"God did not create the world once and for all, but creates it anew at every instant." - Meister Eckhart
Creation is not a past event. It is not a thing that happened "in the beginning" and then ceased. The cosmos is sustained, moment to moment, by the same creative act that brought it forth — an unbroken emanation of divine will, a perpetual utterance of the Word. Were God to cease speaking, the world would vanish like a dream upon waking.
This is the doctrine of creatio continua — continuous creation — and it stands as a corrective to every literal reading of Genesis that places the creative act safely in a mythic past. The Beginning is now. The First Day is every day.
Kabbalah: The Perpetual Flow of Light
In Kabbalistic thought, the divine Or Ein Sof (Infinite Light) does not flow once and then withdraw. It pours ceaselessly through the Sephiroth, sustaining the four worlds at every moment. The Tzimtzum is not a single historical event but an ongoing dynamic — a continuous contraction and expansion, concealment and revelation, through which God sustains the cosmos.
Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi, founder of Chabad Hasidism, articulated this with precision in the Tanya:
"If the letters of the Ten Utterances by which the earth was created during the Six Days of Creation were to depart from it for even one moment, God forbid, it would revert to absolute nothingness." — Tanya, Shaar HaYichud VeHaEmunah, Ch. 1
Hermeticism: The Breath of the All
The Corpus Hermeticum teaches that the cosmos is the living thought of God — not a manufactured artifact but an ongoing expression of divine Mind. As thought does not exist independently of the thinker, neither does creation exist independently of its Creator.
"The Cosmos is in God, God is not in the Cosmos. For there is no place where God is not." — Corpus Hermeticum, XI
The Hermetic understanding is that the relationship between God and cosmos is not that of maker and product, but of mind and thought, breath and air. The cosmos is breathed continuously into being.
Christian Mysticism: Eckhart and Aquinas
Meister Eckhart taught that God's creation is an eternal act — not in time but beyond time. God does not "decide" to create and then act. The divine nature is creative. The Son is born in the Father eternally, and this same eternal birth is the birth of the world.
Thomas Aquinas, while more cautious in expression, affirmed the same principle: all creatures depend on God for their being at every moment. Were God to withdraw the act of being, the creature would not merely die — it would cease to exist entirely. This is conservatio — divine conservation — which is, philosophically, indistinguishable from continuous creation.
A Course in Miracles: God Creates Now
A Course in Miracles teaches that God's creation is wholly outside time. God creates eternally — extending Love, extending Spirit — and this extension never ceases. The world of time and space, by contrast, is not God's creation at all but a projection of the sleeping mind. The Course's cosmology thus draws a sharp line: true creation is continuous and eternal; the temporal world is a dream that will dissolve when the dreamer awakens.
"God creates only Mind Awake." — A Course in Miracles, T-7.I.3
If creation is ongoing, then the Work is not a restoration of a lost past but a participation in the living creative act of the present. The Fall is not an event locked in mythic time — it is re-enacted and can be un-done now. The Return is not a future destination — it is available in this very moment of remembrance.
The alchemist does not merely study an ancient process — the alchemist participates in creation. The Hermetic axiom "as above, so below" is not a static correspondence but a living relationship: what God does macrocosmically, the adept mirrors microcosmically, in real time.
The Temple is not built once. It is built continuously. The Stone is not crafted once. It is refined in every moment of conscious will. The Great Work is not a project with a beginning and an end — it is the soul's ongoing participation in the divine creative act.