For we have explained elsewhere that an essence stripped of attributes has no reality. Rather, the attributes are additional to the essence affirmed by those who deny them. As for the essence endowed with its attributes and capable of performing its acts, it necessarily possesses its inseparable attributes and is capable of whatever acts it wills. It can exist only as endowed with attributes; it cannot be stripped of its inseparable attributes so that one could ask: “Are they additional to it or not?” Rather, they are included in what its name denotes, as are the acts that subsist in it through its power and will.

Thus, just as He is called by His most beautiful names and described by His sublime attributes before the creation of the heavens and the earth, after the Resurrection, and throughout the interval between them—having always been, and remaining forever, endowed with attributes of perfection and described by qualities of honor and majesty—so too is He called by His most beautiful names and described by His sublime attributes before and after these acts.

As this holds before and after the things He brings into being come to exist, it likewise holds before and after His acts occur. Among His signs are the sun, the moon, and the stars. The names and attributes proper to these bodies belong to them before and after particular movements. There is no need to posit for them an essence devoid of light and perpetual motion, to which light and perpetual motion are then added. Thus, perfection is all the more rightly affirmed of the Creator—glorified be He—and deficiency denied of Him, and created things