premise is of the utmost nobility and sublimity, and represents the furthest reach of rational minds.

They said: Existence is either necessary or contingent, and the contingent must depend upon the necessary. Likewise, the Necessary must be necessary in His essence and attributes, for if He were contingent, He would depend upon another cause.

[As for the first premise—that He is necessarily existent in Himself—it has two implications. The first is that His reality must be free of multiplicity. This, in turn, entails several things concerning His essence.

First, He cannot occupy space, because whatever occupies space is divisible, and whatever is divisible cannot be indivisible. Since He does not occupy space, He is not in any direction.

Second, there cannot be more than one Necessary Existent. Were there more than one, the two would share necessity while differing in their particular identities. That which they share is distinct from that which differentiates them. Each would therefore be composite in itself, although we have supposed it to be indivisible. This contradicts the second implication of His being necessarily existent in Himself: that He neither inheres in another nor serves as a locus of inherence. And acts are dependence . . .” (1)

I say: Someone might respond: This is the philosophers’ foundational principle concerning divine oneness, by which they denied His attributes, exalted is He, and it is exceedingly weak.] (*)