The crucial point is the transition from the perfect First Principle to an imperfect world, i.e. to creation. Here the creation ex nihilo and the emanation theories are the Scylla and Charybdis. From neither of them can thought pass to an adequate First Principle; nor, on the other hand, can they mediate between it and creation. They are unworthy of the God of philosophy. To-day there is an attempt to revive a spiritualized form of the primordial Ὕλη upon which the Demiurge worked. Started anew by Jacob Boehme, this theosophic speculation of a φύσις—an eternal non-material substance in God as the source of creation—is forcing itself into the systems of Christian theologians. This is a commendable attempt to avoid the rocks and the whirlpool. But it is not, and cannot be, ultimate till the φύσις is wholly resolved and transmuted in the Divine Glory. This alone can save it from the maintenance of the eternity of the finite, or of matter, and make creation to be a form of free self-activity of the Divine. Poetic, religious, and symbolic forms cannot pass for the pure, i.e. concrete, thought, which philosophy demands.
Now, the First Principle reached by philosophy and stated in the doctrine of the Holy Trinity can be seen as self-sufficient, and sufficient for creation as a free process of self-activity—the creation going forth in imperfect form in order to return in perfect form; i.e. a process in time and space with the one sole final purpose of the evolution and education of rational immortal souls, in a perfect kingdom of God. The world as such is not divine, but a procession which includes its return to the Divine. That is, the First Principle yields a rational and teleological basis and view of creation and its history. The final cause is the true first cause.
Creation in all its present forms and in its totality is imperfect. Respice finem is philosophy's antidote to doubt, awakened by imperfect and transitory forms of life and creed. Reason is immanent in and governs the world, but the world as it is, is not equal to, does not exhaust Reason—the Totality. "Anthropo-cosmic theism" is the valid interpretation of the creation, while creation is not exhaustive of the Divine. It contains
