  Some creatures have the capacity to produce things, but this is not the same as the power of creation. Here Dietrich is following a distinction he finds in the Liber de causis, where creation is understood as the bestowal of being while production is taken to be a formative causality proper to creatures. The ability to produce or reproduce things is vital to Dietrich’s metaphysics of the intellect. For in the order of things intellect comes immediately after God and is a mirror of divine omnipotence insofar as it is the universe of beings in the order of knowing; as God can create the totality of beings, the intellect can reflect or reproduce this totality, including God himself, as ideas.