The second reply is this: If, by calling it an effect, you mean only that its existence depends on the quiddity, then the word “cause” in your usage is not confined to the efficient cause but is broader than efficient causality.

There is no doubt that, in their technical vocabulary, the term “cause” is applied to the agent (efficient cause) and to the end (final cause), both of which are extrinsic to the effect. They also apply it to form and matter, and even to something wider than matter, namely the receptive substrate—even if they do not call it matter, for substances are the bearers of accidents while not being their matter. Accordingly, one ought to speak with the more inclusive term “receptive subject,” or broader still, “condition.”

When, therefore, they use the word “cause” for the efficient cause, the final cause, a mere condition, and the like, they produce no proof that necessary existence cannot be an effect in this broader sense—neither in the remarks of the questioner nor in those of anyone else. In truth, no one has ever established that necessary existence must be devoid of such relations, and when their absence is affirmed, it is on the basis of an independent argument, not simply because the existence in question is necessary.

These philosophers possess, in what they rely upon of negation, transcendence, and divine unity, nothing beyond what they regard as the entailments of necessary existence. Everything they deny of Him is denied only because, in their view, its affirmation would prevent necessary existence from being fully realized. Thus, whatever entails the negation of what is already established is itself rejected, and whatever’s rejection is entailed by necessary existence is likewise dismissed.

By this reasoning they have denied that He is composite—whether as a composition of attributes analogous to the synthesis of genus and differentia that constitutes a species, or by a composition broader than that, such as the union of a specific property and a general accident, or