Just as the eternal Essence does not rely on contingent events, a determinate effect and the determinate act that produces it do rely on them; their existence depends on the successive incidents that are indispensable to them, and whatever requires such successive incidents cannot be pre-eternal. Indeed, one member of the pair—the two acts and their two corresponding effects—depends on the other, for it is conditioned by it, and a conditioned entity cannot exist unless its condition occurs within the agent’s act. Hence this act cannot occur except in tandem with that act, whereas the Essence and Its attributes are independent of any act.

If an act can take place only together with that other act, and neither act can be eternal, then the second act is likewise not eternal. Nothing in the created order can be eternal unless the specific act that brings it about is itself eternal and adheres to the Lord’s Essence in the way an attribute adheres to the one it describes.

Sound reason clearly distinguishes between an attribute of a subject and the act of an agent. An attribute may intelligibly be inseparable from its subject—either identically, as life, or as a species, such as speech and will; it may also be adventitious, though that occurs only in a creature.

An act, by contrast, is intelligible only as something that comes to be, instance after instance. One who has not produced anything cannot be said to have acted or originated anything, whether the act is by will or—if one were to imagine it—without will. Were the act not something that occurs anew, no distinction could be drawn between it and an inherent attribute, for both would then be meanings subsisting in the Essence, inseparably identical with It. But whatever is like that is not an act of the subject in question, and it is inconceivable to regard the subject as its own act.