The primordial act addresses that particular effect, while other acts address its successive concomitants. It is evident that the Necessarily Existent, by virtue of His very Essence, brings about that necessitated thing, and His Essence’s necessitating it is identical with His acting upon it. This eternal act—this primordial necessitation—must therefore be among the inseparable concomitants of the Essence; the Essence cannot exist without that eternal act, and that act in turn cannot exist without its successive concomitants. Those concomitants depend on the eternal act, and the act depends on them in the sense that the one cannot exist without the other, for the effect of either cannot exist apart from the other.

Yet it is impossible for the Eternal to be in need of temporal events, for an effect depends on its cause and a conditioned thing on its condition. Temporal events may indeed be necessary concomitants of Him and dependent upon Him, but He is dependent neither on their individual instances nor on their genus, for the genus comes to be only bit by bit. This would make the Pre-eternal dependent on something that exists only piecemeal, whereas whatever is necessarily eternal cannot cease to be and its existence endures forever. Anything whose existence is perpetual by necessity cannot depend on successive events; otherwise one could claim that the Lord, who is ever acting, is dependent on His act simply because His act is inseparable from Him. At most one may say that the eternal act is conditioned by accompanying the successive acts, so that this primordial act is inconceivable except alongside those successive occurrences.

Accordingly, the existence of His eternal act without those events is impossible, and His act is one of the necessary concomitants of His Essence, like His inherent attributes. It would thus be as though one were to say: His attributes