 These two modes of defining God, as the One Being and through his accidents, mirrored an important distinction in Bruno’s metaphysics. God had two aspects, one wholly aloof from the universe, the other in communion with it. Precedents were the Neoplatonic distinction between the One “unparticipated” and “participated” and the Christian distinction between “God hidden” and “God manifest” (BOI II, 43; BOL I.4, 79; III, 41; Isaiah 45:15; Romans 1:19–20). The Christian God, or more exactly the Word, remained unaltered even as he became miraculously incarnated as Jesus Christ. Similarly, Bruno’s supersubstantial God produced the universe, through his supernatural reconciliation of necessity and free will (BOL I.1, 242–247), as Christ-like and as his “only begotten” nature (BOI I, 693; BOL III, 58–59; I John 4:9). Bruno used several analogies to clarify the relationship, one of which derived from a passage in Plotinus (BOI I, 731–732; Plotinus, Enneads, II.6.1) clarifying the relationship of the intelligible and sensible worlds. A single sperm—here he followed a common belief—was a complete homunculus, a “substance”, comprising virtually the arms, legs and every other bodily attribute of a fully grown human being in an undifferentiated unity. This substance, this DNA so to speak, remained intact with the advent of the body, determining its “qualities, differences, accidents and organization” as it developed, matured and decayed. Similarly, converting temporal into ontological priority, the One Being, God, contained intrinsically the attributes of the universe in a virtual, unexplicated, mode and, while remaining undifferentiated in this mode, also determined in a second extrinsic, yet still undifferentiated, mode the differentiations of the explicated universe.