Scotus Academicus, Tomus primus: De Deo in se subsistente

Three things are to be resolved in this Question. First indeed, whether the highest eternity befits God; second, whether it befits him alone; third, whether it is to be attributed to him by way of a special perfection, and distinct from his other divine excellencies.

Note 1. The pagan philosophers were not of one and the same opinion concerning the duration of the Divinity. For some fabled that the gods were born in time; for, as Hesiod relates in the Theogony, they imagined that Jupiter, the parent of gods and men, was begotten by Saturn, that Saturn was the son of Heaven, and that Heaven was brought forth from the earth.

These Tertullian deservedly derides and rebukes, lib. 1. Contra Marcionem, cap. 8.:

This will be the novelty, he says, which gave birth to gods even for the pagans, always by a new title of consecration of each one. What god is new except a false one? Not even Saturn will so great antiquity prove to be a god, because novelty also at some time produced him, when it first consecrated him. But the living and genuine Divinity is judged neither by novelty, nor by antiquity, but by its own truth... If God is old, he will not be: if he is new, he was not. Novelty testifies to a beginning, antiquity threatens an end: but God is as alien from beginning and end, as from time, the arbiter and measurer of beginning and end.

Some therefore thought the gods eternal only in this respect, that they would nowhere ever perish.

The wiser ones, however, judged that the gods are truly eternal, as may be gathered from Plato in the Timaeus, where he argues against those who, led by error, imprudently transfer those parts of time, was and will be, to the eternal substance.

The Pythagorean Numenius has the same in Eusebius, lib. 11. De Praeparatione Evangelica: God, he says, is an eternal and stable being, always persevering in the same state.

Note 2. A twofold eternity can be distinguished: one indeed without the anterior and the posterior at once, another however without the posterior only; the former denies the beginning and the end, the latter only the end of duration. That one is called eternity simply, this one however immortality or incorruptibility. For, as Isidore of Pelusium notes, Epist. 11t.,

Eternity is wont to be used as it were an everlasting vitality, of that nature alone which is without beginning, and always behaves in the same way. For immortal can be pronounced of that which, although it had a beginning, nevertheless does not die, that is, of the Angel and of the soul: and likewise incorruptible of those things which were made, but are superior to all corruption: so that eternal properly befits the divine Essence.

Note 3. According to the Doctor, 7.6. Quodlibetica, three things are to be distinguished in eternity: First, that it is a perfect possession of life; Second, that this possession has a threefold negation attached, expressed in the words of the aforesaid description of eternity; for it is called interminable, because it denies cessation: wholly simultaneous, because it excludes succession: and perfect possession, because it rejects every dependence and participation; Third, that besides this threefold negation it involves a twofold relation, one indeed negative, by the negation of termination, by the negation of succession, and by the negation of dependence; the other however positive, which is the virtual and aptitudinal respect which God has, that he may be able to coexist with any created duration. This twofold relation is of reason, not however real: the first indeed, as consisting in negation; the second, because it is a respect ad extra, which cannot be real in God, otherwise he would be said to be mutable. Whether, however, besides these three, eternity formally imports something positive, the Doctor does not resolve, but weighs this Question on both sides.

First conclusion. — The highest and most perfect eternity befits God. This is of faith, as appears both from several texts of Sacred Scripture, by which God is celebrated as being without any beginning and end, and eternal: so especially Hebraeorum 1. cites that oracle of the Psalmist, 101., In the beginning, O Lord, thou didst found the earth, and the heavens are the works of thy hands: they shall perish, but thou dost remain, and all shall grow old like a garment, and as a covering thou shalt change them, and they shall be changed: but thou art the same thyself, and thy years shall not fail, prophesied of Christ, as a proper mark of true divinity: then from the Council of the Lateran; then finally from the Creed of Athanasius, where Eternal Father, eternal Son, eternal Holy Spirit is affirmed.

