Al-Ṣafadiyyah - Ibn Taimiya - (1/128)

Thus the Christians are internally inconsistent in their profession of divine oneness, for they are forced either to equate the Essence with the attribute, or to make what is united identical with the Essence itself. Yet these people are even more self-contradictory, and their statement on tawḥīd is worse than that of the Christians.

Yahya ibn ʿAdī, the Christian philosopher, imagined that by matching their doctrine of the Trinity to the philosophers’ triad of the intellective agent, the intelligible object, and intellect itself, he had secured a rational victory. He did not realize that what he had fled to was worse than what he had fled from, and that the philosophers’ claim of “intellect, intellector, and intelligible” is, from a rational standpoint, even more unsound than the Christian claim of “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.”

These issues are discussed at length elsewhere; we touch on them here only because they are the very foundations of the discourse advanced by those who have led astray, from among the sharp-witted of the nations, multitudes known only to God. They are the ones who asserted that the miracles of the prophets—peace be upon them—are merely psychic powers. They built this upon their principles that the world is eternal, that its Originator is a complete cause whose action is necessitated by His very essence, and they enlisted as one of their premises the denial of the divine attributes, basing that denial on what they term “composition.”

When the falsity of their basic premise is exposed, the affirmation of God’s attributes of perfection stands proven, and it then becomes impossible for them to maintain that voluntary acts do not proceed from Him. They rejected the subsistence of such acts in His Essence only because they denied the attributes, not because He is eternal; indeed, in their view the eternal can be subject to events, which is why they claim that the celestial sphere is eternal even though accidents occur within it. And as for those scholastic theologians who say that the Eternal cannot be subject to events

الموصوف فالنصارى متناقضون في التوحيد حيث يلزمهم أن يجعلوا الذات هي الصفة أو المتحد هو الذات وهؤلاء أعظم تناقضا منهم وقولهم في التوحيد شر من أقوال النصارى لكن يحيى بن عيد النصراني الفيلسوف ظن أنه إذا جعل قولهم في التثليت هو مثل تثليت الفلاسفة في قولهم بالعاقل والمعقول والعقل يكون قد انتصر بالأدلة ولم يعلم أن ما فر إليه شر مما فر منه وأن قول الفلاسفة بالعقل والعاقل والمعقول أبطل في المعقول من قول النصارى بالأب والابن وروح القدس وهذه الأمور مبسوطة في غير هذا الموضع ولكن نبهنا عليها هنا لأنها أصول كلام هؤلاء الذين أضلوا من أذكياء الأمم من لا يعلمه إلا الله وهم الذين قالوا إن معجزات الأنبياء عليهم السلام قوى نفسانية وبنوا ذلك على أصولهم في قدم العالم وأن مبدعه علة تامة موجبة بذاته وجعلوا من المقدمات التي استعانوا بها على ذلك نفي الصفات الذي بنوه على ما سموه التركيب فإذا عرف بطلان أصلهم كان القول بإثبات صفات الكمال لله حقا وحينئذ فلا يمكنهم أن يقولوا لا تقوم به الأفعال الاختيارية فإنهم إنما نفوا قيام ذلك بذاته لنفيهم الصفات لا لكونه قديما فإن القديم عندهم تحله الحوادث ولهذا قالوا إن الفلك قديم تحله الحوادث ومن قال إن القديم لا تحله الحوادث من أهل الكلام