Moreover, if you do not know Him, you are ignorant, so do not speak. If you do know Him, you must distinguish Him from everything else by what is unique to Him, saying, for example: “the Lord of the worlds,” “the Eternal, the Beginningless,” or “the One who exists in His own right,” and so forth. You have thereby affirmed a living existent who subsists in Himself, and have affirmed that He acts, although you know of nothing answering this description except a body.

If it is supposed that he denies Him altogether, he is told: “What exists before us is observable. If it is eternal, beginningless, and exists in its own right, then this may establish an eternal, beginningless body existing in its own right—the very thing you sought to escape. If it is created and made, then it has a Creator who created it, and He must be eternal and beginningless. Thus, in either case, an eternal, beginningless existent who subsists in Himself has been established.”

This is discussed at length elsewhere. Here we have drawn attention to the following point: anyone who bases his declaration that the Lord is free of shortcomings and defects on the denial of corporeality cannot, by this argument, establish that He is free of any defect whatsoever. The same applies to anyone whose principal argument is the denial of composition.

Anyone who reflects on what they have written in their books will see that they have offered no proof of His existence. They have neither established His existence and affirmed what rightly belongs to Him, nor declared Him free of imperfection and denied of Him what cannot apply to Him. For their proof of His existence consists in establishing that bodies have a beginning, yet they have offered no proof of that. Their negation likewise rests on this, and they are inconsistent in it, even if