This truth is evident also by the very light of nature implanted in each one: for, says Boethius, lib. 5. De Consolatione, Prosa 6., that God is eternal is the common judgment of all who live by reason. Tertullian affirms the same thing, lib. 1. Contra Marcionem, cap. 3.: As much as human condition can define about God, he says, that I define, which the conscience of all acknowledges; that God is the highest, constituted in eternity, unbegotten, unmade, without beginning, without end: for that state is to be judged belonging to eternity which makes the highest, great God. For since God is that than which nothing greater or more perfect can even be imagined, he would by no means be such, if he were not eternal.

Manifold reason convinces of the same thing. First indeed; if God is not eternal, it follows that he received his origin from another, and so is not the first cause of all things, supremely independent; nor consequently God. — Besides, if God was not from eternity, either something else existed before him, or nothing. If something else existed, this is better and more excellent than God, which is repugnant to the Godhead: if nothing at all existed, it follows that neither would anything have been future. Because, says Richard of St. Victor, lib. De Trinit., cap. 8., he who would give, or could have given, to himself or to others the beginning of existing, at that time did not exist at all; how false this is, evidence itself shows, and the experience of existing things convinces. — Finally, the divine eternity itself is established from the fullness of the divine essence, or the notion of existing through essence; for nothing can be from itself and contain in itself the whole fullness of being, unless it be from eternity, as Anselm excellently demonstrates in Prosol. cap. 22., where, addressing God, he speaks thus: But thou art what thou art, because whatever thou art at some time or now, this thou art wholly and always; and because thou art properly and simply, thou hast not a having been or a being about to be, but only a present being, nor canst thou be thought at some time not to be. For, as Hugh of St. Victor adds,

Therefore he to whom it is the same to be and that which he is, necessarily always is, because nothing can be separated from himself. If therefore whatever is from itself — for to this it is the same to be and that which it is — since it did not receive being from elsewhere, it necessarily follows that it always is, and that what was not given from elsewhere cannot be taken away from elsewhere.

It is confirmed. The highest and most perfect eternity befits him to whom belong the three conditions required for true eternity, namely, the interminableness of life, simultaneity, and perfect possession: but these belong in the highest degree to God. The first indeed; because, says Novatian, lib. De Trinit., cap. 4.,

God is immortal and incorruptible, feeling no losses at all, nor an end: for because he is incorruptible, therefore he is also immortal: and because he is immortal, certainly also incorruptible, both being intertwined with each other in turn, and in themselves by a mutual connection, and brought to the state of eternity by a reciprocal concatenation: with immortality descending from incorruption, and incorruption coming from immortality.

— The second likewise; for Plutarch says in the book De Esse:

God alone is he who truly is, and is in no time, but in an immovable and interminable eternity; of whom nothing is prior, nothing posterior, neither future nor past: and he alone is truly being through himself, which neither was, nor will be, neither began, nor will cease.

Or, as Nazianzen speaks, Oratione 3. et 80.,

God, he says, both was always, and is, and will be, or, to speak more correctly, he always is, for was and will be are figments of our time and of a flowing nature: but he always is, and in this way he names himself, when on Mount Horeb he delivers the oracle: I am who am.

Whence Peter Damian elegantly concludes, opusculo 36. cap. 8.,

For the omnipotent God there is no yesterday or tomorrow, but an everlasting today, from which nothing flows away, to which nothing accrues: for whom nothing is variable, nothing diverse from himself. This today is unchangeable, unfailing, inaccessible eternity... in that today, namely, that day is still immovable in which this world took its origin; and in that today that day also already is nonetheless, on which it is to be judged by the equity of the eternal judgment.

— The third condition of eternity, finally, befits God; for, says Gregory of Nyssa, lib. 1. contra Eunomium:

that nature, needing nothing, and eternal, and containing in its embrace all things that are, is neither in place, nor in time, but before these, and above these, is beheld by faith alone in itself by a certain inexplicable reason, neither circumscribed by ages, nor running along with times, but consisting in itself, and founded and established in itself.

A little below. To that sublime and blessed power, however, to which all things are always present according to the present, even that which is future is considered to inhere, on account of that infinite power of comprehending. Therefore, since the three conditions required for perfect eternity befit God, there is no doubt that he is truly eternal.

