1.  AT refers to Rene Descartes Oeuvres de Descartes, Charles Adam and Paul Tannery (eds), 11 vols (Paris: Vrin, 1996) [8A=vol. VIII, part A, 61=p. 61]; CSM refers to John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch (eds) The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984–1985); CSMK refers to John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, Dugald Murdoch, and Anthony Kenny (eds) The Philosophical Writings of Descartes: The Correspondence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); MD refers to Francisco Suarez Disputationes Metaphysicae (Metaphysical Disputations) in Carolo Berton (ed.) Opera Omnia (Paris: Vives, 1866); ST refers to Thomas Aquinas Summa Theologica, Fathers of the English Dominican Province (ed. and trans.) (Notre Dame IN: Christian Classics, 1981).

2.  See also AT, 7, 49; CSM, 2, 33; AT, 7, 165; CSM, 2, 116. For detailed discussion of Descartes’ doctrine of continuous creation see Geoffrey Gorham ‘Cartesian causation: continuous, instantaneous, overdetermined’, Journal of the History of Philosophy, 42 (2004), 389–423.

3.  The most detailed formulations and proofs of the laws are presented in the Principles of Philosophy, Part 2, sections 36–42 (AT, 8A, 61–66; CSM, 1, 240–243). Similar presentations are found earlier in Le Monde, ch. 7 (AT, 11, 37–47; CSM, 1, 92–97). For discussion, see Richard J. Blackwell ‘Descartes' laws of motion’, Isis, 57 (1966), 220–234; Daniel Garber Descartes' Metaphysical Physics (Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992), and Dennis Des Chene Physiologia: Natural Philosophy in Late Aristotelianism and Cartesian Thought (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), 283–286.

4.  Isaac Newton ‘Locus et tempus’, in J. E. McGuire ‘Newton on place, time and God: an unpublished source’, British Journal for the History of Science, 11 (1978), 114–129. For detailed discussion see further, idem ‘Predicates of pure existence: Newton on God's space and time’, in Phillip Bricker and R. I. G. Hughes (eds) Philosophical Perspectives on Newtonian Science (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1990).

5.  Baruch Spinoza Ethics, I, def. 8 in Edwin Curley (ed. and tr.) The Ethics and Other Works (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 86. This is Spinoza's explanation for his definition of ‘eternity’. In def. 6, ‘God’ is defined as a being of infinite attributes, each of which expresses an ‘eternal and infinite essence’ (Ethics, 85), and in V, P30, Dem., he says ‘Eternity is the very essence of God’ (Ethics, 258). See also Ethics, I, P33, Schol. 2 (Ethics, 107) and V, P32, Schol. (Ethics, 259). I should note that, as with everything else in Spinoza, there is some dispute whether the ‘Deus sive natura’ of the Ethics is timeless. While this is the majority view (see for example C. L. Hardin ‘Spinoza on immortality and time’, in R. W. Shahan and J. I. Biro (eds) Spinoza: New Perspectives (Norman OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1978)), some argue that Spinoza's God must be related to time (see, for example, Martha Kneale ‘Eternity and sempiternity’, in Marjorie Grene (ed.) Spinoza: A Collection of Critical Essays (Notre Dame IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1973)). This is not the place to enter into this dispute. It is clear, however, that Spinoza's early view is that God is absolutely timeless: ‘For as his being is eternal, i.e. there is no past or future to his nature, when we find that we cannot attribute duration to him we have shown that our concept of God is true’; Cogitata Metaphysica, II, 1, in H. H. Britan (ed.) The Principles of Descartes' Philosophy (La Salle IL: Open Court Press, 1905), 140. See also Cogitata Metaphysica, II, 10, 4.

6.  Boethius Consolations of Philosophy, V, vi, V. E. Watts (ed. and tr.) (London: Penguin Books, 1969); Anselm Proslogium, 19–20, in Proslogium, Monologium, etc. S. N. Deane (ed. and tr.) (Chicago IL: Open Court, 1926); ST, I, 10, 1; MD, 50, 3–4.

