Imam Ali (as) On God and Time

Ali ibn Muhammad has narrated from Sahl ibn Ziyad from Muhammad ibn al-Walid from ibn abu Nasr from abu al-Hassan al-Muwsali who has narrated the following from abu ‘Abd Allah (as):
“Once a Rabbi, Hibr, came to Imam Ali (as) and asked, ‘O Amir al-Mu’minin, when did your Lord come into existence?’ Imam Ali (as) replied, ‘Consider carefully. The question ‘when?’ applies to one who did not exist (and then came into being). ‘When’ does not apply to the One Who is eternal. He was before the before without before and after the after without an after. He is not the end of a certain end so that His end would also end.’ He then asked, ‘Are you a prophet?’ Imam Ali (as) replied, ‘Bereft of you be your mother! I am a slave among the slaves of the Messenger of Allah, recipient of divine supreme covenant.’ [Al-Kafi, kitab-ul-tawhid,hadith#239]

‘Before’ [قبل] & ‘After’ [بعد] are temporal notions [زمانى مفاهيم] that apply only to temporal-realities [زمانى حقائق] meaning things that exist in time [زمان], and the essence [ماهية] of time is defined as a means of measuring gradual-change [تغير] or motion [حركة], where motion is a thing’s transition [انتقال] from potentiality [قوة] to actuality [فعلية], and matter is defined as a substance that bears potentiality, therefore time exists due to motion and is hence an accident [عرض] of motion, because in the absence of motion there can be no measure of motion or time; and motion exists due to matter [مادة] and is an accident of matter, because in the absence of a substance [جوهر] that carries potentiality, meaning matter, there can be no transition of a thing from potentiality to actuality, meaning motion, therefore that which renders a thing temporal [زمانى] is its being a subject [موضوع] for the accident of motion, in other words it is a thing’s being mobile or changeable [متغير] that renders it temporal, and that which renders it mobile or changeable is its being material; since it is the material-substance which provides potential for change or motion, therefore with matter being absent there can be no motion or change, and consequently no time as well, and because God is an entity that is absolutely devoid of matter therefore He is immutable or changeless [ثابت], and consequently non-temporal or transcendental in character, therefore temporal ideas such as ‘before’ and ‘after’ cannot be applied to the Divine Being.

God is a Necessary Being [واجب الوجود], but if He is believed to have come into existence [وجود] from non-existence [عدم] such that there was a time in which He was non-existent [معدوم], so the fact that He did not exist previously would be sufficient to establish that existence is not necessary [واجب] for His Essence [ذات] because had existence been integral to and necessary for, His Essence so He would have never been non-existent, and would have always existed, non-existence being impossible for Him, therefore to assert the coming into being from non-being of the Necessary Existent results in a conjunction of contraries [اجتماع نقيضين] which is impossible. Moreover God as the Reality of Existence [حقيقة الوجود] is the contrary of non-existence but to assert the coming into existence from non-existence of the Reality of Existence amounts to equating the Reality of Existence with Non-existence, which is absurd, because the Reality of Existence by virtue of being the very opposite of Non-existence is an eternal-necessity [ضرورة الازلية] and that is the reason why Amir al-Mu’minin (as) states “The question ‘when?’ applies to one who did not exist (and then came into being). ‘When’ does not apply to the One Who is eternal”.

Terms such as ‘before’ and ‘prior’ are sometimes used in an equivocal sense [مشترك لفظى] with respect to time and causation, where temporal-priority [سبقت زمانى] can only be found to exist between two temporal events and not where both or one of the relatives is non-temporal; but events or things where 1) either one or both the relatives are non-temporal, or 2) both the events are temporal but contemporaneous in occurrence, can be distinguished from each other by causal-priority [سبقت بالعلية], which is the priority that a perfect or complete cause [علت تام] has over its effect [معلول], even though there is no interval in temporal terms between the two, for instance the motion of the hand is recognized by the intellect [عقل] as the cause of the motion of the ring [in the hand] and is therefore said to be causally-prior to the movement of the ring, even though both these temporal-events occur contemporaneously and not in succession. Therefore since God is the existential-cause of the subject [موضوع] of time, which is matter, He is also the cause of all the accidents of matter including time, and hence prior to time in a causal sense, as is stated by the Imam (as) “He was before the before without before”; it appears that in this statement the first ‘before’ denotes God’s causal-priority over time, and the second ‘before’ denotes that which is causally-posterior, meaning the effect or time itself, and the last ‘before’ indicates the absence of time between God the cause, and time the effect, which emphasizes the point that the priority being denoted by the first ‘before’ is not temporal but causal, therefore the statement could be seen in the following manner “He was before [causally-prior] the before [time] without before [without there being any time between God the cause and time the effect (meaning the second before)]”. If it is said that the priority existing between God the cause and time the effect, is a temporal one, such that, that which renders God prior to its effect or time is time itself, so this would lead to an infinite regress [تسلسل], because the same question would then revert to this time which happens to be contiguous [متصل] to God and so on; additionally it would also lead to time being prior to itself and its existence before its existence, which is absurd.

Similarly the term ‘after’ is used in relation to things that are perishable and are subject to corruption [فسد] and hence cease to exist, and therefore cannot be used in relation to the Divine because the Reality of Existence being the opposite of Non-existence cannot cease to exist, as has been explained and hence there can be no ‘after’ for it. The term ‘after’ is also used in the sense of having an ‘end or purpose’ [غاية] for instance the end or purpose of medicine is to seek health, where medicine is the means to health and therefore inferior to it, because medicine is consumed for the sake of health and not the other way around; therefore the end or purpose is that for the sake of which something exists, and hence nobler than the means to it, because the means are sought for the sake of the end and not in themselves, just as medicine is sought for the sake of achieving a healthy state and not for its own sake. Therefore if God were to have an end or an after, beyond His Essence then that end would have been nobler than God Himself, because God’s seeking or desiring it as an end would have been due to a lacking in His Own Essence, which is once again inadmissible, because Pure-Existence is not just perfect but He is Absolute-Perfection [كمال مطلق] itself, and therefore there can be nothing more nobler or desirable than Pure-Being; He alone is the Ultimate End of all that exists, attracting all towards its infinite beauty by a force that makes the stars dance.