Thus, if you say, “He is Living, All-Knowing, All-Powerful,” you inevitably liken Him to other beings that are living, knowing, and powerful, and by so doing you fall into corporealism; for no one is ever known to bear these names or be described by these attributes except a body. On this basis they began to repudiate the Most Beautiful Names of God, declaring, “He is not existent, nor living, nor knowing, nor powerful.”

Some of them stopped at this simple denial of affirmation. Another faction responded, “If you say He is not existent, not living, not knowing, and not powerful, you have likened Him to sheer non-existence, just as affirmation likens Him to existing beings. Consequently one must say: He is neither existent nor non-existent, neither living nor dead, neither knowing nor ignorant.”

These people fancy themselves the wisest and most excellent of mankind, yet in reality they are the most ignorant, the most misguided, and the most unbelieving. It is said to them first: you have negated both sides of a pair of contradictories, even though contradictories can neither coexist nor both be absent. Just as it is impossible to say of one thing that it is both existent and non-existent, it is equally impossible to say of it that it is neither existent nor non-existent.

As for their claim that it is permissible to deny both life and death, knowledge and ignorance, speech and muteness, they argue that these pairs relate as privation and possession, not as sheer negation and affirmation. They make this distinction by saying: when something is denied of a subject whose nature renders it capable of receiving that quality, such denial is privation, and its opposite is possession—such as denying knowledge, hearing, or sight of an animal, as opposed to denying them of an inanimate object. They continue: an animal