 It is precisely on the basis of the problematic identification of possibility and non-existence (here lays elsewhere also ʿadam: Ilāhiyyāt, VIII, 3, 342, 6–343, 6) that Avicenna shapes his idea of the divine flow in opposition to the theological conception of creation in time: for him non-existence is what the possible in itself deserves. Reworking the Aristotelian ideas of anteriority and agent causality, he ascribes to the creation by the First Principle (with the consequent non-existence of the effect) not a temporal but an essential anteriority (Marmura 1984). A non-existence that is prior in time would refute the absoluteness of creation because it would, contradictorily, posit non-existence. Moreover, this would explain a relative creation—a “certain causing to be” (taʾyīs mā)—but not an absolute instauration. The principle according to which Avicenna excludes time in the instaurative act of the First Principle is the same one that leads him to exclude any mediation: in order to be truly and absolutely that which makes things existent, the First Principle must perform an act that is free of any mediation; as Avicenna states in the Kitāb al-Išārāt (Dunyā, III vol., 95), creation is not conceivable in terms of time because a time before the creative act of God would end up being an intermediate between the First Principle and the world: