by mere proximity, just as water is heated by the warmth of the pot even though the fire has intermingled with neither the pot nor the water.

How can this be likened to their statement:

“The Lord of the worlds united with the son of a woman and thus became a perfect god and a perfect man”?

Would any rational person claim that the water and the clay themselves turned into a complete ray and a complete clay? Certainly not. Clay remains clay; the ray merely dries it. The ray neither merges with it, nor penetrates it, nor settles within its core.

This example, then, is even farther removed from their doctrine than their analogy of fire with iron or soul with body, for in those cases there is contact with the interior of the iron or the body, whereas here the ray touches only the outer surface of the clay and the like.

Moreover, the soul is a self-subsisting substance, whereas a ray is an accident, and fire, too, is a substance. Hence in this instance it is not the sun itself that has united with or indwelt the clay, but only its ray; indeed, one cannot describe the clay as united with the ray, or intermixed with it in its depths, or as containing the sun itself within it.

Accordingly, when someone says,

“The sun has not changed, nor has it lost its light, its purity, or its brightness even though it comes into contact with every filth, stench, and impurity,”

if by “the sun” he means the sun itself or the attributes inherent in it, then these have neither united with anything else, nor entered into it, nor depended on it.

If this is true of the sun—and to Allah belongs the highest example—then He is even more deserving that He neither unites with another, nor indwells in it, nor subsists through it.