This shows that “the act” here is origination and creation—what the theologians also call requisition, necessitation, effectuation, and the like.

Suppose it is said: “The origination of the necessitant is a single, determinate, eternal act, whereas the origination of its concomitants is a kind that comes to be little by little.” In that case, one of the two acts of origination would itself be necessitated by the other, just as one of the two things originated is necessitated by the other. Indeed, the second act is a condition for the very fact that the first counts as an origination of the effect, not merely for its bare existence; for an act is not truly origination unless it is accompanied by its concomitant, which arises gradually. Consequently, the act of origination can occur only gradually.

This dependence is unlike the dependence of an act-kind upon the Essence: the Essence entails Its intrinsic attributes and is not produced by them, whereas Its act issues from It; and neither of the two acts of origination issues from the other. Rather, if the origination of the determinate entity were assumed to be eternal without beginning, then the generic origination of the successive entities would likewise have to be eternal without beginning—yet each of them would still be an act, a creation, an origination.

Moreover, the very nature of a determinate act makes its being eternal impossible—how much more so when it is inseparable from something that itself arises bit by bit. The two acts are mutually concomitant: because one of them exists only in stages, the other can exist only in stages, both because it is an act produced by will and because the existence of one member of a pair of concomitants without the other is impossible. If one of them cannot be eternal in its very identity, the other cannot be eternal in its very identity either.

For the existence of what is necessarily eternal by virtue of its cause—just as an eternal attribute necessarily follows from the Essence that entails it—does not depend on any contingent events; and even if the species of such events were supposed to be everlasting, the eternal attribute would still not be contingent upon them.