are nevertheless better than the Muʿtazila. For this reason, when their doctrine is scrutinized by people of sound innate nature—as (1) one of them put it—it follows that God would be a phantom, and that this phantom is merely the imagined form of a body, like the shadow a body casts upon the ground, which is nothing but an accident. Hence they realize that whoever describes the Lord by means of these (2) negations—such as their statement, “He is neither inside the world nor outside it,” and the like—has not, by his own admission, affirmed anything that truly exists in and of itself. Instead, God becomes for him a mental image that the intellect projects, an image that possesses no independent existence.

There is no doubt that this is in fact the position of (3) those who claim they are exalting the Lord by denying corporeality and all that follows from it. Yet once they have negated body and its concomitants and declared, “He is neither within the universe nor outside it,” people of reason know that they have failed to establish any self-subsisting existent at all. Rather, what they have affirmed is a mere phantom (4) (5)—an imagined likeness and representation—like the phantom that is the shadow of persons, or the image reflected in a mirror or on water.

Now it is clear that such an image, likeness, or phantom [necessarily presupposes a real being that subsists in itself, for the phantom of a person] (6) entails the person’s actual existence. The same applies to their claim: they acknowledge that there is a Creator who governs the universe, described as All-Knowing and All-Powerful, yet they qualify Him (7) with so many negations that what remains must be a chimera. Their words, therefore, entail both His existence and His non-existence simultaneously. Whenever they turn to speculative theology, nothing remains but the phantom; they then ascribe real existence to that phantom, so that the image itself ends up implying the existence of a genuine, self-subsisting Being.