—in and of Himself, self-sufficient, eternal without beginning, everlasting, to whom neither coming into being nor passing away can in any way apply. Yet they ended up attributing to Him what is impossible even to exist, let alone to be necessary, real, or pre-eternal.
[The School of Ibn Sīnā and His Followers]
A related tendency appeared among certain philosophers and those who followed them: they spoke of Him only in terms of negations and relations, omitting the affirmative attributes, and declared Him to be “absolute existence conditioned by absoluteness.” Plain reason, however, tells us that such a thing can exist only in the mind, not in the external realm of beings. They further identified each attribute with the Essence itself, so that knowledge, for them, was identical to the Knower—an open defiance of axiomatic truths. Then they collapsed all attributes into that one, making no distinction between knowledge, power, and will, thereby repudiating what is necessarily known to sound intellects.