debated, whether Eckhart really falls into pantheism or not.  The answer seems to me to depend on what is the obscurest part of his whole system—­the relation of the phenomenal world to the world of ideas.  He offers the Christian dogma of the Incarnation of the Logos as a kind of explanation of the passage of the “prototypes” into “externality.”  When God “speaks” His ideas, the phenomenal world arises.  This is an incarnation.  But the process by which the soul emancipates itself from the phenomenal and returns to the intelligible world, is also called a “begetting of the Son.”  Thus the whole process is a circular one—­from God and back to God again.  Time and space, he says, were created with the world.  Material things are outside each other,