Yet you have said: “If this were present in the First, it would be a deficiency requiring completion from without.” You have thus affirmed in that which is necessarily existent in itself a deficiency requiring completion from without. If this is possible for that which is necessarily existent in itself, it cannot be ruled out for the First, the object of love. Rather, despite being necessarily existent in itself, it could also love, will, produce effects, and act, while possessing, on your own principles, a deficiency requiring completion from without.

Since this is not impossible for that which is necessarily existent in itself, your argument that it is impossible for it is invalid.

Moreover, if this is possible for it, there would be no more reason for one to be the lover and the other the beloved than the reverse. Indeed, each could love and long for the other.

On the supposition that it loves the world and wills its existence, it would be the originator of the motions within the world.

On this supposition, moreover, the celestial spheres need not themselves be necessarily existent in themselves. Rather, one could say that there is something other than them that is necessarily existent in itself, and that one of the two necessarily existent beings originated the celestial spheres because of a longing that arose in it—just as you say concerning what comes into being through the motion of the celestial sphere.

In short, if they say, “The world is necessarily existent in itself,” they undermine everything he has said concerning the First Principle, and they have no argument against the naturalists who deny the First.

The position of the naturalists who say, “The world is necessarily existent in itself,” is more untenable than that of all these theistic philosophers among them, as the untenability of their position has already been explained elsewhere.