Fourth:

It may be said: If a being loves and wills things distinct from itself, has power over them, and brings them about according to its love and will, without any impediment, why do you say that this is a deficiency? Is not a being so described more perfect than one that loves nothing, wills nothing, and has no power over anything? If the former is likened to a living creature, the latter is likened to an inanimate object, and an inanimate object is more deficient.

[The twenty-fourth argument]

It may be said: Suppose there are two beings: one loves and wills, does whatever it wills, and has the power to do so; the other loves nothing, wills nothing, and has no power over anything loved or willed, but is loved by another. All rational people would agree that the first is more perfect than the second. The second resembles bread, water, clothing, and dwellings, which people love and desire, while the first resembles the people who love these things.

Clearly, the second is more deficient than the first, and the first is closer to perfection.

Thus, in supposedly fleeing what they imagined to be a deficiency, these people fell into something undoubtedly far more deficient.

To clarify this, it may be said: If we divide existing things into two classes—the living and the lifeless, the knowing and the ignorant, the powerful and the powerless, those capable of action and those incapable of it; indeed, those capable of acting and moving according to their will and love, and those that have neither will nor power, or that neither act nor move toward what they will, and so forth—it is the first, not the second, that possesses the attributes of perfection.

As for merely being an object of will and love, this is not an attribute of perfection unless the thing is loved for itself and willed for its own sake.

These people have stripped the Lord of all attributes of perfection, attributed deficiencies to Him, and affirmed no perfection for Him beyond His merely being