and that the ten intellects, each one of them, is nothing but knowledge, so that He is at once knowledge, knower, and known. Indeed, they went further, saying He is intellect, intellector, and intelligible; lover, beloved, and love; delightful, enjoyer, and delight. Thus they turned Him—in His very essence—into love, intellect, and pleasure, and then declared this to be the knowing, loving, delighted subject. They identified knowledge itself with love itself and with pleasure itself, making Him—again, in His very self—mere attributes while at the same time a self-subsisting essence, and they treated every attribute as identical to every other. Plain reason shows the falsity of all this.

Some among them do not openly say that He, in and of Himself, is knowledge. They will say instead that He is intellector, intelligible, and intellect, and that He knows Himself without any knowledge that He acquires—for, they claim, He is the knower, He is the known, and He is the knowledge. Yet the substance of their words returns to the position of the first group: when they say that the very knowledge by which He knows His essence is itself the knower and the known, they have equated knowledge itself with the knower and knowledge itself with the known. That is precisely what the others maintained, and these matters are set out in detail elsewhere.