Napoleon asked Goethe what matter was. “_Esprit gelé_,”—frozen spirit was the answer Schelling wished Goethe had given him. But neither is matter spirit, nor are matter and spirit together mere natural effluxes from God’s substance. A divine institution of them is requisite (quoted substantially from Dorner, System of Doctrine, 2:40). Schlegel in a similar manner called architecture “frozen music,” and another writer calls music “dissolved architecture.” There is a “psychical automatism,” as Ladd says, in his Philosophy of Mind, 169; and Hegel calls nature “the corpse of the understanding—spirit to alienation from itself.” But spirit is the Adam, of which nature is the Eve; and man says to nature: “_This is bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh_,” as Adam did in _Gen. 2:23_.
This theory regards creation as an act of God in eternity past. It was propounded by Origen, and has been held in recent times by Martensen, Martineau, John Caird, Knight, and Pfleiderer. The necessity of supposing such creation from eternity has been argued from God’s omnipotence, God’s timelessness, God’s immutability, and God’s love. We consider each of these arguments in their order.
Origen held that God was from eternity the creator of the world of spirits. Martensen, in his Dogmatics, 114, shows favor to the maxims: “Without the world God is not God.... God created the world to satisfy a want in himself.... He cannot but constitute himself the Father of spirits.” Schiller, Die Freundschaft, last stanza, gives the following popular expression to this view: “Freundlos war der grosse Weltenmeister; Fühlte Mangel, darum schuf er Geister, Sel’ge Spiegel seiner Seligkeit. Fand das höchste Wesen schon kein Gleiches; Aus dem Kelch des ganzen Geisterreiches Schäumt ihm die Unendlichkeit.” The poet’s thought was perhaps suggested by Goethe’s Sorrows of Werther: “The flight of a bird above my head inspired me with the desire of being transported to the shores of the immeasurable waters, there to quaff the pleasures of life from the foaming goblet of the infinite.” Robert Browning, Rabbi Ben Ezra, 31—“But I need now as then, Thee, God, who mouldest men. And since, not even when the whirl was worst, Did I—to the wheel of life With shapes and colors rife, Bound dizzily—mistake my end, To slake thy thirst.” But this regards the Creator as dependent upon, and in bondage to, his own world.