7.  Giordano Bruno Cause, Principle and Unity, Third Dialogue, Richard Blackwell, Robert de Luca, and Alfonso Ingegno (eds) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Campanella, Teologia, I, 7, 1–2, (Milan: Società, 1936).

8.  And the issue remains controversial. Recent defences of divine timelessness include: Eleonore Stump and Norman Kretzmann ‘Eternity’, Journal of Philosophy, 78 (1981), 429–58; Paul Helm Eternal God (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988); and Brian Leftow Time and Eternity (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 1991). Recent critiques of timelessness include Nelson Pike Divine Timelessness (New York NY: Schocken Books, 1970); Nicholas Wolterstorff, ‘God everlasting’, in C. Orlebeke and L. B. Smedes (eds) God and the Good (Grand Rapids MI: Eerdmans, 1975); William Hasker God, Time and Knowledge (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 1989). Theories that combine elements of temporality and timelessness include: Alan Padgett God, Eternity and the Nature of Time (New York NY: Macmillan, 1992), and William Lane Craig God, Time, and Eternity (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2001).

9.  Antoine Arnauld Fourth Set of Objections (AT, 7, 211; CSM, 2, 148) and in the 1648 letters to Descartes discussed below (AT, 5, 188, 215); Marin Mersenne L'Impiété de Diestes, ch. 16 (Paris, 1624); Pierre Gassendi; Syntagma Philosophicum, Physicae, I, ii, 7 in Opera Omnia, I, Tullio Gregory (ed.) (Stuttgart-Bad Constatt: Verlag, 1964); Thomas Hobbes, English Works, I, 413 (London: J. Bohn, 1839–1845), and Leviathan, IV, Section 46, C. B. MacPherson (ed.) (New York NY: Penguin Classics, 1982).

10.  Henry More Divine Dialogues, XV (London: 1658); Walter Charleton Physiologia Epicuro-Gassendo-Charltoniana, I, 7, 2–3, R. H. Kargon (ed.) (New York NY: Johns Reprint Co., 1966); Isaac Barrow Geometrical Lectures, Lecture 1, Edmund Stone (tr.) (London, 1735); John Locke Essay, II, xv, 12, P. H. Nidditch (ed.) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975); Samuel Clarke Fourth Reply to Leibniz, §16, Roger Ariew (ed.) G. W. Leibniz and Samuel Clarke: Correspondence (Indianapolis IN: Hackett, 2000). Isaac Newton ‘Locus et tempus’ and Principia Mathematica, General Scholium, I. B. Cohen and A. Whitman (ed. and tr.) (Berkeley CA: University of California Press, 1999); Baruch Spinoza Cogitata Metaphysica, II, 1, and II, 10, 4; G. W. Leibniz New Essays, Bk ii, ch. 17, and Letter 5 to Clarke in G. W. Leibniz and Samuel Clarke: Correspondence; Nicholas Malebranche Dialogue on Metaphysics, Dialogues 7 and 8, Willis Doney (ed. and tr.) (New York NY: Albaris Books, 1980).

11.  The standard, though rarely argued, view among twentieth-century commentators is that the Descartes’ God is timeless. See Norman Kemp Smith Studies in the Cartesian Philosophy, (New York NY: Russell and Russell, 1902/1962), 128; Alexander Boyce Gibson Philosophy of Descartes (London: Methuen 1932), 243; Alexandre Koyré From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe (New York NY: Harper, 1958), 122; Garber Descartes' Metaphysical Physics, 328, n. 11; John Cottingham Descartes Dictionary (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), 43; Tad Schmaltz Radical Cartesianism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 187–188, 200–201; Vere Chappell ‘Descartes' Ontology’, Topoi, 16 (1997), 111–127, 114; J.-M. Beyssade La Philosophie Premiere de Descartes (Paris: Flammarion, 1979), 288–317; J.-L. Marion Sur la Théologie Blanche de Descartes (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1981), 28: ‘structure permanente de l'acte divin’; Martial Gueroult Descartes Philosophy Interpreted According to the Order of Reason, Roger Ariew (tr.) (Minneapolis MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), I, 198: ‘When we locate ourselves on this plane, we refer it [duration] to God's eternity itself, and we are led to consider this eternity also as continuous and infinitely divisible, even though it is absolutely indivisible in itself’; Mikio Kamiya La Théorie Cartésienne du Temps (Tokyo: Libraire-Éditions France, 1982): ‘Voici est une tres grand difference, entre les pensées divin et les notres, que nous connaissons manifestement par la portée de la durée: on ne peut pas admettre la succession dans la pensées de Dieu.’ (59 – referring to Descartes’ letter to More, 15 April 1649). J.-R. Armogathe compares the successive duration of finite minds to the partially successive aevum of angels, and contrasts this in turn with God's duration: ‘Cette durée n'est pas le temps humain; elle n'est pas plus l'aeternitas divine; elle est un cocept connu des philosophes scolastiques: elle est l'aeveternitas, le temps de creatures spirituelles’; J.-R. Armogathe ‘Les source scolastiques de temps cartesien: elements d'un débat’, Revue Internationale de Philosophie, 37 (1983), 326–336, 329.

