Those who confine Him to negative and purely relational predicates, while refusing to affirm any positive attributes, fall into a more extreme form of nullification than the one who says He is not limited by either negative or positive predicates. When they declare that He is “existence qualified by universal negation,” stripping from Him every affirmative attribute, they have in fact combined two contradictories. What their words really amount to is: “He exists and yet does not exist; He is necessary in existence and yet impossible in existence.”
The others, who say “He is neither existent nor non-existent,” merely abolish both contradictories. Yet that group erases every pair of opposing predicates, insisting that He is neither living nor dead, neither knowing nor ignorant. By contrast, the first group does not deny all positive predicates; instead, they affirm only a bare existence from which every affirmative quality has been removed. They do not affirm positive realities to the same degree that they deny privative ones, and in this respect they sink even deeper into non-existence—despite contradicting themselves whenever they speak of “intelligible, intellect, and intelligent,” or “pleasure, the one who enjoys, and what is enjoyed,” or “love, lover, and beloved.” In these expressions they affirm multiple positive meanings and then recast them as mere negations.
Moreover, if existence is restricted by a negative or relational condition, it necessarily shares the name “existence” with other things and is distinguished from them only by negative qualifications. Yet negative predicates—whether labeled a differentia or a specific property—cannot distinguish between entities that share a common genus. Whenever the supposed differentiator among things that possess existence is purely negative and carries no positive content, no real distinction is achieved. They are therefore driven to one of two alternatives: either abolish distinction altogether, leaving a sheer, unqualified existence set apart by neither affirmation nor negation—whereby it loses all reality; or introduce positive attributes, which makes clear that it must possess a particular reality distinct from absolute existence itself.
As for those who speak of the “all-encompassing existence,” if they interpret that encompassing existence as