The furthest one might go in reply is to argue as follows: successive acts of choice do arise in Him, and whenever one of those acts subsists in Him the causal conditions required for the event that occurs at that moment are thereby complete, while His Essence, taken on its own, remains a sufficient cause for the determinate effect that is accompanied by temporal happenings. Yet this position is likewise untenable, for His Essence is never in fact bare, nor can It, in isolation, bring anything into being.

Furthermore, an effect cannot be contemporaneous with its agent in time. Were the Essence ever imagined to be stripped of those volitional acts, no new act of choice could arise in It thereafter, for that would mean that an event had occurred without a cause. And if, at the point when It is supposed to be devoid of those successive volitional acts, something were nevertheless to proceed from or within It, that too would violate the principle that no event comes to be without a complete cause. In Its stripped state It is not a complete cause; were It so, the ever-renewing acts of choice would have had to accompany It from pre-eternity—a conjunction of two mutually exclusive states.

Because these sequential acts of volition are inseparable from Him, the very notion of the Essence divested of them is impossible. Even if such divestment were granted, His mere Essence could not be an eternal, all-sufficient cause for any determinate entity, since that entity is inseparable from temporal events and, like every contingent thing, does not precede them. Were the Essence an eternal, complete cause, each and every temporal occurrence would have existed from all eternity—a blatant contradiction. Therefore, since stripping the Essence of volitional acts is impossible, and since, on that supposition, nothing could issue from It, it follows that nothing can proceed from Him except in conjunction with the successive acts of choice that subsist in His Essence.