12.  See MD, 50, 1, 5 (=Disputation 50, section 1, sub-section 5). For an acute analysis of the relation between the philosophies of time of Suarez and Descartes, see J.-L. Solère, ‘Descartes et les distinctions médiévales sur le temps’, in J. Biard and R Rashed (eds) Descartes et le Moyen Age (Paris: Vrin, 1997), 329–348.

13.  See Aquinas ST, I, 10; MD, 50, 5, 1. For detailed discussion of Suarez's philosophy of time, see Piero Ariotti ‘Toward absolute time: the undermining and refutation of the Aristotelian conception of time in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries’, Annals of Science, 30 (1973), 31–50, and Stephen Daniel ‘Seventeenth century scholastic treatments of time’, The Journal of the History of Ideas, 42 (1981), 587–606.

14.  As mentioned in n. 11, there is also a hybrid, aeviternity or aevum, which characterizes the duration of beings, like angels and separated souls, which exist successively in accident but not in substance. For example, Aquinas says angels are permanent in their substantial being but successive in their affections and choices; ST, I, 10, 5. As Pasquale Porro documents, the concept of aeveternity itself undergoes significant development in the medieval period; Pasquale Porro ‘Angelic measures: aevum and discrete time’, in idem (ed.) The Medieval Concept of Time: Studies on the Scholastic Debate and its Reception in Early Modern Philosophy (Leiden: Brill, 2001), 131–160.

15.  Aristotle Physics, IV, 11 (220a, 25), in Richard McKeon (ed.) Basic Works of Aristotle (New York NY: Random House, 1941).

16.  See also AT, 5, 193; CSMK, 355.

17.  Spinoza, at least in his early work, characterizes tempus and duratio in the same way. See Cogitata Metaphysica, I, 4. For detailed treatment of Cartesian time in historical context, see Geoffrey Gorham ‘Descartes on time and duration’, Early Science and Medicine, 12 (2007), 28–54, and Solère ‘Descartes et les distinctions médiévales sur le temps’.

18.  In an earlier letter to Marin Mersenne, discussing a related objection from Antoine Arnauld, Descartes speaks frankly of his desire that Arnauld know that ‘I have deferred to his judgement’; AT, 3, 334; CSMK, 175.

19.  Descartes dismisses ‘simultaneous existence’ again a little later in the conversation, when Frans Burman attempts to draw the following distinction between past and future eternity: ‘in the case of past eternity the parts [in duration] are actual and all at once [simul]. But in the future eternity they are only potential, and are never all at once and actual’. Descartes replies that ‘there is only one part which is all at once [simul sit], namely the present’; AT, 5, 155.

20.  For an opposing reading of these texts see Schmaltz Radical Cartesianism, 200–201. As Schmaltz notes, at least one of Descartes' French followers, Robert Desgabets, understood Descartes' position as attributing successive duration to God; ibid., 187–188. Along with Desgabets, Schmaltz's book also includes valuable discussion of the views of Pierre-Sylvain Régis on the relations among time, motion, and the mind.

