Al-Ṣafadiyyah - Ibn Taimiya - (2/28)

Their freedom from deficiencies, they did not come to know through reason but through transmitted revelation—the unanimous consensus testifies to that. Yet when they set out to negate attributes, their chief reliance became the rejection of corporeality, just as the Muʿtazila had done before them. To deny corporeality they first sought to establish that bodies are originated, and for that they leaned on the premise that an infinite succession of temporal events is impossible.

Likewise, the philosophers who deny the divine attributes made the negation of composition their main argument. They grounded that negation on the bare possibility of composition, and they justified the possibility itself by asserting that a composite cannot be necessary in itself, for it would depend on some of its constituent parts.

We have already drawn attention to the unsoundness of this reasoning and have exposed the ambiguous terms upon which it rests. To claim that a being qualified by inseparable attributes cannot be necessary in Himself because He would then “need” some of His own concomitants—or elements implied in His very definition—really means no more than that He cannot exist without them. This in no way implies that any of those concomitants brings Him into existence or serves as an efficient cause for Him. The One who is necessary in Himself is precisely the being who has no agent and no efficient cause whatsoever.

Accordingly, if one posits a self-subsisting entity endowed with inseparable attributes, nothing in that notion conflicts with His having no agent. Even if one were to imagine a composite that is necessary in itself and can exist only when all its parts exist, reason provides no basis for insisting that such a whole must have an external agent.

The expression “necessary in itself” has, through excessive debate, come to suffer from verbal equivocation. If by it one means a being that possesses neither attribute nor concomitant, there is no proof at all that such a being exists.

It is indeed remarkable that these very thinkers declare His effects to be inseparable from Him while still claiming that He

النقائص لم يعلموه بالعقل بل بالسمع وهو الإجماع على ذلك وجعلوا عمدتهم فيما ينفونه عنه هو نفي الجسم كما فعلت ذلك المعتزلة واعتمدوا في نفي الجسم على إثبات حدوث الأجسام واعتمدوا في ذلك على امتناع حوادث لا أول لها وكذلك نفاة الفلاسفة جعلوا عمدتهم فيما ينفونه هو نفي التركيب واعتمدوا في نفي التركيب على إمكان التركيب واعتمدوا في إمكان ذلك على أن المجموع لا يكون واجبا لافتقاره إلى بعض أفراده. وهذا الكلام قد تقدم التنبيه على فساده وبينا ما في هذه الحجة من الألفاظ المجملة وأن كون الموصوف بصفات لازمة واجبا بنفسه إذا قيل إنه يتضمن افتقاره إلى بعض لوازم ذاته أو ما يدخل في مسمى ذاته كان مضمونه أنه لا يوجد إلا به وليس في ذلك ما يقتضي كون ذلك الفرد فاعلا له ولا علة فاعلة له والواجب بنفسه هو الذي لا يكون له فاعل ولا علة فاعلة له. وأما إذا قدر موجود بنفسه ذو صفات لازمة فذلك لا ينافي أن لا يكون له فاعل ولو قدر مجموع واجب بنفسه لا يوجد إلا بوجود كل من أجزائه لم يكن في العقل ما يمنع أن يكون هذا غير مفتقر إلى فاعل. ولفظ الوجوب بالنفس قد صار فيه بحسب كثرة الخوض فيه اشتراك لفظي فإن عني به أنه لا يكون له صفة ولا لازم فهذا لا دليل على ثبوته. ثم من العجب أن هؤلاء يجعلونه معلولاته لازمة له مع زعمهم أنه