By Maximus of the Dyercord.
Q. How does pre-eternal make sense? Eternal already means being without beginning or end.
A. You are assuming our conception of identity is reducible to God’s conception of identity, divorcing God of supra-essential existence. He is outside of identification, meaning the ability to abstract mentally with our mind’s predication, because there is a created antithesis that’s complementary, as St. Maximus says, not opposed
Q. So are you saying that God’s conception of identity is not something that we can understand precisely because it’s supra-essential? Not sure what you mean by a “created antithesis that’s complementary.”
A. Laws of identity along with time came into existence when ex nihilo was. It’s based on God’s pre-existent knowledge from the Lógos Himself. “He establisheth the course of creation,” meaning gave it order, boundaries, definition, delimited created modalities, such as time and created divisions like quantity.
The question is not “How?” but “What?” Identity has different modes of existence that are both apophatic and positive, for instance “No cats are dogs” or “No dogs are cats” are one mode.
“God isn’t the world and the world isn’t God” is a logical/chronological identity of the world being compared to God, not God to the world, because God transcends all human antithesis to conceive ideas and concepts that are created in their finite modalities that speaks of God’s attributes like infinite immensity that we experience.
The unending and infinite abyss between something from nothing and nothing from something isn’t actually a contradiction but something that proceeds not a region or anything but absolute nothingness into being is nothing relative and a created mode of absoluteness that’s analogically prime or primordial in its modality.
That human antithesis doesn’t actually oppose God, that’s for created things, and temporal, because there is nothing opposed in God. You can’t put ‘in’ God and reduce it to a mere analytical proposition of ‘is’ or ‘it’, itherwise you are a nominalist and don’t believe in God.
And sometimes discussing about identity is not fruitful because it’s confusing if you just reduce it to language problems of semantics without the metaphysics and theology being the delimiting factor behind it all, otherwise we just get lost in babbling about personal incredulity nonsense about ourselves.