They then claimed that this object of love, which is the final cause, cannot be moving and can have no motion whatsoever.

On this basis they maintained that the world is eternal, since the coming into being of originated things requires motion through which they come into being. They therefore ruled out events arising from the object of love, which they called the First Mover, lest it undergo change.

Yet events arising from a cause that undergoes no change is impossible according to plain reason. Their discussion of this is utterly contradictory. Such is the ultimate extent of these people’s reasoning, knowledge, and judgment.

Thus, when he said:

“It has therefore become clear that every human substance depends, in its substance, existence, and continued subsistence, upon the cause that is the principle of the motion of everything,”

this was their position.

I say: It is already clear that, if the premises he mentioned are granted, all he has established is that motion must have a mover. He has not yet established that the mover does not move, nor that what moves bodies is something separate from them.

He said in explaining this:

For it does not follow that every instance of nonexistence must precede existence in time, where the cause of a thing’s existence is something other than itself; nor that every instance of non-order must precede order; nor that everything simple must precede what is composite. For when something is prior to another because the latter subsists through it and by reason of it, or derives its existence from it, it does not necessarily follow that it must precede the latter in time.

Likewise, Aristotle says: “What is most excellent in the First Principle is what is actually the case: that it is the cause of the existence of everything that exists, and the cause of the continued subsistence of everything that endures, from all eternity—not that it became so at some point in time after not having been so. For nothing exists or continues to subsist except through it.”