Second conclusion. — Eternity properly so called befits God alone. This sufficiently appears from the preceding conclusion: for the three aforesaid conditions required for perfect eternity can belong to none besides God. Nevertheless the holy Fathers prove it further in various ways. Thus St. Gregory the Great affirms from immutability that God alone is eternal, lib. 12. Moralium, cap. 17.:

For what is mutability, he says, but a kind of death? which, while it changes any thing into another, as it were kills what it had been, that it may begin to be what it was not: and of the author of all things it is written, who alone has immortality, because namely he alone is immutable in himself.

With him agrees St. Augustine, Tractate 23. in Ioannem: what is it, he says, that the Apostle says of God, who alone has immortality, unless because this he openly says, that he alone has immutability, because he alone has true eternity? St. Hilary, however, lib. 3., shows that eternity is proper to God alone from his supreme necessity of being:

I do not think, he says, that God is mutable, nor does vice, or correction, or advance, or loss befall eternity; but what he is, he always is; for this is peculiar to God; what always is, will never be able at some time to have it in its nature not to be.

St. Prosper, however, in Sententiis n. 183.: The true eternity of God, he says, belongs to him who alone has immortality: since he is changed by no species or motion; nor is his will temporal.

You will say. Angels and the rational soul are said to live forever: therefore eternity is not proper to God alone.

I distinguish the consequence. Eternity of a certain kind, and participated, that is, a parte post, I concede: simple and absolute, which has no beginning of duration and is not to have an end, such as belongs to God alone, I deny. Add. That nothing is said to be perfectly eternal except what is altogether immortal and immutable. Whence St. Augustine, lib. 3. contra Maximinum, cap. 12.:

God is said to have immortality alone, because he alone is immutable; for in every mutable nature the mutation itself is a kind of death; because it makes something not to be in it, which was. Hence the human soul itself, which is on that account called immortal, because in whatever way, according to its own mode, it never ceases to live, nevertheless has, for its very mode, a certain death of its own; because if it was living justly, and perishes, it dies to justice; if it was a sinner, and is justified, it dies to sin; that I may pass over its other changes, about which it is long to dispute; and the nature of the heavenly creatures could die. For the Angels also sinned, and were made demons, of whom the devil is the prince; and those who did not sin were able to sin.

Whence, lib. 83. q. 19., he gathers that this is the distinction between the immortal and the eternal: that every eternal thing is immortal, but not every immortal thing is with sufficient subtlety called eternal: because even if it always lives in some way, yet if it suffers mutability, it is not properly called eternal; because it is not always of the same mode; although it may rightly be called immortal, because it always lives. It must be concluded, therefore, that eternity properly befits God alone, and that it is subtly and learnedly called by Tertullian the estate of God, in the book contra Hermogenem, cap. 1.: For what other estate of God, he says, than eternity? what other state of eternity, than to have always been, and to be about to be, by the prerogative of no beginning and no end?

You will press. St. Basil, Homilia 1. in Hexaemeron, affirms that, before the world was made, there was an eternal state of creatures, and an intelligible light:

There was, he says, before the constitution of the world a certain more ancient state suited to the supermundane powers, eternal before the times, perpetual, in which the creator and maker brought the creatures to completion: an intelligible light suited to the blessedness of those who love the Lord, natures endowed with reason, invisible, and every ordering of intelligible things, surpassing whatever grasp of our mind; of which we cannot so much as search out the names. For these things complete the substance of the invisible world.

Therefore something is eternal besides God, not only a parte posteriori, but also a parte anteriori. — I answer. St. Basil understands by the more ancient state nothing other than the ideas of all things, which God had from eternity, bearing the world in his mind, and forming it in time from a like image, says Boethius; to which that saying of St. John 1. corresponds: What was made, in him was life. By the intelligible and eternal light, however, St. Basil expresses the eternal Word, who is called the splendor of the divinity; for he is the vapor of the power of God, and a certain pure emanation of the clarity of God, etc. For he is the brightness of eternal light, says the Sage, cap. 7.; whence St. Ambrose, lib. 1. in Hexaemeron, c. 5.: If you seek the splendor of God, the Son is the image of the invisible God. As God is, therefore, such is the image; God is invisible, and the image also is invisible. He is also the splendor of the paternal glory, and the image of his substance.

