 This first principle and cause of all things, given its supersubstantiality, was unknowable. We cannot understand God as we can, say, abstract mathematical or metaphysical truths, let alone experience him directly through our senses. Nevertheless, the universe, mere vestige of him though it is, teaches us a few incontrovertible truths. We know, first, that he exists. We can deduce that a sculptor exists when we see a statue, even though we know nothing else about him. Similarly, we know from the existence of the universe that there must be a first principle and cause of all things, whom we call God (BOI I, 646–650). “He is who is”—a pun on God’s response to Moses’s plea that he describe himself (Exodus 3:14)—“for besides him nothing is” (BOL III, 41; similarly BOL I.3, 26). Furthermore, since the universe is one, we can tell that God, too, is absolutely simple and the “monad of monads” (BOL I.3, 144 , 146). He was the One Being, the unchanging ens unum, of which Xenophanes and his pupil Parmenides had spoken. All other things were his accidents or contingent “modes” (BOI I, 733), just as in arithmetic numbers were composed of, and therefore accidents of, the number one, and physical objects were composed of, and therefore accidents of, the atom. Even the substances Universal Soul and Universal Matter, given they engaged in the flux of things, were accidents of God’s supersubstantial unity.