But if some say that the body is immaterial, in
the same way as the fifth body The
reference is to the Pythagorean and Aristotelian ideas of the heavens
as being like the body of Deity, something uncorrupt, different from
the four elements, and therefore called a fifth body, or
element (στοιχεῖον). In his Meteor. i. 3, De Cœlo i. 3, &c.,
Aristotle speaks of the Ether as extending from the heaven of the fixed
stars down to the moon, as of a nature specially adapted for circular
motion, as the first element in rank, but as the fifth,
“if we enumerate beginning with the elements directly known by
the senses.…the subsequently so-called πέμπτον
στοιχεῖον,
quinta essentia.” The other elements, he taught, had
the upward motion, or the downward: the earth having the
attribute of heaviness, and its natural place in the world being the
lowest; fire being the light element, and “its place the sphere
next adjoining the sphere of the ether.” See
Ueberweg’s History of Philosophy, Vol. I. p. 167,
Morris’s translation, and the chapter on the De Cœlo in
Grote’s Aristotle, Vol. II. pp. 389, &c. of which the
Greek philosophers speak (which body is an impossibility), it will be
wholly subject to motion like the heaven. For that is what they
mean by the fifth body. Who then is it that moves it? For
everything that is moved is moved by another thing. And who again
is it that moves that? and so on to infinity till we at length arrive
at something motionless. For the first mover is motionless, and
that is the Deity. And must not that which is moved be
circumscribed in space? The Deity, then, alone is motionless,
moving the universe by immobility Greg. Naz. ut
supr.. So
then it must be assumed that the Deity is incorporeal.