VII. For what will you conceive the Deity to be,
if you rely upon all the approximations of reason? Or to what
will reason carry you, O most philosophic of men and best of
Theologians, who boast of your familiarity with the Unlimited? Is
He a body? How then is He the Infinite and Limitless, and
formless, and intangible, and invisible? or are these attributes of a
body? What arrogance for such is not the nature of a body!
Or will you say that He has a body, but not these attributes? O
stupidity, that a Deity should possess nothing more than we do.
For how is He an object of worship if He be circumscribed? Or how
shall He escape being made of elements, and therefore subject to be
resolved into them again, or even altogether dissolved? For every
compound is a starting point of strife, and strife of separation, and
separation of dissolution.
But dissolution is altogether foreign to God and to the First
Nature. Therefore there can be no separation, that there may be
no dissolution, and no strife that there may be no separation, and no
composition that there may be no strife. Thus also there must be
no body, that there may be no composition, and so the argument is
established by going back from last to first.