the not-yet-existing of the ground , does not ultimately and positively precisely make existence possible, whether the not-yet "is" not for itself just that from which precisely what emerges from itself comes. One forgets to notice that in this becoming what becomes is already in the ground as the ground. Becoming is neither a mere relinquishing of the ground nor an annihilation of it, but on the contrary, what exists first lets the ground be its ground. This becoming is not the mere the precursor of Being which is put aside afterward as, for example, i n the case of the becoming of a shoe where the procedure of making i t remains outside of the finished product, and the finished product becomes finished by being removed from the realm of procedure. On the contrary, in the case of the non-thing-like becoming of God, becoming as the development of essential fullness is included in Being as its essential constituent.
We are accustomed not only to "measure" every process and all becoming guided by time, but to follow it this way in general. But the becoming of the God as ground to the God himself as existing cannot be represented as " temporal" in the everyday sense. Thus, one is accustomed to attribute eternity to the Being of God. But what does "eternity" mean and how is it to be comprehended in a concept? God 's becoming cannot be serialized in individual segments in the succession of ordinary "time." Rather, in this becoming every thing "is" "simultaneous." But simultaneous does not mean here that past and future give up their nature and turn "into" the pure present. On the contrary, original simul-taneity consists in the fact that being past and being present assert themselves and mingle with each other together with being present as the essential fullness of time itself. And this mingling of true temporality, this Moment, "is" the essence of eternity, but not the present which has merely s topped and remains that way, the nunc stans. Eternity can only be thought truly, that is, poetically, if we understand it as the most primordial temporality, but never in the manner of common sense which says to itself: Eternity, that is the opposite of temporality. Thus, in order to understand eternity, all time must be abstracted in thought. What remains in this procedure is not, however, a concept of eternity, but simply a misunderstood and half-baked concept of an illusory time .
The becoming of the God as the eternal is a contradiction for common sense. That is quite as it should be, fo r this contradiction characterizes the prevailing of a more primordial Being in which the earlier and the later of clock time has no meaning. What precedes, the ground, does not already have to be what is superior and higher and, conversely, what is superior can very well be what "follows." What is earlier in essence is not necessarily what is superior in essence and what is superior does not become lower by being something later. The "priority" of the one and the "superiority" of the other do not exclude each other here because there is no last and no first here, since every thing is at once. But this "at once " is not to be understood as the contraction of the succession of ordinary time into a "now" magnified to giant proportions, but as the sole uniqueness of