On the Reasons of the Holy Spirit, Book II

it will offer itself, especially that which can harm the believer regarding salvation. Therefore, we must see to the nature of God. There have always been great errors concerning the highest good and the fountain of good, but the first and truly wicked one is that of the impious who deny that the world is ruled by any providence and who deny that it has a cause outside itself. Since these have been very few and most lost, and given the protest of the world and the consensus of the most learned, they do not deserve to be refuted, but we shall demonstrate their absurdity with a single argument. There is nothing in the whole nature of things that can take its origin from itself. For otherwise it would exist before it existed, which is impossible. Wherefore, this temple of nature must have God as a cause, which can be learned through countless other reasons, but I do not wish to adduce certain chief ones handed down in the first book, in the chapter on God. Away, therefore, with impiety and its animal world, which prefers to believe that God is impacted into matter and is impotent—so that He might consist without matter for acting—rather than to recognize the trace of God, which is manifest in all creatures. Truly, these cannot be heretics, because they remove the principle of all true things. Since God is most perfect, He must be infinite. For otherwise, if He were understood with a prescribed magnitude, something greater could be given, and thus someone more perfect. Indeed, magnitude is the first designation of God. Refuted in this place is the error of the Anthropomorphites those who attribute human form to God and any others who ascribe human limbs or any other things to God, an error which was born from the fact that the divine scriptures and philosophy, so that our mind might be able to conceive notions about God, descended to those words by which our mortality comes into the cognition of things.