21.  See also Henry More ‘Epistola secunda ad Renato Descartes’, in A Collection of Philosophical Writings, I (New York NY: Garland Publishing Co., 1978), 73–74.

22.  ST, I, 10, 1.

23.  In his systematic defence of divine timelessness, Nelson Pike suggests how immovability or immutability might entail timelessness. Such an entailment would be trouble for my thesis, since Descartes certainly thinks that God is immutable. However, as Pike notes, his argument depends on certain assumptions, most importantly that ‘the possibility of persistence is a sufficient condition for the possibility of change’; Pike God and Timelessness, 43. The argument seems to be endorsed by Helm in Eternal God, 88–89. Pike finds this assumption ‘plausible’, though he declines to argue for it. But I don't see why Descartes should find it plausible. Descartes says ‘God's perfection’ involves Him being ‘immutable in himself’; AT, 8A, 61; CSM, 1, 240. But granted temporality is a necessary condition for the possibility of change, why should it be sufficient? Perhaps God's perfection allows, or even requires, Him to persist but not to change. Compare: God's perfection involves inerrancy. Having an intellect is necessary for the possibility of error. But from this it certainly does not follow that God could have no intellect; rather having an intellect seems itself necessary for His perfection. Richard Swinburne criticizes Aquinas's view that immutability entails timelessness in his The Coherence of Theism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 226.

24.  See further, Gorham ‘Descartes on time and duration’.

25.  One of the reasons Arnauld rejected Descartes’ model of divine self-conservation was precisely because he considered it inconsistent with the standard notion of an infinite being, as he says in the Fourth Set of Replies: ‘indivisible, permanent and existing “all at once”, so that the concepts of “before” and “after” cannot be applied’; AT, 7, 211; CSM, 2, 148. Descartes seems to relent somewhat in his reply: ‘God does not really preserve himself if “preservation” is taken to mean the continuous creation of a thing. All of this I gladly admit’; AT, 7, 243; CSM, 2, 169. But it should be noted that his reasons for conceding this point derive from inherent conceptual and theological difficulties with divine self-causation, rather than from fear of making God's duration successive.

26.  Again: ‘he preserves the same amount of motion and rest in the material universe as he put there in the beginning’; AT, 8A, 61: CSM 1 240. See also Le Monde: Descartes says ‘with God always (toujours) acting in the same way and consequently always producing the same effect there are, as if by accident, many differences in the effect’; AT, 11, 37–38; CSM, 1, 93.

27.  See also the version of the proof in Le Monde: God conserves each thing by a ‘continuous action’, and consequently He conserves it ‘not as it might have been at some earlier time but precisely as it is at the very instant he conserves it’; AT, 11, 45; CSM, 1, 96–97.

28.  For recent reconstructions of the proof, see Garber Descartes' Metaphysical Physics, 285–288; Dennis Des Chene Physiologia: Natural Philosophy in Late Aristotelian and Cartesian Thought (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), 279–286; and Geoffrey Gorham ‘The metaphysical roots of Cartesian physics: the law of rectilinear motion’, Perspectives on Science, 13 (2005), 431–451.

29.  ST, I, 19, 7. See also Summa Contra Gentiles, II, 35, Joseph Rickaby (trans.) (London: Burns and Oates, 1905) and MD, 21, 2, 4.

30.  See also AT, 5, 343; CSMK, 373; AT, 5, 347; CSMK, 375. Descartes may have in mind Aquinas's explanation of divine omnipresence in ST: ‘Incorporeal things are in place not by contact of dimensive quantity, as bodies are, but by contact of power’; ST, I, 8, 2. See also MD, 51, 3, 8.

31.  In the final analysis, it is simply a confusion to attribute extension of power to incorporeal things: ‘to attribute to a substance an extension which is only an extension of power is an effect of the preconceived opinion which regards every substance, including God himself, as imaginable’; AT, 5, 342; CSMK, 372–373.

32.  For further discussion of this as aspect of the More–Descartes exchange, in the scholastic context, see Des Chene Physiologia, 387–390.

