If you take the first view, then consider its Maker: if you say, ‘He is a body,’ you have fallen into the very thing you denied. If you say, ‘He is not a body,’ you have affirmed an agent who made the world and is not a body, although no such thing can be conceived of in the observable realm.

Thus, if you affirm a Creator who acts but is not a body, while knowing no agent except a body, your opponent may say, ‘He is living and knowing, but is not a body,’ even though the only living, knowing being he knows is a body. Indeed, you must affirm for Him the attributes and names befitting Him.”

If the heretic says, “Rather, this observable world is eternal, necessarily existent in itself, and independent of a maker,” he has affirmed something necessarily existent in itself, eternal and beginningless, which is a body bearing accidents, spatially located in various directions, in which spatial states subsist and temporal occurrences and movements take place, and which has constituent parts and components. He has thus become committed to the equivalent of what he sought to avoid—affirming an eternal body—and indeed to something even more extreme. Through this denial, he has gained nothing except denial of the Creator, rejection of His messengers, opposition to the plain dictates of reason, and manifest error: the utmost error of those who go astray and unbelief of those who disbelieve.

It has therefore become clear that the claim of anyone who denies the attributes, or any of them, because affirming them entails corporealism is a claim that no one can use as an argument. Indeed, no one can argue that the Lord is free of any imperfection on the grounds that it would entail corporealism. For he must affirm something, and what he affirms will carry an implication analogous to the one he imputed to another concerning what he denied. When the implication is the same in both cases, and his opponent can give an answer like his own, he cannot affirm one thing and deny another on this