The reply is: If this is an attribute of perfection, the First is more entitled to it; if it is a deficiency, the intellect must be deemed free of it.

[The Nineteenth Argument]

His statement:

“The First, the Necessary Being, knows those substances together with those forms, not through other forms, but through those very substances and forms themselves. Likewise, He knows existence as it really is. Thus, not even an atom’s weight escapes Him, without any of the aforementioned impossibilities necessarily following.”

He may be answered as follows:

What is the form that He knows together with the substances? Is it an intelligible form subsisting in Him? You regard this as false, and you acknowledge nothing besides existing things.

Or are there other forms, separate from Him and accompanying existing things, so that His knowledge of them is external to His essence and accompanies them? This too is false, as explained above.

Or by “forms” do you mean the essences which you and your predecessors claim are unproduced essences accompanying existing things? You have not mentioned these. And how are we to know them when, according to you, they are not produced by Him, such that His producing them would entail knowledge of them, as you claimed?

He intended none of these things. Rather, by “forms” he meant the intelligible forms subsisting in the substances—that is, knowing the substances and knowing their knowledge of existing things.

Their knowledge of existing things includes their knowledge of Him. Thus, He knows their knowledge of Him and of everything, yet, according to this thinker, He Himself has no knowledge other than the existence of created things.

Is this not among the most unsound positions, both rationally and religiously?