of Aphrodisias. However, these philosophers never claimed that it is contingent and admits both existence and non-existence, as Ibn Sīnā and his followers maintain. If the entity said to be “capable of non-existence” is this very eternal being, then—seeing that it is eternal and its existence is necessary, even if through something else—how could its ceasing to exist be rationally conceivable?

The matter is akin to the Lord’s intrinsic attributes, exalted is He: they simply do not admit non-existence under any circumstances. His life, for instance, is inseparable from His sanctified Essence; it can never lapse into non-existence, and the very supposition of its absence is impossible.

If someone objects, “In itself it is liable to non-existence,” we answer in two ways. First, to posit an essence apart from a concrete existent is a claim advanced by a group of philosophers—the Aristotelians among the logicians—but it is deemed false by the majority of rational minds, as has been shown elsewhere.

Hence, the distinction they draw between constitutive attributes that enter into the very quiddity and accidental yet inalienable attributes—whether inalienable to the quiddity or to its existence—ultimately reduces, upon careful examination, to mental abstractions, not to real properties on which actual realities rest.