the Essence is unsound.

The Companions’ statements affirming Allah’s attributes are too numerous and substantial to record here. Indeed, their statements affirming the concrete attributes known through revelation—whose affirmation the deniers of the attributes call corporealism—are too numerous to record here. Their statements, and those of the Successors, explicitly show that they did not affirm an essence devoid of attributes.

As for the wording, “Are the attributes additional to the Essence or not?”, it is ambiguous. If someone means that there is a self-subsisting essence separate from the attributes additional to it, neither those who affirm the attributes nor the Companions maintain this.

If, however, he means that the attributes are additional to the bare essence acknowledged by those who deny the attributes, this is true. Yet no bare essence exists in external reality. The early generations and the leading scholars did not affirm a bare essence such that they would say, “The attributes are additional to it.” Rather, the Essence they affirmed is the Essence possessing the attributes of perfection established for it. This meaning is abundantly and consistently attested in the statements of the Companions.

In short, the Companions understood sound, established meanings better than anyone, even though the ways of expressing those meanings vary with differences in terminology.

False meanings might never occur to one of them; or they might occur to him and he would dismiss them; or he might hear them from someone else and refute them. For what Satan instills