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...in truth. We then challenge them to openly declare that He is a body; and when they refuse and say it is impermissible to call Him a body, since every body is created,
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we say: then by the same logic they must not say that His Life and His Knowledge are other than Him — for everything whose Life and Knowledge are other than it is likewise created.
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These people — may God have mercy on you — misunderstood the direction of the argument: we, the community of the believers in unity, only believed that human life is other than the person because we see him alive at one time and dead at another;
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and so we knew that there was something in him by which he was alive, and when it departed he became dead.
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Likewise we only believed that human knowledge is other than the person because we see him at one time knowing and at another time ignorant — and so we knew that there was something in him by which he was knowing, and when it departed he became ignorant;
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and had we not observed these two conditions in the human being, we would have believed that the human is living and knowing by virtue of his essence itself.
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Since it is truly impossible that there should be a time when the Creator of all is not alive or not knowing — as does occur with the human — it follows necessarily that He is living in virtue of His very essence and knowing in virtue of His very essence;
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and the foundational premise these people adopted is thereby demolished.
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Moreover, they did not do justice to their own doctrine, for they spoke of His essence, His life, and His knowledge, but omitted to mention His power;
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and likewise the meanings of 'Hearing' and 'Seeing' — for if their saying 'Living' makes 'Omnipotent' superfluous, and their saying 'Knowing' makes 'Hearing and Seeing' superfluous,
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then their saying 'Knowing' also makes 'Living' superfluous, since there is no Knowing except what is Living — you see then that they did not follow their own doctrine nor even pursue their own argument to its end, but fabricated this formula merely to ward off what was said against them.
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Then I say: if one change of meaning were permissible in Him, every change in the world would be permissible in Him — for rational inquiry examines only
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...the totality of things and their classes, not their particular individuals.
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If these people have pursued rational inference, we have already demonstrated its falsity with respect to what they pointed to;
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and if they have derived their argument from scripture — as perhaps some of them say: 'I have seen scripture state that God has Spirit and Word, as in: The spirit of the Lord speaks through me and His word is upon my tongue' (2 Sam. 23:2) —
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we say to him: that Spirit and Word are created things — namely, the detailed speech that God revealed by prophecy to His prophet;
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We also know that scripture uses 'soul' (nefesh) as a name for God, as in: 'He who has not lifted My soul — i.e., My name — to vanity' (Ps. 24:4).
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So just as in creatures 'soul' and 'spirit' have one meaning, while 'soul' applied to the Creator means His name — so 'spirit' applied to Him means His life and His prophecy;
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and this shows a shallow understanding of the Hebrew language on the part of these scriptural reasoners.
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Likewise I found some of them arguing that scripture says God's spirit creates, citing: 'The spirit of God made me and the breath of the Almighty gives me life' (Job 33:4);
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and that His word creates, citing: 'By the word of the Lord the heavens were made and by the breath of His mouth' (Ps. 33:6) — and I regard this too as showing a shallow understanding of the language;
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for what scripture means when it says the Maker made things 'by His word' — by His command, His will, His purpose — is that He made them intentionally, not through futility, negligence, or necessity;
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as in: 'He is in one, and who can turn Him? And His soul desires, and He does' (Job 23:13) — and the meaning of 'He made them by His word, by the breath of His mouth, by His speech'
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...and by His knowledge — is that He made them all at once, not over time and not piece by piece, as in: 'Stand and let them stand together' (Is. 48:13).
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Scripture illustrates this for us by analogy to a thing we say 'come' to, or breathe upon with our own breath — in the same way: 'by the breath of His mouth all their host' (Ps. 33:6), 'by the blast of the breath of Your nostrils' (Ex. 15:8).
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Despite all this I find them abandoning their own position — for scripture says His hand creates: 'For the hand of the Lord has done this' (Is. 41:20), and His eye watches: 'The eyes of the Lord guard knowledge' (Prov. 22:12);
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and His vineyard gathers: 'The glory of the Lord will gather you' (Is. 58:8), and His anger rises: 'The anger of God rose against them' (Ps. 78:31), and His mercy receives: 'Let Your mercies come to me and I will live' (Ps. 119:77) —
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so each of these meanings, and all analogous ones, would constitute additional distinct hypostases beyond Spirit and Word, since all of these have actions attributed to them just as Spirit and Word do.
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All these — may God guide you — and their like are, for us, figures of speech and expansive usages by which language extends itself; each of them has its own approximation and explanation, which I will treat in what follows, with the aid of the Merciful.
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Section 6. I have found some of them interpreting 'The Lord created me at the beginning of His way' (Prov. 8:22) to mean that God has an eternal Word that never ceased to exist alongside Him and that creates;
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but this is a matter I have already once refuted against those who applied it to spiritual beings, and demonstrated that the word 'qanani' means 'created'; I also showed that that attribute is the attribute of Wisdom —
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and it does not mean He created things by means of Wisdom as an instrument, but rather that He created them wisely — so that whoever sees them testifies that a wise Maker made them.
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I have also found others holding fast to God's saying 'Let us make man in our image' (Gen. 1:26) and claiming this phrasing alludes to a plurality. These are more ignorant than the first group, for they