He follows Boethius (the late ancient one, not Boethius of Dacia) in holding that God alone is eternal in the special sense of being timeless. This means that an eternally created world would still fall short of God’s sort of atemporal eternity (Aet. §10; ST I Q46 a2 repl obj 5).10 What makes the created world non-divine is not, in other words, the fact that it has only been around for a certain amount of time. It is that it is subject to time at all, and, of course, that it is dependent on God for its very existence. Neither of these features requires the past existence of the universe to be
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