Ibn Sīnā, on this point, broke ranks with those philosophers who said that God knows nothing but His own Self—a claim they advanced to avoid the charge of multiplicity. How, then, can he share their denial of multiplicity and yet part from them by affirming God’s knowledge of things other than Himself? When he realized that such a doctrine would require one to say that God knows nothing in this world or the next and knows only Himself—while His creatures know both Him and other things, thereby surpassing Him in knowledge—he abandoned it out of embarrassment and distaste. Yet he felt no shame in persisting in the absolute negation of multiplicity, alleging that God’s knowledge of Himself, of what is other than Himself, indeed of every single thing, is nothing but His very essence with no addition whatsoever. This is the very contradiction from which the rest of the philosophers recoiled, for its inconsistency is evident at first sight.

Thus no faction among them escapes disgrace in at least one aspect of its doctrine. Such is Allah’s way with whoever strays from His path and imagines that, by mere speculation and fantasy, he can grasp the inmost reality of divine matters.

If it be said: Once it is conceded that He knows Himself as a source in a relational sense, then His knowledge of the attributes remains one; for whoever understands the category of place does so through a single act of knowledge, and within that same knowledge lies, implicitly, awareness of time and of paternity—so the knowables multiply while the knowledge itself remains one. Likewise, He knows His essence as the principle of its change, so the knowledge is one even though the objects known are many. If this can be conceived with respect to a single effect and its relation to Him without entailing multiplicity, then adding further cases within a genus that does not in itself require multiplicity will not introduce multiplicity. The same applies to someone who knows a thing and also knows (1) his knowledge of that thing.

I reply: From the passage we have reported from Abū Ḥāmid it is clear that he maintains that the Necessary Existent proven by rational demonstration is that which has no efficient cause. As for a receptive cause, he does not consider it incompatible with necessary existence—at least not until he proceeds to affirm necessary existence for the attributes.