As for the third point, we say: affirming a plurality of meanings or attributes in the Necessary Existent—and in every other being—is unavoidable. Even you, with your extravagant devotion to denial, nonetheless describe Him as a Necessary Existent, as intelligible, intellective, and intellect, as delightful and the object of delight, lover, beloved, and love itself, and yet further categories besides.

The adherents of the divinely revealed religions all concur that He is Living, Knowing, and All-Powerful. It is self-evident that anyone who equates His being Living with His being Knowing, or His being Knowing with His being Powerful, is among the most ignorant, mendacious, and sophistical of people. The same judgment applies to whoever claims that life is identical with the Living One, knowledge with the Knower, or power with the Powerful: sound reason clearly shows that each attribute is neither another attribute nor the very essence that bears it.

Likewise, the one who says that love is the lover, or that the delightful is delight itself, or that the very Intellect which produces an intellect that apprehends an intelligible is identical with the intellective subject subsisting in itself—all such claims belong to the same category of obstinacy, ignorance, and sophistry.

Hence, whoever declares the attributes to be the self-subsistent essence, or regards every attribute as identical with every other, is one of the most ignorant, dishonest, and sophistical of mankind—indeed, more ignorant than the Christians who say, “one in essence, three in hypostases,” while also asserting that the hypostasis of the Word alone was united with the Messiah and that He is “true God from true God.” For if they take “hypostasis” to be the very essence qualified by the three attributes, the Messiah would then be identical with the Father; and if they take it to be an attribute, the Messiah cannot be God, for an attribute neither creates nor provides sustenance, nor can it exist apart from the subject.