an act performed at its will, is brought into being and contingent, they were compelled to maintain that everything that exists has a beginning. For the Creator—exalted be His majesty—possesses attributes and voluntary acts that subsist in Him: He speaks by His will and power, and creates whatever He creates by His will and power. Yet these people believed that He was devoid of these attributes, because they considered the following proposition sound: whatever has attributes and temporal events subsisting in it must itself have a beginning, since it is never free of temporal events, and whatever is never free of temporal events must itself have a beginning. If it has a beginning, it must have a beginningless originator. They believed that they had thereby established the Lord’s existence, and that He is an essence stripped of attributes whose existence is unqualified: He can neither be pointed to nor identified as a particular being.

They say, “He can neither be pointed to nor identified as a particular being.” Yet what they have affirmed has no reality outside the mind; it exists only in thought. Thus, what they affirmed and believed to be the Maker of the world exists only in minds, not in concrete reality. Their position therefore amounted to denying the Maker.

Then others who shared the fundamental premise of their doctrine came along and said, “This unqualified existence, stripped of attributes, is the existence that pervades all existing things.” They thus maintained that He indwells everything.

Others among them said, “He is the existence of everything.” Some distinguished between existence and subsistence; others distinguished between individuation and being unqualified. Some held that His relation to the world is like that of matter to form, while others held that He is in the world like butter in