place, and the errors into which the philosophers fell concerning the attributes in this regard have been explained. They did not distinguish between a condition and an efficient cause; indeed, they may treat all of these as causes. For them, causes include the agent and the end—the two distinct causes through which the effect comes to exist—as well as the receptive subject, which may be called matter or hyle, together with form. These latter two are the causes of a thing’s reality in itself, whether its reality is said to differ from the concrete entity existing in the external world, as they claim, or to be identical with it, as is the well-known position of the theologians of Ahl al-Sunnah.

The point here is that, when the proof established that there must be something necessarily existent in itself—that is, something with no agent bringing it into existence, whether an efficient cause or anything else called an agent—they began calling it “necessarily existent in itself.” They then took all the meanings that this expression could bear and sought to establish them all. Thus, they began denying the attributes and denying that it has a reality characterized by existence, lest the essence be dependent upon an attribute and therefore not necessarily existent in itself.

It is well known that the essence’s necessarily entailing an attribute of perfection, such that it cannot