neither in His essence, nor in His attributes, nor in His acts, whether the matter inheres in His essence or not. Rather, He is Himself independent of everything other than Himself; it is not said that He Himself is independent of Himself. Nothing about His entailing His attributes and performing His acts requires Him to depend upon anything other than Himself. For if He alone entails His attributes and performs His acts, this does not require Him to depend upon anything other than Himself. For if He alone entails His attributes and performs all His acts, nothing that exists has come to exist through anything other than Him. Rather, everything that exists falls within the scope of His essence, attributes, and acts. Thus, it is inconceivable that He should depend upon anything other than His own holy Self, glorified and exalted is He.
The point, however, is that if an objector says to the proponent of this argument:
“What prevents these incidental matters from depending upon something else, while the Real is necessary in Himself?”
then what the proponent has said provides no proof. Rather, he has stated that, if those matters are not necessary concomitants of His essence such that His essence alone suffices for them, He would otherwise have to depend upon a separate cause. Yet all that follows is that those matters depend upon a separate cause. If he demonstrates that what inheres in the Necessary Being cannot depend upon a separate cause, his argument is complete; otherwise, it is not. He can establish an argument only that it does not depend upon something that is, in itself, independent of the Necessary Being. This is true.
But he cannot establish a proof that it does not depend upon something that itself depends upon the Necessary Being.
The seventh point:
It may be said: Your statement that the incidental features of His essence do not depend upon anything else entails that the incidental features of His essence do depend upon something else. If supposing that a claim holds entails its negation, this shows that supposing it holds entails combining two contradictories. It therefore cannot hold.
Or, if you wish, you may say:
Your statement that temporal occurrences do not inhere in Him entails the inherence of