Pe. Dilonei Pedro MÜLLER

Original title: Se Deus é eterno

Published in The Time and the Eternity in the Ancient and Medieval World

Keywords: Being, Duration, Eternity, God, Time.

This study focuses on comprehending some of the aspects about God’s eternity in São Tomas. He talks about the question of the eternity of God in the first part of the Summa Theologiae, the tenth question. The eternity concept acquires itself throughout the knowledge of time. Such as to the knowledge of the simple things gets through the knowledge of the composed things, and the knowledge of God’s eternity is acquired through the knowledge of time. Time is the enumeration of the movement one second before and one second after and characterizes itself by own succession. In a not moving endowed being, which, in fact is always the same one, there isn’t one second before and one after. This comprehension derives the idea of eternity. So, what is totally immutable doesn’t carry any succession, and, because of this it doesn’t have either a beginning or an end.