His attributes—exalted be He—and His attributes are neither outside the referent of His Name nor something tacked on to it. Only if one were to imagine an essence stripped of every attribute could the attributes be said to be “additional” to that mentally posited, attribute-less essence. The attributes, however, are not additional to the Essence that is actually qualified by them, for that Essence is realised only through its attributes. To posit the Essence while divesting it of its attributes is therefore an impossible supposition.

Among those who affirm the attributes a debate has arisen: should one say, “The attributes are the very Essence,” or rather, “They are not the Essence”? Or should one say instead, “It is not to be said that they are other than the Essence, nor that they are not other than the Essence”?

They have also disagreed over what is meant by “two distinct things.” Does the expression apply to anything whose two constituents could ever be separated in an absolute sense? Or to what could be separated by existence, time, or place? Or is it anything of which one may know one constituent while remaining unaware of the other? In the end these are disputes over wording.

Many of them, when treating the inalienable attributes, have drawn distinctions among them, declaring some to be additional to the Essence and others not, and the criterion for their distinction was simply the limits of what they could imagine, not the reality of the matter itself. Thus, when