33.  For a recent version of this sort of argument for the coherence of timeless action, see William Hasker God, Time and Knowledge: ‘Just as the nonspatial God can act outside of space to produce effects at every point in space, so the timeless God can act outside of time, that is, in eternity, so as to produce effects at every point in space’ (154).

34.  For examples of such a model, see MD, 21, 2, 4 and Malebranche Dialogues on Metaphysics, Dialogue 8. For discussion of Malebranche on this point see Steven Nadler ‘Occasionalism and general will in Malebranche’, Journal of the History of Philosophy, 31 (1993), 31–47.

35.  ST, I, 19, 7.

36.  Descartes’ God does in fact originally produce an uneven spatial distribution of motion: ‘Suppose, in addition, that from the first instant the various parts of matter, in which these motions are unequally dispersed, began to retain or transfer them from one to another, according as they had the force to do so’; AT, 11, 43; CSM, 1, 96.

37.  This problem should be distinguished from the problem why, if God wills eternally a certain order of events, those events do not all exist co-eternally with God. See n. 42.

38.  See also AT, 4, 119; CSMK, 235. Schmaltz (Radical Cartesianism, 200) and Cottingham (Descartes Dictionary, 43) both claim that Descartes is here is asserting that the act is timeless. See also Edwin Curley ‘Descartes on the creation of the eternal truths’, Philosophical Review, 93 (1984), 569–597, 579, and Tad Schmaltz Descartes on Causation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), ch. 2.

39.  This seems to be how David Cunning reads the passage. See Cunning ‘Descartes on the immutability of the divine will’, Religious Studies, 39 (2003), 79–92, 81.

40.  So I do not think that Descartes must accept Paul Helm's claim that ‘while an immutable thing might go on existing forever, such a thing could not be God because God has in fact acted in the creation of the universe and presumably still acts to sustain it moment by moment’; Eternal God, 90. Descartes does not think that God's conservation of a changing world requires God to change. On the contrary: ‘the very fact that creation is in a continual state of change is thus evidence of the immutability of God'; AT, 8A, 66; CSM, 1, 243. See also AT, 11, 38; CSM, 1, 93.

41.  Since Descartes says that God is divisible in time but not in nature (AT, 5, 148; CSMK, 335), we might follow Richard Arthur in holding that God's creative action ‘while unextended and divisible with respect to its nature, is nonetheless extended and divisible with respect to its duration’; see Richard Arthur ‘Continuous creation, continuous time: a refutation of the alleged discontinuity of Cartesian time’, Journal of the History of Philosophy, 26 (1988), 349–375, 359. I will return to the distinction between divisibility in nature vs divisibility in duration below.

42.  Cf. Cunning ‘Descartes on the immutability of the divine will’, 86.

43.  Among current authors, some argue that necessity precludes time (e.g. Brian Leftow Time and Eternity, 40–49); others argue that necessity requires time (e.g. Martha Kneale ‘Eternity and sempiternity’). J. E. McGuire provides an interesting account of the relation between God's temporality and his necessary existence according to Newton, in ‘Existence, actuality and necessity: Newton on space and time’, in J. E. McGuire Tradition and Innovation: Newton's Metaphysics of Nature (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1995), 1–51.

44.  For an overview of Descartes’ views on modality, see David Cunning ‘Descartes’ modal metaphysics’, in Edward N. Zalta (ed.) Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. URL=<http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/descartes-modal/>

45.  Cogitata Metaphysica, 139–140.

46.  Ibid., 140.

47.  See also AT, 7, 119; CSM, 2, 85: ‘this being really does exist and has existed from eternity, since it is quite evident that what can exist by its own power always exists’, and AT, 7, 110; CSM, 2, 79: ‘this power is so exceedingly great that it is plainly the cause of his continuing existence’.

48.  The doctrine is developed in a series of letters to Marin Mersenne in 1630: 15 April (AT, 1, 145–146; CSMK, 1, 23); 6 May (AT, 1, 149–150; CSMK, 24–25); 27 May (AT, 1, 151–152; CSMK, 25).

