Sacred Demonstrations, or the Christian Euclid, Book II

it must have. Although they may also doubt the matter and form of the heaven, there exists, however, a matter which the Greeks could call autoteta selfhood/essence—we would not dare to fabricate ipsitatem itselfness or eccitatem thatness—but to speak better, it consists of cœleitas heavenliness and heaven. When I say heaven (says Aristotle), I mean form; when I say this heaven, I mean matter. Therefore, heavenliness is the form, and this heaven is the matter from which that nature is composed. Form gives existence to the thing. There is a need, therefore, for matter and form to pre-exist before the composite. Although we may know those things which are above the elements only privatively, we nevertheless know that they exist in that way, inasmuch as the image of all things existed in the divine wisdom before it was in the thing itself. Now let us come to things more familiar. The sun itself consists of body, rays, and power; and just as the son is generated from the father, that is, from power, and from both proceeds the will—love or affection—and the effect, so from the center of the sun proceed the rays, and from the rays and the sun proceeds the heat or virtue acting upon inferior things. But besides the fact that it consists of matter, form, and composite like all other things, it acts by body, rays, and power; it also has an image more similar to divinity. For it has an inexhaustible power of shining, from which proceeds an incessant force of shining, from which proceed, with choice and love, the force of action. In this alone is the creature unlike God: that it does not have eternity in action or power by itself, but God is an eternal force. Indeed, the example of God is seen in the sun as if in His deputy, subject to our eyes. For just as the whole divinity is in power, the whole in wisdom, and the whole in love, while yet it is but one divinity, so the whole solar nature is in the body of the sun itself, the whole in the rays, and the whole in the power proceeding from both.