and it need only apply to both and encompass them, like other univocal terms that admit differences of degree. Thus, “blackness” applies to the blackness of pitch and ink, although the two are not alike. Likewise, “white,” “red,” and similar terms encompass both perfect and imperfect instances. The term “living” likewise encompasses the life of angels, the inhabitants of Paradise, flies, and mosquitoes, although their lives are not alike. How, then, could the Lord’s existence, knowledge, or power be considered like the creature’s existence, knowledge, or power merely because they fall under the unrestricted terms “existence,” “knowledge,” or “power”?
If he says, “Rather, I mean qualified existence, as when we say ‘the existence of the necessary’ and ‘the existence of the contingent,’” the reply is:
Here the concepts differ, because each has a distinct expression qualifying “existence,” namely, the attribution. This qualifying attribution precludes their being alike, but it does not entail equivocation. For the difference here arises in the very term “existence”—rather, in the attribution added to the term, and in attribution or definiteness, as when we say “the Lord’s existence” or “necessary existence,” and “the creature’s existence” or “contingent existence,” and the like.
Thus, the argument he uses to establish equivocation in terms applied to both the Lord and the servant would entail equivocation in all other general terms. It is of the same kind as the argument that