He brings about one event after another, yet one must not claim that in pre-eternity, or at any particular moment, He was already acting upon an event after an event. His being an agent who produces events successively is an enduring attribute whose kind is eternal; it is not an eternity that has been interrupted.
The Arabic terms qadīm (eternal) and azalī (without beginning) are equivocal. By qadīm one may mean a specific entity that has always existed and whose existence has no first instant; or one may mean something that takes place successively, one thing after another, in which case its successive kind is eternal even though no single instance of it is eternal, nor the totality of those instances. In this latter sense the succession itself is called eternal.
Accordingly, the perpetual act of causing—one thing after another—which is a necessary concomitant of His essence, is eternal in kind, while none of its particular instances is eternal. None of the individual effects is eternal: neither the celestial sphere nor anything else, nor what is called intellects, souls, or the like.
Thus He is never, at some determinate moment, an agent producing event after event; rather, He is perpetually producing event after event. Likewise, there is no specific moment at which He acts upon the sum total of events; instead, He brings them about item by item, event after event, and moment after moment.
If the product necessarily involves events, He produces it only with those events accompanying it. And although the events arise within it successively, the One who brings them into being one after another—were He to bring into existence something that accompanies them at a particular instant—would necessarily be Himself one of the originated things, and that is the very conclusion required.
If it is said, “It is concomitant with Him, eternal alongside Him, present with Him at every moment,” we respond: This could only be so were He a necessitating cause of it, not a producing agent; for in that case He would have to be a complete cause, which would mean that in pre-eternity He was fully effectual, possessing all the requisite conditions