 The theological formulations by Peter Abelard, Peter Lombard and Peter of Poitiers discussed above exemplify twelfth-century deviations from the Aristotelian thesis “What is necessarily is when it is”. This was traditionally understood as implying the principle of the necessity of the present, which was not questioned in ancient modal theories (Knuuttila 1993: Ch. 1). Since God’s knowledge about contingent things was regarded as unchangeable, the contingency of this knowledge (in the sense that it could be different) also implied the denial of the Aristotelian equation of immutability with necessity, a denial regarded as an explicit doctrine of the nominales (Iwakuma and Ebbesen 1992: 194). The new modal paradigm, which is more or less consciously applied in these discussions of God’s will, power, and knowledge, could be characterized as the model of simultaneous or synchronic alternatives. There are three main examples of it in early medieval philosophy. 