rather, affirming it entails only that His essence necessarily possesses His attributes of perfection and the perfection of those attributes—not that He depends on anything separate from His holy essence.

Furthermore, it may be said that His essence necessarily entails His measure, which the polytheists failed to appreciate—as the Exalted says:

“They have not esteemed Allah as He deserves. On the Day of Resurrection, the entire earth will be in His grasp, and the heavens will be folded in His right hand. Glorified and exalted is He above what they associate with Him.”
Al-Zumar 67

This is just as His essence necessarily entails all His other attributes, such as knowledge, power, and life. For if a being possessing distinctive attributes required something to confer those attributes upon it, this would entail either circularity or an infinite regress, both of which are invalid. There must therefore be a being whose distinctive attributes belong to it by virtue of itself and its essence, not by virtue of anything separate from it.

This is the true nature of that which necessarily exists by virtue of itself and necessarily entails all its attributes, without depending on anything other than itself. Yet, in his discussion of the necessity that dimensions be finite, he rejected all the approaches adopted by others and devised an approach which he claimed no one before him had advanced. If his arguments and theirs within these approaches are rigorously examined, the objections to them are stronger than their arguments for negation. Thus, if we were to suppose that two people held different positions, one affirming a self-subsisting being that is infinite, and the other affirming a being that is neither finite nor