Theo Kobusch: Creation out of nothing: Creation out of God Eriugena’s doctrine of creation as the beginning of idealism

One of the philosophical pioneering feats in Eriugena’s Periphyseon consists in giving a whole new meaning to the traditional concept of ‘creation out of nothing’. ‘Nothing’ is no longer understood as ‘privative nothing’ (nihil privativum) in which Augustine still saw the cause of all nothingness. Now, instead, it stands for the richness of all reality in the Neoplatonic, i.e. ‘superessential’ or eminent sense of the οὐδὲν πάντων in Plotinus from which everything created originates. However only in creation God comes to himself. Creation is the condescendence of God.
Motion in Peripyseon is the motion of creation, in which God is condescending to the limit, creating himself by returning to himself in everything created. That is, as this paper is going to show, the basic model of idealist thought. For that reason, Eriugena has been rediscovered by 19th century Schellingians, by F.A. Staudenmaier and others. In his name Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel rejected the traditional understanding of creation out of nothing.