Without it, the attribute would indeed be “other” to Him in that restricted sense. Yet once the attribute is intrinsically bound to Him, and He to it, nothing necessitates that either depend on the other as an effect depends on its cause, nor that one serve as the efficient, final, or formal cause of the other. At most, the attribute may be said to rely on the Essence the way an accident relies on the subject that receives it. The philosophers do call that subject a “receptive cause,” but only with respect to properties that newly accrue to it, not with respect to what has been eternally and perpetually inherent in it. Even if they insist on naming all of this “cause” and “effect,” then the Essence would be a receptive cause for the attribute in that limited sense, and the attribute’s being an “effect” would mean no more than that it is an attribute subsisting in its possessor.
The Composite of Essence and Attribute Needs None of the Four Causes
Even so, the totality made up of Essence and attribute stands in need of none of the four kinds of causes—neither an efficient cause, nor a final cause, nor a recipient, nor a form. Hence it is invalid to claim that the whole depends on one of its parts in the same way an effect depends on its cause. All that can be granted is that within the whole the attribute depends on the One described, just as an inseparable accident depends on the substratum that necessarily entails it. We may therefore ask: what is there in His being self-existent, without any agent producing Him, that forces you to deny this mutual concomitance—which you have labelled “dependence”—between His Essence and His attributes?
They say, “Whatever depends on something other than itself is not necessary in itself.” We reply: it is agreed that by “dependence” they merely mean concomitance, and by “other” they point to something included within the same totality—either the Essence or the attributes—not to something external that could be detached from Him. At most they intend that an attribute cannot exist without the One it describes; they do not mean the dependence of an effect on an efficient cause. Consequently, in this concomitance you have called “dependence,” and in these attributes you have termed “others,” there is nothing that requires any of them to be an effect produced by a producer or by an efficient cause.
The Necessary Existent to which all contingent beings testify is the One who exists by Himself and stands by Himself—the Lord of all worlds—who needs no agent and no efficient cause; rather, He is by virtue of His very Essence and His attributes.