share in the mere notions of existence and necessity; accordingly, the absolute essence corresponds to absolute necessary existence, and the particular essence corresponds to particular necessary existence.
Hence your claim that “neither the essence nor any of its attributes may be the cause of existence, for the reasons already stated” can count as an argument only if you first prove that, in this context, there is an existence that is other than the essence, and that the essence is the cause of that existence. You have proven none of this. You simply imagined the case to be like humanity’s being the cause of animality, and we have already shown that this analogy is mistaken. It follows that the proof is unsound.
Sixth point: One might ask, Why should it not be permissible to hold that the very essence of the Necessary Existent is the necessary existence itself and nothing else—just as the people of the Sunnah and the other theologians who affirm the divine attributes, such as Abu Muhammad ibn Kullab and Abu al-Hasan al-Ashʿari and their followers, maintain that existence has no existence over and above itself, whether that existence be necessary or contingent? On this view there is neither cause nor effect, neither concomitant nor consequence, for each term denotes a self-subsistent essence: the very necessary existence is the self-subsistent essence, and the two are but different names for a single reality, and it is impossible to say that a thing is the cause of itself.
Seventh point: Let us concede, as some Muʿtazilites assert and al-Razi adopts in certain works such as al-Arbaʿin, that the essence of the Necessary Existent is other than His existence. We would reply: you need not make the essence the cause of existence; it is enough to say that it is inseparably concomitant with existence, so that the essence and its existence are mutually inseparable. But what is inseparable from a thing need not be its efficient cause. If, therefore, the essence is not the cause of existence, the argument you advanced collapses; for you said, “It is impossible for the essence of the Necessary Existent, or any of its attributes, to …”