If someone says:

“Our opponents say, ‘He has always spoken whenever He wills,’ or ‘He has always acted whenever He wills,’ or ‘Acts of will and words have always subsisted in His essence, one after another,’ and similar statements. They affirm that successive events arise within His essence, whereas we affirm that successive events arise separately from Him: either conceptions and acts of will arise in the celestial soul, or successive movements of the celestial sphere occur. Why, then, should our position be impossible and theirs possible?”

They would be told:

“You have said that He is a complete causal agent, or a complete cause, from eternity. It therefore follows that none of His effects can be delayed beyond Him, whether they proceed through an intermediary or without one.”

If you say that an intellect, for example, proceeded from Him, and that the intellect necessitated a celestial soul and a celestial sphere—or whatever else you maintain—you would be told:

“If the first effect is complete in every respect, such that nothing can come into being within it—it being eternal and beginningless—then its effect, the intellect, would be eternal and beginningless alongside it. For the intellect would then be a complete cause from eternity, requiring its effect likewise to be eternal and beginningless alongside it. The same applies to the effect of that effect, and so on.”

If you say:

“Movement cannot persist,”

you would be told:

“Then it cannot have a complete necessitating cause from eternity. Rather, its necessitating cause would not have been complete from eternity, but would have become a necessitating cause. His coming to be a necessitating cause cannot depend upon an effect of another, since there is no other necessitating cause.”

Nor can there arise the completeness