  Godfrey proposes a different kind of act-potency “composition” in order to meet one argument in support of real distinction between essence and existence. If, as Aquinas, Giles, and Godfrey all hold, the angels of Christianity are purely spiritual and not composed of (spiritual) matter and form, then it seems that they must be composed of essence and existence. Otherwise they would be perfectly simple and equal to God. Godfrey responds that one and the same being, even if purely spiritual, may be regarded as actual insofar as it exists, but as potential insofar as it falls short of the actuality enjoyed by a higher being and, above all, by the First Being, God. He quotes Proposition 2 from Proclus’s Elementatio theologica: “What participates in the One is both One and not-One.” As Godfrey reads this, anything that is different from the One can fall short of it only by approaching (accessus) the not-one. Hence it is simply by reason of the fact that such a being recedes from the One that it is not the One itself. In this way more perfect beings such as angels are distinct from the One, or God, without being composed either of matter and form or of essence and existence. Nonetheless, actuality and potentiality are present in them because they possess a certain intermediary nature and hence are likened or “assimilated” to something higher and more actual, and to something lower and more potential. Therefore they are “composed” of potency and act, not really, but conceptually. This composition is not merely imaginary. It applies to such entities by their being related to something higher and to something lower (Quodlibet III, qq. 1, 3; Quodlibet VII, q. 7; Wippel, 1981, 90–97).