What He wills must exist—it is impossible for it not to be—whereas whatever He has not willed is impossible to exist; nothing, therefore, comes into being without His will.

Given this, the existence in pre-eternity of any of the world’s temporal events, or of any of its parts, is impossible. An event comes to be only when its complete cause is present. Had that complete cause existed from pre-eternity, all of its effects would likewise have existed from pre-eternity; and were all effects already present, nothing new could ever occur in the universe.

If someone were to contend that the complete cause is present successively, event after event, we reply that for every event the complete cause is present only at the very moment the event itself exists. Were the fully sufficient cause in place while its effect were absent, this would entail affirming a complete cause without its effect—a necessitating agent without what it necessitates—which is patently impossible.

Equally impossible is the notion that a created entity whose very nature entails temporal events could exist while somehow devoid of those events. Hence the existence of any created thing in pre-eternity is as impossible as the existence of any temporal event in pre-eternity. And if it were claimed that some portion of the universe is eternal, empty of events, and that events then later arose within it, this would mean that an event occurred without a preferring cause, thereby privileging one of two identical possibilities without any differentiating factor.

It is therefore clear that contingent beings are inseparably bound to temporal events, and that any contingent entity bound to such events can in no respect be eternal. Nothing in the universe is co-eternal with God.

By this the distinction becomes evident between contingent things that accompany temporal events and those that accompany the Necessary Being in Himself—such as the acts that subsist in Him and the like—for the Necessary Being is