49.  Though this would not be a decisive reason since once can conceive of a temporal being creating a timeless object. According to constructivism, mathematical objects are both created but also presumably atemporal. Fictional characters are created, but they don't seem to endure successively.

50.  This point is emphasized by Jonathan Bennett in ‘Descartes' theory of modality’, Philosophical Review, 103 (1994), 639–667, 665.

51.  Curley, ‘Descartes on the creation of the eternal truths’, 578. Spinoza raises a similar concern about allowing God's existence, considered as his essence, to be temporal: ‘No one would say that the essence of a circle, or of a triangle, so far as it is an eternal truth, has endured for a longer time than the creation of Adam’; Cogitata Metaphysica, 140.

52.  Ibid., 578–579.

53.  See also AT, 5, 52–53; CSMK, 320; AT, 7, 432: CSM, 2, 291.

54.  Anselm Monologium, 21, in Proslogium, Monologium, etc.

55.  Versions of the argument and doctrine are repeated frequently. See, for example, AT, 8A, 13; CSM, 1, 200; AT, 7, 109; CSM, 2, 78–79; AT, 7, 369–370; CSM, 2, 254–255.

56.  For Descartes, a substance and an attribute are merely conceptually distinct when ‘we are unable to form a clear and distinct idea of the substance if we exclude from it the attribute in question’; AT, 8A, 30; CSM, 1, 214.

57.  So Descartes cannot avoid dividing his temporal God into parts in the way Brian Leftow has suggested: ‘A thing's temporal parts compose not the thing itself, but its duration or its life. Hence a thing with temporal or atemporal duration is not ipso facto composite or complex’; Leftow Time and Eternity, 135–136.

58.  ‘I regard the divisions of time as being separable from one another [mutuo sejungi posse] so that the fact that I exist now does not imply that I shall continue to exist in a little while’; AT, 7, 109; CSM, 2, 78–79. See also AT, 5, 53; CSMK, 320. Similar points have been made by Jonathan Bennett Learning from Six Philosophers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), I, 97–98, and Clarence Bonnen and Daniel Flage ‘Descartes: the matter of time’, International Studies in Philosophy, 32 (2001), 1–11, 9.

59.  Once might suggest that the parts of my duration are merely modally, rather than really distinct, like the size and motion of an object. The problem is that the parts of my duration are not even modally distinct, in Descartes’ sense, from me. I can conceive of an object not having its size or motion, so these are mere modes of the object (AT, 8A, 29–30: CSM, 1, 214); but the parts of my duration are not modally distinct from me since I cannot conceive of myself continuing to be (as a complete thing) while excluding my continuing duration: ‘a substance cannot cease to endure without also ceasing to be’; AT, 8A, 30; CSM, 1, 214.

60.  See also AT, 7, 138; CSM, 2, 99; AT, 7, 35; CSM, 1, 128–129.

61.  Actually, there is a third notion of simplicity in Descartes which I will not discuss since it is clearly not threatened by temporal parts, namely simplicity in the sense of not being composed of more than one nature: ‘it could not be a perfection of God to be composed of these two [intellectual and corporeal] natures’; AT, 6, 35; CSM, 1, 129. For a recent discussion of this and other notions of divine simplicity in Descartes, see Dan Kaufman ‘Divine simplicity and the eternal truths in Descartes’, British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 11 (2003), 553–579. For an overview of Descartes' eternal-truths doctrine in relation to the foundations of his laws of nature, see Margaret Osler ‘Eternal truths and the laws of nature: theological foundations of Descartes' philosophy of nature’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 46 (1985), 349–362.

62.  See also AT, 8A, 13; CSM, 1, 201.

63.  See also AT, 7, 137; CSM, 2, 98; AT, 7, 151; CSM, 2 107.

64.  Chappell ‘Descartes' ontology’, 114.

65.  To borrow a term from Garber, Descartes’ Metaphysical Physics.

66.  For discussion and criticism I would like to thank Janet Folina, Andy Hryhorowych, Tad Schmaltz, Jorge Secada, Ed Slowik, an anonymous referee for this journal, and audiences in Chicago (March 2007) and Saskatoon (May 2007).