You will insist. But creatures, not only according to ideal being, but also according to real being, truly are from eternity: therefore there is no solution. The antecedent is proved: possible creatures are not pure nothing, nor beings of reason: therefore they are something real. The antecedent is evident: possible creatures have something that a chimera does not have; for it is repugnant to the latter to exist at some time, but not to the former: but a chimera is a being of reason, and not pure nothing: therefore possible creatures are not pure nothing, nor a being of reason, and hence are something real from eternity.

I answer 1. Possible things can be said to have being in three ways. First, in the divine intellect, which knows them. Second, in the divine omnipotence, by which it can produce them. Third, in themselves. The first is called objective or known being: for the divine intellect, as infinite, from eternity distinctly knew all possible creatures, according to the proper entity of each, which it is to have in time if it is produced. The second is called virtual being, which they have in the divine omnipotence, which can produce them. The third is called entitative being, which they can be conceived to have in themselves. It is certain that the first two are real from eternity; for God really knows creatures, and has the power of producing. The third, however, is not more real than a chimera, as the Doctor affirms in 1. dist. 36. q. un. n. 14., saying:

The first reason, therefore, altogether, and not reducible to another, why being is repugnant to man, is because he is formally man, and this whether really in the thing, or conceptibly in the intellect; and the first reason why being is repugnant to the chimera is the chimera inasmuch as it is a chimera. In different ways, therefore, that negation of nothingness is present to man in eternity, and to the chimera; and yet not on this account is the one more nothing than the other.

To this answer he had premised the reason in n. 13., saying that the negation of something is present in another either on account of the mere defect of the cause producing it, or on account of the repugnance which it has to receiving it. In the former way whiteness is denied of a non-white wall; in the latter it is denied of an Angel, and in this case a non-white wall is not less nothing of whiteness than an Angel. And the reason (he says) why this negation is not more than that one is because any negation denies the whole affirmation opposed to it, from whatever reason it be such; for it is just as true to say that a black wall is not white, as that an Angel is not white: the same is to be said, by way of similarity, of possible creatures and of the chimera; because real being is truly denied of both from eternity.

I answer 2. The essences of created things can be said, in their own way, to be eternal, and essential propositions, insofar as they are considered objectively, to be of eternal truth; this eternity, however, is not of some positive and true being outside God, but only of a certain negation or non-repugnance that such essences may at some time exist and be true beings: therefore this eternity is not true and perfect, such as that is which is attributed to God alone.

Third conclusion. — It is probable that eternity is not a special perfection of God distinct from immutability.

This is the teaching of the Doctor, q. 6. Quodlib., who although he weighs this question on both sides, and concludes with these words: concerning this eternity, whether it is present from the nature of the thing, let that one of the two stated parts be held which seems more probable to the inquirer; nevertheless he inclines more to our side, and confirms it more broadly, and, leaving its foundations untouched, he altogether dissolves the arguments of the opposite opinion; and after he has weighed the definition of eternity expressed in the third Note, he concludes:

If, therefore, this is the most proper description of eternity that we have found, and only this one thing is there from the nature of the thing, namely, life, but the three things which complete its notion are not there from the nature of the thing, as it seems, because they per se import either the negation of some extrinsic imperfection, or some aptitudinal relation, or a potency to something intrinsic: and neither in this way, nor in that, is any of them there from the nature of the thing; and consequently, neither will eternity as eternity be there from the nature of the thing.

