Although a person traverses the second stretch of a route only after completing the first, he is not the complete cause of the first crossing, nor of the second. The complete cause for the occurrence of the second crossing comes into being only together with that second act—it is the decisive will and the fully realized capacity that arise only after the first segment has been covered. Were they to say the same about the Eternal, this would necessarily imply ever-renewed volitions in Him. Indeed, this is the view adopted by their sharpest minds, early and late—the leading sages who lived before Aristotle, or many of those eminent figures, as well as Abū al-Barakāt, author of al-Muʿtabar, and others. Abū al-Barakāt maintained: “Affirming that the Lord—exalted is He—exerts an influence in this world is possible only on the basis of this doctrine. It is obligatory to declare Him transcendent above that kind of transcendence, and imperative to revere Him beyond that kind of reverence.”