its nonexistence or has always existed.” This is an exhaustive division. Accordingly, the quality of being qadīm has two aspects. The first is intrinsic to the thing described: it amounts to being beginningless—that is, having always existed, whether or not the existence of anything else is posited. The second concerns its precedence over something else. This is the meaning of being “the First,” for the name “the First” implies a relation to something else, as does being prior to something else. If nothing else were assumed to exist, one could not conceive of its being first or last, just as one could not understand its being prior to, or preceding, anything.

Thus, when it is said that an existent thing must be either qadīm or originated, the intrinsic sense means that it is either beginningless or not; in the second sense, it means that it is either prior to something else or not. There are several senses in which something can be prior to another, as discussed above. Those who maintain that the world is eternal say that He is prior to the world in a certain respect, even though both are beginningless.

His being beginningless means that He has always existed. Alongside this beginningless, everlasting, enduring One, the intellect conceives successive ages, one after another, without beginning, just as He has no beginning. This is so even on the assumption that time as ordinarily understood does not exist. Yet it has already been explained that, according to most people, this posited duration exists only in the mind, though some regard it as existing externally.

The same applies to being qadīm in the second sense. One can conceive of something as prior to another even in the absence of night, day, and time as ordinarily understood. The mind posits successive ages between the two, much like those it posits as accompanying beginningless existence. The same holds for His names “the Great,” “the Magnificent,” “the Most High,” and “the Manifest”