His sovereign unity may best be understood by His being
self-sufficient; for the most perfect principle is necessarily that
which best suffices Himself, and which least needs anything else. Now
anything that is not one, but manifold, needs something else. Not
being one, but being composed of multiple elements, its being demands
unification; but as the One is already one, He does not even need
Himself. So much the more, the being that is manifold needs as many
things as it contains; for each of the contained things exists only by
its union with the others, and not in itself, and finds that it needs
the others. Therefore such a being needs others, both for the things
it contains, as for their totality. If then there must be something
that fully suffices itself, it must surely be the One, which alone
needs nothing either relatively to Himself, or to the other things. It
needs nothing either to exist, or to be happy, or to be composed. To
begin with, as He is the cause of the other beings, He does not owe His
existence to them. Further, how could He derive His happiness from
outside Himself? Within Him, happiness is not something contingent, but
is His very nature. Again, as He does not occupy any space, He does not
need any foundation on which to be edified, as if He could not sustain
Himself. All that needs compounding is inanimate; without support it is
no more than a mass ready to fall. (Far from needing any support) the
One is the foundation of the edification of all other things; by giving
them existence, He has at the same time given them a location. However,
that which needs a location is not (necessarily) self-sufficient.