Abstract

Heymeric de Campo († 1460) discusses the Trinity several times in a largely unpublished metaphysical treatise, the Colliget principiorum. This paper analyses only some of these references, especially in relation to the creation of the world, which Heymeric understands in two stages : first as a creation in thought by the Father in the Son, and then as an outflow from the Trinity through the participation of the Holy Spirit. To better situate this position in the medieval context, the paper shows that some authors associate the thesis of creation in the Word with the archetypal world of Plato’s Timaeus, while others reject it, such as Albert the Great. Heymeric de Campo chooses an intermediate path : he accepts that creation in the Son is the archetypal world, but he stresses that the latter neither exists nor acts outside the Trinity. This can be interpreted as a reaction against the Prague realists (Jerome of Prague and John Hus) condemned at the Council of Constance. Heymeric draws on Albert’s interpretation of Proposition IV of the Liber de causis to show that God’s going out from the Trinity is through a particular type of flow of the first created being. This first created being is a third kind of being, neither that of the Creator nor that of the creature, but creation. It is passage and becoming, that by which God manifests himself and allows himself to be known. Heymeric calls it quid neutrum and quo fit, an indeterminate being, simple but filled with forms, both finite and infinite, a form without form, but informing and transporting forms (in an inchoative manner). Yet it is the subject of metaphysics, and that opens a different perspective from that of the onto‑theology to which we are accustomed.