—concurrent with events, none of which is eternal or inseparable from Him in pre-eternity; rather, every single one of them is subsequent to Him. Their coming into existence one after another is not an ancient, abiding non-existence fixed in pre-eternity; it is an existence realized item after item. Thus, what cannot possibly exist from pre-eternity would be accompanying that whose existence in pre-eternity is necessary—an outright contradiction. It therefore becomes clear that producing those events in pre-eternity, one after another, is impossible, just as producing them all at once is impossible, and just as producing any single one of them in pre-eternity is impossible. Since producing them in pre-eternity is impossible in every respect, producing whatever necessarily accompanies them is likewise impossible in every respect: if it were produced together with them, that would be impossible; and if it were produced before them, its production would still presuppose their production, which is likewise impossible.

Now, if the world—or anything whose existence entails events—were held to be eternal, that would necessarily require the occurrence of those events in pre-eternity, and that is impossible under every hypothesis. Thus it is proven that the eternity of any part of the world is impossible under every hypothesis.

A decisive difference must be observed between producing events in pre-eternity and His continually producing events. The first supposition demands a single eternal act, concurrent with Him, by which He produced the events without any new occurrence; the second supposition requires that He has never ceased producing them, one after another. The latter entails only the eternality and continuity of the genus of action, whereas the former entails the pre-eternity of a particular, determinate act. But it has already been shown that the pre-eternity of any specific act that produces events is impossible; therefore, producing the events apart from what accompanies them is impossible, and so producing what accompanies them in pre-eternity is likewise impossible.

This follows because the concomitance is bilateral: every entity in the world is concurrent with and inseparable from events—whenever some entity in the world exists, an event necessarily exists alongside it, and whenever some event of the world exists, another entity exists with it. Even if the obligation held only on one side, that alone would suffice, for