Emanation and exnihilation

[Mighara Sovmadhi]

And so on...

Let's say you had a grid of variables with a single constant, G, in the center. Now G is the only source of assigned values, and does not assign itself to any variable. When it assigns a value to something as existent, then, G creates it "from nothing."*

Emanation posits the grid and the center, but has G assigning itself as a value to at least some of the variables (the Aeons, in Gnosticism, for example). G might be a grid-within-the-grid, too, in which case emanation might be of parts instead of the whole (as with Tertullian's model of the Trinity IIRC, though technically this would be the interior grid having variables fixed by the interior constant).

Creation-from-preexistent-matter would be the grid having at least one constant besides G. Interestingly enough, few seem to have ever thought of God creating matter from nothingness but then creating everything else from matter. Maybe Christology based on the Bible has obscured the matter from consideration, since that theology would have Christ's substance as the fundamental intermediary, yet one would think it would be an easy step from Christian matter to Christian hylomorphic genesis... Anyway...

*There is a more extreme diagram possible, namely to have a blank page without the grid, except for G, followed by a page with G and the grid, and an indicator that the pages are representations of the relation of creation as an absolute. This connects up with the "transcendental argument for the existence of God"/presuppositionalist apologetics, namely, PA is not merely about creation from nothingness as per the grid, but a second-order assertion about the grid itself. (However, this is also the disproof of PA to an extent: its description of the fundamental state of the grid is a confusion of typography with metaphysics.)