If what is meant is that one is the subject in which the other inheres, then al-Ghazālī’s answer is adopted: the attribute needs the essence, but not vice versa.

Accordingly, if someone says that one is an effect of the other, meaning that one is the agent of the other, this is false. An attribute’s inhering in that which possesses it does not entail that its possessor is the agent producing it. Rather, the reverse is true: something produced by an agent cannot be among the attributes inseparable from that which possesses them.

If, however, what is meant is that one receives the other, there is nothing impossible in this, even if it is said that the subject is, rather, a cause of what inheres in it.

Know that the confusion surrounding this argument and others like it arises only because their terms are ambiguous. The term “cause” may mean an efficient cause or a receptive cause. The expression “need for another” may mean being inseparably linked to another, the need of something conditioned for its condition, or the need of something produced for its agent.

Once this is understood, the inseparable attributes and the essence are mutually inseparable, and neither is the agent of the other. Rather, the essence is the subject in which the attributes inhere. Neither is an efficient cause; rather, that which possesses the attributes receives them. There is nothing impossible in this. Indeed, it is what clear reason and authentic revelation establish.

Yet al-Ghazālī offered only one answer. The substance of their reasoning is that all their arguments denying the attributes ultimately come down to saying that this is