“GOD'S PLAN is eternal, as is the creative act itself, though it has its effect in time. God’s plan is established from all eternity. But eternity is not a kind of divine time which precedes time. It is a limitless instant which indivisibly embraces the whole succession of time. All the moments of that succession are physically present on it. If all things are naked and open to the eyes of God it is because they are seen by His divine “science of vision” in their presentness. “To foresee” is an improper word to use when speaking of God. We employ it because we project into His eternity the anteriority (in relation to future events) of the knowledge which we would have of those events if we knew them before they happened. They are known to Him “already,” which is to say, always. He sees them as actually taking place at a given temporal instant which is present in His eternity. All things and all events in nature are known to Him at their first coming forth and in the eternal morning of His vision, because they are willed by Him, beyond all time, in the eternal instant with which their whole succession coexists.
“But when we deal with the world of freedom, and not only with that of nature, when we deal with free existents, creatures endowed with freedom of choice (a freedom inevitably fallible), we must go still farther. We must say that in a certain fashion those creatures have their part in the very establishment of the eternal plan, not, indeed, by virtue of their power to act (here all they have they hold of God) but by virtue of their power to nihilate* to make the thing that is nothing, where they themselves are first causes. Free existents have their part in the establishment of God’s plan, because in establishing that plan, He takes account of their initiatives of nihilating.”
—from Existence and the Existent, Ch. IV. “The Free Existent and the Free Eternal Purposes.”
* The coinages “nihilate” and “nihilation” [are used] to render the French words (also coined) néanter and néantement. To “nihilate” does not mean “to give non-being,” which would rather be expressed by the word “negate,” nor does it mean “to deprive of being” or “annihilate.” It signifies simply to abstain from giving being. (from the Translator’s Note)
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