These volitional acts arise one after another; hence they can never constitute a perpetual, complete cause for any determinate entity. For when the totality of the conditions required to bring about an effect comes into existence only bit by bit, it is impossible for those conditions to be permanently conjoined with that determinate thing. Accordingly, the pre-eternity of any specific entity is impossible; were such an entity everlasting and eternal, its complete cause would of necessity also be everlasting and eternal—yet an eternal, complete cause is itself impossible, and therefore the entity’s pre-eternity is impossible as well.

The alleged complete cause is either (a) the Essence stripped of the successive acts whereby It becomes an agent little by little, or (b) the Essence together with those very acts. The first alternative—adopted by certain philosophers—is impossible, because such divestment of the Essence is impossible, and even if it were conceivable nothing could issue from It in that state; the effect is inseparable from temporal happenings and therefore cannot proceed from an eternal, complete cause that is thus stripped of them.

As for the Essence characterized by those acts, It becomes an agent only step by step, as noted earlier; it is therefore impossible for It to possess an act that is itself both determinate and eternal, let alone an eternally determinate effect.

Nor may one contend that the Essence, merely by existing, necessitates the locus in which events occur, while what subsists in that locus then necessitates those events. An agent who acts by His power and will cannot assign part of His action to Himself apart from will and another part together with will, for the act of One described as possessing will cannot occur without that will—and the same holds true for whatever is supposed to subsist in Him of