and if what is meant is its ray, that ray is not the sun itself, so the analogy is of no use to them. For they maintain that Allah Himself united with the Messiah, and that the Messiah—so they claim—is the Lord of the worlds even though he is a complete human being; thus, in their doctrine, he is a perfect God and a perfect man. By contrast, the clay in their example is neither a complete ray nor pure clay, and the ray itself does not mingle with anything; it merely inheres in it. The inherence of an accident in its locus is not the same as its intermixture with it, for true mixing occurs only when each of the two entities blends with the other, as water mixes with clay and the like.

As for something that merely rests upon the outward surface, some would describe it as “intermingled with all the parts,” yet no one says of the sunlight that falls upon the mountains and the sea that it is intermingled with the very substance of the mountains and the sea, nor of the fire’s glow that it is mixed with the walls or has penetrated the earth.

It has already been mentioned that they divide this issue into three categories. The first is the blending of one thing with another, like water with wine. The second is mere contact without blending, such as water with oil, or a vessel of which one part is silver and another gold. They insist that this should not be called mixing so long as the two natures and substances remain distinct—just as one would not say that there is a mixture between the water and the earthen jug that contains it, for the nature of pottery does not mingle with that of water.

The same distinction exists between the ray and the clay; indeed, the disparity between them is even greater