The conclusion is therefore proved. First indeed from the holy Fathers, who, as we said above, not only gather the divine eternity from immutability, but even confuse it with it; for, as Tertullian speaks, adversus Hermogenem, cap. 37., the laws of eternity are that it cannot suffer change: and St. Augustine, lib. 4. De Trinit., cap. 18., when he had said: Inasmuch as we are mutable, in so much we are distant from eternity, adds: But true immortality, true incorruptibility, true immutability, is itself eternity; whence Richard of St. Victor, lib. 2. De Trinit., cap. 4.: What else, he says, is eternity than a long duration without beginning and end, and lacking all mutability?

It is proved secondly by reason. On the one hand, because, says Smisingus, Disput. de aeternitate, n. 11., once the immutability of the divine existence, supremely necessary, and which of itself denies every potency to being and non-being, and signifies the most simple and most actual being, is conceived, the concept of an interminable life, existing wholly at once and perfectly, is sufficiently had, which is the very description of eternity; for it implies a contradiction that the most simple, most actual, and supremely necessary being should have a beginning, an end, and a succession of its life; and hence God, inasmuch as he is immutable, has an interminable life, and wholly at once, and so eternity is not positively distinguished from immutability. On the other hand, because the duration of God is not more distinguished from his existence than created duration from the existence of the created thing; but created duration adds no positive real thing to created existence, by which it is distinguished from it: therefore neither does the divine from the existence of God. The major is evident; for if created duration adds no positive real thing to created existence, much less will the duration of that most simple and uncreated being add any positive real thing to uncreated existence; for the divine perfections are identified with one another more than the created ones. The minor is therefore proved: if created duration added some positive real thing to created existence, it would add it most of all either as a new thing, or as a new formality, after the first instant in which the created thing began to exist: but neither can be said, because that thing, since it would have its own existence, would also have to claim for itself its own duration, and so there would be a duration of a duration, and hence a process to infinity. The same must be said of the formality; for just as any formality has its own formal being, from the nature of the thing distinct from the formal being of another, so too it has its own duration, which would be a new formality, and hence one which would also have its own duration; and so to infinity.

You will say 1. Just as infinity is related to the divine essence, so eternity is related to existence: but infinity is a positive perfection of the divine essence: therefore eternity also will be a positive perfection of existence.

The cited Doctor denies the major: Infinity, he says, is indeed an intrinsic mode of the divine essence, positively perfecting and attaining it, such as eternity is not with respect to existence; for if, per impossibile, he says, the divine essence passed away in an instant, that is, subsisted only for a moment, still both the essence and the existence would have an intrinsic mode, namely, intensive infinity; but that existence would not have eternity, by which we understand durative infinity: which beyond intensive infinity adds only the negation of failing, or a relation of potentiality, namely, of coexisting with whatever is possible, which relation is only of reason. This he proves thus; because if an Angel were annihilated tomorrow, it would have no other intrinsic mode in its nature than if it remains forever, as it will remain, and according to some without succession. Whence he concludes: It is true, therefore, that existence has a mode intrinsic to itself just as essence has, but that is nothing other than intensive infinity; eternity, however, as eternity, or interminable duration as interminable duration, is not infinity. Add that since the divine existence is of the formal and intrinsic concept of the divine essence, it has no other intrinsic mode than the essence itself.

You will say 2. The divine eternity is proved through immutability: therefore it is not formally the same as immutability; for nothing is proved through itself.

I distinguish. It is proved by an expositive proof, which is made, namely, through a greater explanation of the thing, or through a diverse connotation to something extrinsic, I concede: by a formal proof, by which something unknown is demonstrated and known through something more known, I deny. And so the divine immutability, inasmuch as it universally denies every variation altogether in the divine being, is specially called eternity through the special connotation of succession, dependence, beginning and end, all of which it denies in particular of the divine being.

You will say 3. Every duration is some positive mode of the enduring thing: but eternity is the duration of the divine existence: therefore it is also its positive mode, not, however, some simple negation.

I deny the major. For duration, as is evident from the proof of the Conclusion, adds no reality or formality to the existence of the enduring thing, but only connotes the perseverance of that existence, as we have also abundantly proved in our Physics, when treating of duration.