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“Doctor,” replied Giovanni, “your reasons are nothing worth, forasmuch as God, who is all pure, exists.”

But the Subtle Doctor retorted:

“If you would read your books more carefully, my son, you would see it is said of Him you have just named, not, ‘He exists,’ but, ‘He is.’ Now to exist and to be are not one and the same thing, but two opposite things. You are alive, and do you not say yourself, ‘I am nothing; I am as if I were not’? And you do not say, ‘I am he who is.’ Because to live, is each moment to cease to be. Again you say, ‘I am full of impurities,’ forasmuch you are not a single thing, but a blending of things that stir and strive.”

“Now do you speak wisely,” answered the holy man, “and I see by your discourse that you are very deep read, Subtle Sir, in the sciences, divine as well as human. For true indeed it is God is He who is.”

“By the body of Bacchus,” exclaimed the other, “He is, and that perfectly and universally. Wherefore are we dispensed from seeking Him in any single place, being assured He is to be discovered neither more nor less in any one spot than in any other, and that you cannot find so much as a pair of old spatterdashes without their due share of Him.”

“Admirably put, and most true,” returned Giovanni. “But it is right to add that He is more particularly in the sacred elements, by the way of transubstantiation.”

“More than that!” added the learned Doctor; “He is actually edible in them. Note moreover, my son, that He is round in an apple, long-shaped in an aubergine, sharp in a knife and musical in a flute. He has all the qualities of substances, and likewise all the properties of figures. He is acute and He is obtuse, because He is at one and the same time all possible triangles; his radii are at once equal and unequal, because He is both the circle and the ellipse–and He is the hyperbola besides, which is an indescribable figure.”

While the holy Giovanni was still pondering these sublime verities, he heard the Subtle Doctor suddenly burst out a-laughing. Then he asked him:

“Why do you laugh?”

“I am laughing,” replied the Doctor, “to think how they have discovered in me certain oppositions and contradictions, and have reproached me bitterly for the same. It is very true I have many such. But they fail to see that, if I had them all, I should then be like the Other.”

The holy man asked him:

“What other is it you speak of?”

And the Adversary answered:

“If you knew of whom I speak, you would know who I am. And my wisest words you would be loath to listen to, for much ill has been said of me. But, if you remain ignorant who I am, I can be of much use to you. I will teach you how intensely sensitive men are to the sounds that the lips utter, and how they let themselves be killed for the sake of words that are devoid of meaning. This we see with the Martyrs,–and in your own case, Giovanni, who look forward with joy to be strangled and then burned to the singing of the Seven Psalms, in the Great Square of Viterbo, for this word Truth, for which you could not by any possibility discover a reasonable interpretation.

“Verily you might ransack every hole and corner of your dim brain, and pick over all the spiders’ webs and old iron that cumber your head, without ever lighting on a picklock to open this word and extract the meaning. But for me, my poor friend, you would get yourself hanged and your body burned for a word of one syllable which neither you nor your judges know the sense of, so that none could ever have discovered which to despise the most, hangmen or hanged.