the particularization, and what he actually stated in reality both entails and is entailed by that (1). Speech, after all, requires a specific affiliation: if it is not affiliated with the agent, it must be affiliated with the locus, and the counter-arguments will inevitably arise.

Others answered with regard to the names (2) “the Just,” “the Benefactor,” and the like by saying: In our view al-ʿĀdil (the Just) is one of the perfect Names, because He is the doer of justice. The condition that justice subsist in the Just is not required (3) merely because He performs the act of justice, but because of the specific description of that act; for justice may take the form of motion, rest, or something similar, and from that aspect it must inhere in Him. Every meaning that possesses an opposite must subsist in the one described by it, and the act that we call justice (4) has an opposite—namely injustice—so from that standpoint it must subsist in the agent in our case.

I say: These alleged distinctions, upon reflection, have no real substance. The subsistence of speech in the speaker is exactly like the subsistence of an act in its agent; there is no difference between them in observable reality, in language and derivation, or in rational analogy. For this very reason al-Rāzī abandoned the well-known formulation that (5) a “speaker” is one in whom speech subsists, because (6) it required this preliminary premise and the negation that He could be a locus of contingencies. Instead, he sought to prove it by an exceedingly weak method—namely the composite dialectical consensus (7).