—indeed, the disparity between them is even greater than that between water and the clay jar, for water is a self-subsisting substance, whereas a ray is an accident that subsists only through something else; and one body more closely resembles another body than a body can resemble an accident.

According to their doctrine, the Godhead permeates every fiber of the Messiah’s humanity; no part of him is free from union with God. How, then, can the two cases be compared?

If it is argued that the ray does not forfeit its own light, purity, and brightness even though it encounters every form of darkness, grime, stench, and impurity, that claim still fails to match the case in question, for the ray never actually intermingles with those things.

Then we say: if by “unchanged” they mean that the very ray inhering in its locus undergoes no alteration, this is untenable, for the ray changes in accordance with its locus. It appears red on a red surface, black on a black one, blue on a blue one. Indeed, when light passes through differently colored glass, the ray itself is seen in the color of the glass—red, blue, or yellow.

The heretical advocates of “the unity of being,” who claim that the existence of the Creator is identical to the existence of the creation, have coined for Allah analogies even more corrupt than those advanced by the Christians. Theirs is the vilest likeness, whereas to Allah belongs the highest likeness. Among the images they fashioned is their likening Him to a ray within glass.

Thus, in their scheme, the “fixed entities” in non-existence are the contingent beings, and the existence of the Real One pervades them; they liken His existence to the ray and those entities to the glass.

This analogy is false on several counts. One of them is that the assertion that the essences of contingent things remain “fixed” in non-existence is itself false.