for two existents that are without a cause and of which neither is the cause of the other. Accordingly, your claim that “what has no cause is so either essentially or by a cause” is a defective division, for the very negation of a cause and the sufficiency of an existent without a cause is not something for which one seeks a further cause. What sense is there, then, in someone’s saying, “That which has no cause is without a cause either essentially or through a cause”? When we say, “it has no cause,” we are uttering a pure negation, and pure negation can have no cause; one cannot even say of it that it belongs “essentially.”

If, however, by “necessity of existence” you mean a positive attribute in addition to the statement that the being exists without a cause, that is unintelligible in itself. The only intelligible element in the phrase is the denial of a cause for its existence, and this is sheer negation; about a pure negation one cannot say that it holds essentially or by a cause, unless that contrived division is introduced for some ulterior purpose. This shows that the argument is nothing but ornamental display without any real substance. Rather, what we mean when we say that a being is “necessary of existence” is simply that no cause underlies its existence, and no cause underlies its being without a cause. Nor is its being without a cause itself caused by its essence; there is absolutely no cause either for its existence or for its being causeless.

All the more so, this dichotomy cannot apply to certain affirmative attributes, let alone to what is purely negative. Suppose someone said, “Blackness is a color either essentially or because of a cause. If it is essentially a color, then redness should not be a color, and the genus ‘color’ ought to belong to nothing but the essence of blackness. But if blackness is a color by virtue of a cause that made it so, then one must be able to conceive of a blackness that is not a color should that cause be absent; for whatever accrues to an essence through a cause can be conceived of as absent from it, even if it never actually exists.” The correct reply is that the division itself is ill-formed: one does not say of blackness that its being a color is either essential to it or without a cause in a way that would prevent that property from belonging to anything other than its own essence. (1)